Most people have a product or idea and create a business around that. I did things a bit backwards. I decided to found a company based on what is important to me at this time in my life and then look for business opportunities that supported those values.

Perhaps my favorite quote for entrepreneurs is from Steve Blank: “A start up is a temporary organization designed to search for a scalable and repeatable business model.” I took these words to heart and went down an unknown path to find the opportunities that would create a sustainable business model. My path had a number of twists and turns and several initiatives that are all connected to the same mission. Our talented graphic artist Tina prepared the following chart to show the path and the milestones.

Many of the experiences along the path have expanded my thinking. Last summer, JumpThru and Girl Develop It held the first weekend long Hackathon for women. I was able to see first-hand the brillance of women as they created an interactive web game for social good from scratch. The technology available to women today creates a level playing field in innovation. I am a fierce advocate of women learning the basics of coding. At JumpThru we depend on lots of open source code or we modify existing platforms with custom code to create products to further our mission.

A dream of mine came true when Women Innovate Mobile Accelerator was launched in December 2011 with my two amazing co-founders Veronika Sonsev and Kelly Hoey. The past months of that start-up were intense but we could not be more proud to see the first companies evolve over three months with the concentrated help of mentors and experts.

None of this could have been done with out the wildly capable team at JumpThru, most of whom are volunteers or interns. Intergenerational and diverse teams are very powerful. We have had young women interns in high school and college who volunteer and move on to impressive opportunities. Because we are so lean at JumpThru, all the interns jump right in and participate in all projects. Our culture is very distinct: no attitude, no politics, and learn, learn and learn. I learn from the team everyday. They are young, talented and have a confidence I never had at that age.

Building my company and pursuing my mission has been deeply satisfying. On a weekly basis women thank me for what we are doing, be it an intern, a fellow founder, or just another woman who wants to see women succeed. That is what keeps me going day after day and forging ahead.

I have always believed that if you could provide a way for women to consciously support one another through their own purchasing power, you could ignite a movement with lasting change for the better. For many months, my team and I have been building a company called Plum Alley, which is the way we think we can reach this goal. Plum Alley, launching this September, is a discovery site where you can find female founded companies and support them by purchasing their stunning products and services.

In meeting with female founders to profile on Plum Alley, I have been humbled and inspired by the stories of women who had a dream, took a big risk, and founded a company. I can think of no better way to help these companies succeed than to buy their products and services.

I am very appreciative of all the women and men who have encouraged me from my first longings to found a company. Many of you have been loyal readers of My Tech Letter and it has been hard to realize that we now need to focus on Plum Alley in order to have a bigger impact on women founded companies. Therefore, going forward we will not publish My Tech Letter on a weekly basis. Instead, we will send out posts when we want to report on noteworthy activities that we are pursuing like the launch of the Digital Map for Female Founded Companies. We are also considering several media opportunities and partnerships with like-minded organizations that would promote our content.

Thank you from the bottom of my heart for supporting me and other female founders. Stay tuned for updates on Plum Alley. We hope you will be active visitors to the Plum Alley site and consider buying items for yourself and gifts whenever you have the opportunity.

Click the image to go to the live site.

The question often comes up from our readers: “Who are the women who invest in women?” Data about this is hard to come by. However, we have been following lists, blogs and databases for a few months now to collect that information. The data is very messy for many reasons, including the fact that it is constantly evolving. Women change companies, and some women angel investors are under the radar screen. Furthermore, women investors generally do not invest solely in female founded companies (except for organizations like Golden Seeds). All that being said, we decided to forge forward and make a database of women who are professional investors.

In our research we uncovered over 500 women who are professional and active investors from all stages. We did our best to present what we found from public data sources, however, we take no responsibility for the accuracy of the data we used from those sources. We created the digital database of female investors which is presented here. We uploaded a handful of the women investors so we could test the user interface and see how the database performs. We are no where near complete on this, but we thought we would still share it with our community and ask for your help identifying the women who should be included here. In a way, this is a crowd sourced database of women investors, many of whom have invested in female founded companies.

