In honor of International Women’s Day on March 8th, we are celebrating the accomplishments of female entrepreneurs. In this article, we highlight women-led startups. Take a look at what these ladies have achieved in the world of business, and why they are staying at the top:
LearnVest – Alexa Von Tobel
Where have you ever heard of someone dropping out of Harvard in order to achieve even more success? After winning an Astia business plan competition, Alexa Von Tobel quit school and launched LearnVest. LearnVest is a personal finance platforms that aids women in financial planning offering tools, content and everything else needed in order to manage your money matters. LearnVest is described by this female founder as ‘Weight Watchers meets Personal Finance” and it’s taking the world by storm.
“By 2011 the company was already valued at $100 million, and von Tobel has been recognized as one of the most prominent female figures in the industry by Forbes, Business Insider and Inc” – Business Insider
Just to give you a background of the genius that is Alexa; here are some of her achievements listed on the LearnVest website:
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Founder and Chief Executive Officer, LearnVest
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Founding team member of Drop.io
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Formerly worked at Morgan Stanley’s Proprietary Trading Desk
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Received an A.B in Psychology Honors at Harvard College
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Harvard Business School
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She is a Certified Financial Planner and Series 65 licensed.
LearnVest aims at educating individuals on money matters and the management thereof. The LearnVest Action Program will help you take action whether you want to pay off debt, save for a trip or maximize your investments.
“If you know what it takes to become an entrepreneur, you’d never become one. Because it’s you, in the trenches every day…It’s a very hard, lonely endeavor to dream about something that’s not even built yet and then go out and build it against all odds”. – Alexa Von Tobel
Manicube – Co-Founders Katina Mountanos & Liz Whitman
This dream team, consisting of female entrepreneurs Katina and Liz, is focused on providing a basic service to working women, and men that don’t get time for me-time. Manicube is a professional beauty service that can do home or office visits to help you save time on your manicures and pedicures.
“Manicube’s mission is to make working women’s lives easier. We can help a professional woman here save her Saturday so she can spend time with friends, family, reading the newspaper, or relaxing”. – Manicube
Katina and Liz are both professionals within the beauty industry who also completed business school. This gave them an arsenal of experience and expertise to embark on this journey. What started out as a service in Boston and New York City is steadily rolling out to new US cities. They’ve created a business out of a personal need – which is many times the key to starting a successful business.
SlideShare – Rashmi Sinha
Sinha started her love affair with web technology after completing a PhD in Cognitive Neuropsychology at Brown University. SlideShare is not her only business-baby, she also co-founded Uzanto, a consulting company working with companies such as eBay. MindCanvas was her first product launched in 2005, and a year after she co-founded SlideShare. If you’