Please help us by filling out the form to include yourself or anyone you think would be appropriate. The best way to help promote women entrepreneurs and technology is to promote the women who can help them grow.

This summer at JumpThru, we’ve been lucky enough to get some amazing interns. Here, they tell their first experience working at a startup.

Min Yung Joo

My summer internship at JumpThru has provided me a very unusual intellectual experience, one that has given me so many “Eureka!” moments and has allowed me tremendous personal growth. From knowledge about the women entrepreneurial world to marketing and business strategy to technology, I have gained a comprehensive learning experience that truly expanded my insight into various industries.

From assisting the JumpThru team in brainstorming various marketing strategies for our soon-to-be-launched e-commerce site, Plum Alley, to helping the WIM accelerator companies with their pitch presentations, to writing the MyTechLetter articles, everyday was a surprise, a new task, and a new lesson. I was introduced to some of Deborah’s awesome friends and network of women entrepreneurs at various WIM events, and even taught myself some coding while helping Carol Pak, our Entrepreneur in Residence, build a reward based crowd-funding platform for women.

When Carol first came to me asking for help in constructing the basic infrastructure to the website, I had absolutely no experience in HTML, CSS, and all the other fancy computer languages that were necessary for creating web pages. I was also a newbie to WordPress, a free and open-source blogging tool that we were going to use to build our website. Back then, I really felt sorry for Carol because I wasn’t really in the position to help anyone. I was rather the person that needed to be saved from my ignorance in computing.

As it turns out, anyone (really, anyone) can build a customized website with just a little bit of research, patience, and help. WordPress already has a lot of free software components called plugins and themes, made by amazing computer wizards, that helps you add specific content and looks to your website. Thus, a background in computing is unnecessary, although my previous JAVA programming experience enabled me to build a more customized website. Just by digging into some of the HTML, CSS, and PHP files within the plugin, and modifying these codes a bit, you can definitely create a web page of your taste and needs.

One lesson I learned is that you will never find the perfect plugin you want for your website. For example, I had major difficulties in setting up customized sidebars and implementing a specific plugin for users to post projects in order to raise donations, which was further complicated by the integration of an online payment system. I’ve tested quite a few different types of plugins for these features, and many failed to meet our intent; if one piece was working, the other didn’t and sometimes, one plugin would clash with the other, preventing it from working properly. Everyday I was confronted with new problems, and I had to learn different languages on the way, but when I had finally figured a way to fix the errors, either through modification of codes or implementation of the right plugin, it simply blew my mind.

Building a website from scratch is indeed a difficult job. However, with the advancement of technology today, you are provided with so many tools. It is your job to process logic into this massive jigsaw puzzle and to make sense out of it. My journey so far was definitely challenging, but it has been so rewarding and I cannot wait to see the site go live someday. Even though my internship at JumpThru is nearing its end, I’m definitely going to continue broadening my coding experience and help Carol finish her website.

-Min Jung Yoo, Undergraduate at Brown University majoring in Applied Mathematics, Economics

Erin Gillingham

I knew I had picked the right place for my summer internship when that first afternoon we had a snack of something with chocolate in it. I forget exactly what it was, but I know it had chocolate in it because I quickly learned that chocolate is a common staple of our afternoon snacks. Working in a women-filled office does have its perks. However, it is not the chocolate filled afternoons or the women-only office that makes this internship special. What makes it special is working with these women. Tina introduced me to the world of graphic design and coding, Anna and Joan taught me marketing strategies and strategic analysis, and Jasmine and Carol showed me what a (soon-to-be) successful entrepreneur looks like. All the women of JumpThru are all talented and ambitious, yet they still take the time to answer a question or consider each opinion. I noticed from day one that not only were the women I were working with willing to help me learn, but that they also listened to my ideas and were willing to learn from me. They say you learn the most from your mistakes, and thus I learned the most from the times when my ideas were simply acknowledged, transformed, or taken. I was able with that to learn and change my thought process, or where I was right and keep heading in that direction.

Pushing these women forward is the woman behind it all, Deborah Jackson. If JumpThru were a chocolate bar, her presences brings the office from a Heresy’s bar (still wonderfully delicious) to a cream-of-the-crop bar straight from the Swiss. Deborah Jackson is currently the founder or co-founder of Plum Alley, Women’s Innovate Mobile, JumpThru, My Tech Letter, and Blue Glue. Before that, she worked on Wall Street for twenty-one years, dabbled in some non-profit work, and spent some time as an angel investor. Then, she decided she wanted to help women succeed, in everything from entrepreneurship to technology to investing, and she set out to start the companies that would further this cause. At the WIM demo event in late June, Kelly Hoey (another amazing woman I am glad I had the ability to meet and work with), said, in reference to Deborah, “She’s who I want to be when I grow up.” I couldn’t agree more. Being able to work and learn from her this summer was simply amazing. Not only is she smart and ambitious, but she is inspirational and truly wants to help women succeed.

At the start of this internship, I knew very little about what it takes to start and run a company. Both of my parents are civil engineers, and they have basically been working at the same job their entire lives. Not that there is anything wrong with that, but it led to me not knowing much about business or what other career paths looked like. Deborah and the other women at JumpThru changed this. From day one, I was exposed to the inner-workings of the companies in the WIM accelerator program and the behind the scenes of Plum Alley and JumpThru. I know I still have a lot to learn, but without this internship, I wouldn’t have even known what I was missing.
I still have a few weeks left, and I plan on soaking up as much as possible. But for now, thank you Deborah and the rest of JumpThru for giving me this opportunity.

-Erin Gillingham, Rising Senior at Columbia University majoring in Economics and Political Science

Not being an engineer or a computer science major, I knew I would have to come up the curve as much as possible to understand what happens behind the scenes or in that black box with any business that has or uses technology. I learned to love technology and the power of what it could do by seeing the front end. Back in the 1990′s when I was an investment banker and my clients were health-care hardware, software and Internet companies, you only needed to understand the front end. Much like a car where you could evaluate it by looking and driving it, and you’d just believe the sticker about the insides of the engine.

Technology has changed everything about our lives and everything about business. When JumpThru was founded 18 months ago, I had to look into the back end. I plunged into learning about the state of the art programming languages and platforms to build a website with all the functionality that was needed to carry out the mission. But, over the past months, I think I have merely skimmed the surface, learning a bit about the power of Ruby on Rails, Open Source Code, Diaspora, WordPress, PHP, MySQL, Magento, Shopify, Node.js and on.

I want to say right upfront that I made many, many mistakes. I did my best to find, vet and hire experts to help me. Here is what I learned the hard way. Like with many things, you will never be an expert if it is not your training or field of expertise. Therefore, you need to take the time to learn what you need to know in order to be able to evaluate the tech side of the business. Even with that, mistakes are often made because it is hard to evaluate a programmer or the time things should take until you are well underway and have invested thousands of dollars.

Some of my mistakes were: hiring excellent contractors who were snatched away for full time jobs at bigger companies mid-stream and, not knowing that coding and programming languages are dynamic. They change everyday. That is a good thing and it allows for invention and progress even though it may wreck havoc on your project. I never realized I would have to revisit so many decisions because of advancements in technology. This will only be greater in the future. I also found that I am not alone. Over 90% of the entrepreneurs I know have made costly and time consuming mistakes that threatened their businesses.

Most of the classes and training out there for “non-technical” entrepreneurs and investors is not very useful. There are important classes to teach women to code (www.girldevelopit.com) and some sessions on how to find a technical co-founder, but these sessions tend to be focused on younger entrepreneurs. What do you do if you are an investor who wants to invest, but do not have the expertise to evaluate the tech side? This is especially hard because much of what is being created today does not exist. An investor needs to not only imagine the product and the potential, but also think about what might be involved in building out the tech underpinnings. Very, very hard to do.

All this is why JumpThru has decided to co-sponsor and promote a 2-day program called TechSpeak that is being held September 20th and 21st in New York, which is taught by Nelly Yusupova, the Chief Technology Officer of Webgrrls International. Nelly is a pro and can easily bridge the gap between a tech expert and a business person.

Save 15% using code: JumpThru
early bird discount ends 7/30/12

Here is a sampling of what will be covered in the training:
How to price and budget your project, how to determine the best tech solutions for what you are trying to accomplish, and how to build your tech infrastructure for scale.

I am signing up for this class because I realize how much I don’t know. If you sign up too here, you will receive a 15% discount on the fee. I think the money is well worth it to lessen the risk of any early stage investment or business.

Here is a video of Nelly offering her words of wisdom to entrepreneurs.

What the Company Does: Appguppy is a company that has created the technology to allow any business organization, or person to have a mobile presence in a few easy steps in a few minutes.

Value Proposition:
* Easiest and least expensive way to go mobile for anyone
* Engage you customers, clients or fans
* Social media integration
* Mobile store front and monetization of customers
* Location based features
* Outside the app store

 Customer Base: Any business, organization or person that wants a mobile presence

What the Company Does: Loudly is a company that revolutionizes the way we communicate and use our mobile device.

Value Proposition:
* Automatically updates and sync your address book with the content submitted by the contact person
* Improved reception for cell phone users with a Loudly phone number
* Custom and vanity-like Loudly phone numbers
* Ability to signal callers with availability
* Ability to store all communication with each contact person (email, text, and phone)

Customer Base: Generation X and Millennials

What the Company Does: SQL Vision is the most powerful and only cloud-based solution for companies to visually manage their databases and data from a single dashboard accessible from any device.

Value Proposition:
* Consolidates information from database across networks and datacenters into one unified dashboard
* Proactively detects problems in database infrastructures
* Facilitates capacity planning
* Eliminates the need for expensive and complex on-site platforms

Customer Base: Any commercial enterprise or other organization with databases that are mission critical

If you would like to read a full article on the companies, please click here. 

In the last edition, we talked about the Women Innovate Mobile (WIM) accelerator program. Now we are featuring the first companies who are completing the program. As a summer intern at JumpThru, I have had the chance to sit on several meetings with all of the three companies. It was very exciting to see the amazing progress that each company has made in the last month. They have great affection and confidence towards their products and I can’t wait to see these companies bring a whole new set of values to mobile technology.

Appguppy is a company that has created the technology to allow any business, organization or person to have a mobile presence in a few easy steps in a few minutes. This does not mean taking your web site and transferring it on to a mobile device. What it means is that you can custom create your own mobile application with specific functionalities like:

* Custom content feeds – you own news feeds and others
* Engage your customers, clients or fans
* Social media integration
* Mobile store front and monetization of customers
* Location based features
* Outside the app store

Your mobile presence can be fashioned with easy to use templates and symbols or can be customized to your liking. This is a powerful solution for users to avoid expensive developers, long lead times, and an over-saturated app store. Self deploy your own app directly to your own customers and fans. Think of a word press application for any mobile device. With the explosion in the use of mobile technology around the world, this is fastest and easiest way to go mobile right now with a few simple clicks.

The three Appguppy co-founders are seasoned professionals with advanced degrees in business, law, medicine and computer science. The technology is built and is in beta in the first market segment — popular bands with highly engaged and tech savvy fans. Since the beta launch one week ago, over 200 users have created and deployed a mobile presence with Appguppy, which has resulted in almost 2000 actively engaged fans using apps.  The market segment of bands is the first of numerous market segments that Appguppy will pursue with the raise of capital. Other targeted markets are: bloggers and authors with large and engaged following and online retailers selling just about anything.  The customers of Appguppy now have an immediate way to have a mobile presence.

Users of the Appguppy platform have an instant way to engage and monetize their customers, clients and fans. Initial users of the Appguppy platform are willing to pay for the ability to reach their customers, engage with them and become an active storefront for e-commerce. Appguppy will take compensation in the form of transaction fees and commissions, custom design, and premium subscription services.

The company has a powerful product, and has already impressed and satisfied customers. Use of their platform will increase customer engagement and e-commerce opportunities for the Appguppy users. At this time there is no other identifiable company that provides anywhere near the values, functionalities, ease, and cost efficiency like Appguppy does. Have a mobile presence–faster, cheaper and better. Sounds like a trifecta to me.

Loudly is a company that revolutionizes the way we communicate and use our mobile device. Forms of communication have greatly evolved in the past 5 years. We are avid users of email and social media technology. Despite the burgeoning development of various electronic communication tools, the phone has not changed at all. We still have an impersonal phone number, which we don’t identify with and have no control over how it is used. We can give out our phone number but we can’t get it back once it is given. Our address book on our mobile device is a mess.  Some information is inaccurate, some is outdated and some is incomplete. All this will be solved with Loudly.

Loudly is a technology for your mobile device and will give you the ability to communicate when you want and how you want with others.  Not everyone needs to be using Loudly; non-Loudly users connect with Loudly users without having to download the app. The use of Loudly will grow fast because of the organic way people communicate and share their contact information.

You can continue using your existing phone number with Loudly or Loudly can supply you with a custom or vanity-like phone number that you can give out. This customized Loudly phone number provides improved reception through Wi-Fi. With Loudly, you can also designate specific custom messages and signal your availability to your contacts. The Loudly technology will allow you to better personalize and manage your phone and phone book. You can maintain an up-to-date phone book by sharing your current information with others, and them with you. Never again will you be stuck trying to get in contact with someone with only the old business number. Every form of contact with a person – text, email, and voice mail – is all organized in one sleek log for future reference.

The two co-founders of Loudly, Sophia and Foy are able to visualize the next generation of communication and create the customization of your communication. They make communication more efficient and personal.

SQL Vision is the most powerful and only cloud-based solution for companies to visually manage their databases and data from a single dashboard accessible from any device.

Their software provides a unique capability for companies to visually monitor and proactively manage their entire database infrastructure across multiple locations on any device, computer or tablet. It consolidates information from databases across networks and data centers into a single unified dashboard. With companies of every size becoming overwhelmed with the volume of net data and the increasing complexity of their database infrastructures, SQL Vision provides an ideal solution to the industry’s problems.

Their system is a predictor – it gives you the data to figure out what if something is going wrong before things really take a turn for the worse and your database shuts down. In other words, it proactively detects problems in database infrastructures. The system prevents companies from overspending in database management because it facilitates capacity planning and eliminates the need for complex on-premise software that would otherwise be needed for all types of companies to manage their entire database. SQL Vision provides an all-in-one package database management with just one piece of software and one installation. It is truly the only cloud-based solution that saves any commercial enterprise or other organization with databases that are mission critical, a large amount of money and the unnecessary expenses of IT costs like software licensing and hiring of additional IT professionals.

The two co-founders of SQL Vision, Roshan and Boris, have spent over 5 years creating database software products. Over that time, they have built, marketed, and sold on-premise dataset software tools. As a result, they have already acquired a customer base of 600 companies. With their vast experience in the database software market, the two co-founders developed SQL Vision with a team of five highly talented engineers, over the last seven months. The SQL Vision solution provides value to any company, on line and off line with data critical activities.

This article was written by Min Jung Yoo from Brown University, summer intern at JumpThru. Read more about her here.

It is hard to believe that only a year ago, I met Veronika Sonsev and we first talked about founding an accelerator program for female founded companies in the mobile space.  We knew we needed a third partner who could help us build the accelerator on a full time basis so that Veronika and I could continue to lead our own companies which were both at an early stage.  Kelly Hoey was a dynamo we both had met and in a short time, she was on board. In the fall of 2011, we laid out our strategy and formally announced in December with the firmly held belief that if we built it, women would come. Our hunch that there was a need for a female friendly accelerator was proven when our brand new accelerator with not one, but two filters – female founded and focused on the mobile space – received 140 legitimate applications from the US and around the globe in a matter of a month.

Being the first time through our program, there were a few challenges along the way.  The space we sublet was not ready on time, one of our companies decided to postpone attending because the CTO had a change in circumstance, and one of our companies decided two weeks ago to do a complete pivot and changed from an adaptive learning mobile company to a hardcore data transfer and processing cloud-based technology accessible on any mobile device.

My co-founders and I had a large network of professional friends who we amassed through our careers for decades on Wall Street, in internet and mobile technology businesses, and the law.  We were blessed with an extended team of experts, which spanned from developers and technologists, to public relations and media professionals, to successful entrepreneurs and venture and angel funders, who served as mentors for the WIM companies.   We had a number of guest speakers from organizations like Twilio and Golden Seeds that shared words of wisdom to the WIM companies.

My co-founders and I knew we would be different from other accelerators and I can already name a few of the reasons we are. We selected our companies based on merit and when I walk into the accelerator office near Union Square, I am struck by the diversity of the founders.  No one fits any mold or easy description. However, all the WIM companies have a something in common.  First, they are all very strong on their technical capability having talented developers in the founding team. Second, all of the companies are building tech solutions that have never before existed.  Great tech companies are created by the marriage of idea people and those that can turn those ideas in to a product and company.  We witnessed true invention over the past few months as teams went from ideas, and vision, and an ability to see the world as it might be, to building something that never existed before.

We realized a challenge in pitching to outside investors was actually explaining how the world might look rather than just showing off a product that was easy to understand.  The three months were exhilarating with every company making monumental progress in product development, customer feedback and customer acquisition, as well as honing in on the financial and business model.  It is hard to grasp the power of a well-run and intimate accelerator until you see it first hand.  For WIM, it was mentorship on steroids, meaning each week we were customizing the help and content for each company given their individual needs.  Because we are small and could really focus on each company, we could quickly change course when we felt it was needed.   We will have to determine how this model can scale in the future because we don’t want to lose the intimacy and direct connection we have to each founder and each company.  We never want to have large classes and become a “factory”. We are the opposite of the “spray and pray” mentality that seems to be the description of the strategy of some early stage investors.

Working with the WIM companies so closely over the past three months has also made me think about the capital raising process and how venture capital reminds me so much of the mentality and practice I saw in my years on Wall Street.  That is, the name of the game is to produce a large return for the investors in the shortest amount of time possible.  The definition of success is focused on making money and not always on establishing independent, ongoing and sustainable businesses.   I completely understand this given that I have invested in early stage companies before.  There is a natural tension between building a viable business and having to produce a return for investors. That can, at times, lead a founder to make decisions that they might not make when considering the long-term.  This reminds me of public companies focusing on quarterly earnings rather than building a long-term strategy with higher payoffs down the road.

During the next weeks the first companies in the WIM Accelerator will meet with potential angel and venture investors.  I am personally elated about each one of the companies and the power of the founding team, the technology created and the business prospects.  I believe these companies will be successful and can raise money and even have noteworthy exits or a sale to other bigger companies down the road.   Knowing the WIM companies, the founders will evaluate their opportunities with a keen mind toward building a game-changing business and balance the pressure to produce a quick return as they accomplish other goals.

This post was written by Deborah Jackson, Co-Founder of Women Innovate Mobile Accelerator. In the next edition we will showcase all the amazing WIM founders and their companies.

Click here to view the full infographic.

We are living in an age where we are more connected with each other than ever. The transition from the analog media to digital media has allowed a vast amount of ideas and values to spread on the social network. One result of this new outlet of connected people is the striking evolution in crowdfunding. Crowdfunding is a new investment strategy where anyone, from a savvy entrepreneur to an average person on the street, can get funding for their new project or business idea from anyone. Anyone can turn their business idea into a reality by soliciting funding from people who are as passionate about the idea as the visionaries who start the companies. Crowd sourcing can fund projects from art to games, and food to technology, as our chart here in shows. The Internet has allowed for a new, more personal, investment strategy and a way for anyone to financially support what they believe in. This is another way the internet has given every person a voice and role in what is going down in our society.

Are you a fan of the TikTokWatchBand for the iPod Nano or the ElevationDocks for the iPhone? These are just some of the successful crowd sourced projects that have been funded on Kickstarter, the world’s leading platform for crowdfunding projects. Kickstarter, launched in April, 2009, is one of the first and most successful crowdfunding websites to connect entrepreneurs, many of whom have failed to find money from traditional sources, and people who want to invest in their good or service. Unlike venture capitalists or angel investors, funders do not ask for ownership in the business. Instead, they seek something in return, such as a discount on the new product or some recognition. Thus, crowdfunding allows entrepreneurs to connect with those most interested in their product or services and maintain ownership of their new business.

Setting up project pages on Kickstarter for fundraising is free. Any individual can create a profile on Kickstarter and apply for funding, as long as they have a sound project. The funding goal should be the minimum amount needed to complete the project. So far, the average amount raised for a project is around $5,000. The projects are all-or-nothing, meaning that if the desired amount of funding is not raised, none of the investors are charged and the project receives no money. As of April 2012, Kickstarter has helped fund over 23,000 projects totaling over $207 million. Kickstarter accepts only 60% of all the projects that apply each week, but other crowdfunding websites like Indiegogo and Profounder accepts any project as long as it is not illegal. Some of these sites are better suited for individuals with specific goals. For example, microventures.com is the way to go to if you are a tech firm seeking experienced angel investors.

Crowdfunding opens up the door for the average American with a novel idea to find their base of supporters. For example, Kristy Lewis, a women entrepreneur, and her husband Coulter began fundraising for their food project through Kickstarter. They wanted to reinvent microwave popcorn by taking out all of the chemicals and replacing them with only the natural ingredients and fun flavors. The campaign successfully raised $27,880. or 278% of the original amount of funds that they had initially asked for. With the help of 755 supporters, the couple was able to bring Quinn Popcorn into an already established market.

There is a huge opportunity for entrepreneurs because today they can now easily raise capital while keeping complete control of their idea and business. Crowdfunding allows entrepreneurs to market and find funding for their business all in one. Entrepreneurs can test out the demand for the product or service before bringing it to the full, competitive market. If the fundraising fails, chances are it would not survive in the market. However, if the fundraising is successful, the early stage companies have a built in market waiting to use and promote their business. Crowdfunding, through sites like Kickstarter, brings investing to the age of the Internet and social media.

This article was written by Erin Gillingham from Columbia University and Min Jung Yoo from Brown University, summer interns at JumpThru. Read more about them here.

We have begun a series about women who invest in early stage companies. The two most prominent types of early stage investors are angels and venture capital firms. The real difference between angels and VCs is that angel investors invest their own money and VCs invest other people’s money (OPM) or money given to them from institutions. Venture capital firms have overhead that must be paid for, including salaries (sometimes large ones) that must be paid before any returns or profit can be paid out to their customers or investors.

Angels have historically invested in very early stage companies, such as companies that have an idea, but their product or customer base is not yet proven. Respectively, Venture Capital firms habitually have invested when a company has a product, customers and even revenues. Over the past few years, the stage of the companies in which angels and VCs have invested has blurred. Angels have gained expertise and tend to invest in companies at several stages while VCs have begun to invest in early stage companies because that is where many big opportunities lie.

We are collecting data on women who invest as either angels or in their positions in VC firms. We will be featuring more articles about women in VC firms and individual women angels but we thought it was important to write about the strongest organized group of female angel investors. Golden Seeds was founded in 2004 by Stephanie Newby (formerly Stephanie Hanbury-Brown). In 2005, Peggy Wallace joined the group. Since then, Golden Seeds has grown remarkably and on their web site, they report having 240 angel members. www.goldenseeds.com That number reflects a growth in members during the past six years of nearly 12,000%. The number of members in Golden Seeds is exponentially more than the number of women who hold decision-making positions on investments in VC firms. That is very powerful.

There is a critical mass of women (and a few men known as “golden dudes”) who are members of Golden Seeds and have stepped up to write checks to support female funded companies. Over the past several years, Golden Seeds and its members have written individual checks totaling $34 million and have funded 42 different female founded companies. According to the 2011 Halo Report, Golden Seeds is the fourth largest angel investing group in the US and was the third most active in terms of financings completed in 2011.

To further expand its reach, in 2011 Golden Seeds also raised a $26.5 million fund to invest strictly in female founded companies and has already invested in a number of female founded companies in 2012. In addition to finding individual investors to join its powerful network, Golden Seeds was able to tap into a market of others who wanted to invest in female founded companies and wanted to have the investment decisions made by experts.

As stated on its website, Golden Seeds is dedicated to delivering above market return through the empowerment of women entrepreneurs and the people who invest in them. Its vision is to realize the true value of diversity in management by producing higher returns, equipping women to become successful investors in a high-risk-high-reward segment of the capital markets, and to provide a rewarding business environment in which both men and women can thrive.

The company operates four primary businesses: an active national angel investor network, a growing family of venture capital funds, an emerging private equity business, and an educational academy for women that teaches them about angel investing and venture capital.

Golden Seeds also has Fund 1 LP- a vintage 2008 fund with $3.8 million in committed capital and Golden Seeds Funds 2 LP- a vintage 2011 fund with $26.5 million in committed capital. A list of the Golden Seeds portfolio companies, can be found on their web site along with other valuable content and the application procedure for female founded companies wanting to apply for investment.

Check back periodically for our future editions, as we hope to feature the founder of Golden Seeds and other women investors to learn from their experiences.

This article was written by Min Jung Yoo, a summer intern from Brown University. http://jumpthru.net/about/#team

In the interests of disclosure, Deborah Jackson is a member of Golden Seeds.

My Tech Letter readers have asked us to profile women who are investors. In response, we are beginning a series of stories about women angel investors and venture capitalists. There are women who head up venture funds, women who are super angel investors (more than 30 individual investments) and established groups of female angel investors. What we’ve noticed is that there are so many women who are investing, but they tend to do it seriously and without much attention or notoriety. The news is that they are moving huge amounts of wealth to early stage companies especially ones that are founded by women. Our first post is about the five women who made it to the Forbes Midas list for 2012. They are certainly powerful women and deserving of this honor in every way.

If you are a female investor or know of one, please send us their information to tina@jumpthru.net.

Ruby Lu
A former VP of Technology, Media and Telecom Investment Banking Group of Goldman Sachs, Ruby is now a general partner at Doll Capital Management, where she is the lead investor in two behemoths in the Chinese market: BitAuto and DangDang (A Chinese Ecommerce Site known for being the Amazon.com of China), which has a female co-founder and chairwoman, Peggy Yu Yu.

Jenny Lee
As a managing partner at GGV Partners, Jenny Lee is responsible for China Investments. Coming from a technical background, she got her masters in Engineering and her Bachelor’s in Electrical Engineering from Cornell after her home country agreed to pay for her education on the condition that she come back to work for her country. Thus, she spent her early career managing the development of fighter jet upgrade programs. Later she became an investment banker for Morgan Stanley.

Adele Olivia
Adele focuses on biotech and healthcare ventures in her work at Quaker Partners, where she invested in companies such as Ascent Healthcare Solutions and Prometheus Laboratories. Regarding her experience as being a mother and a professional woman in a hugely male environment, Adele says “I was the first female to have a child – it is like a big sign is on you and everyone thinks you’re going to just drop.” Watch a series of her Cornell interviews here.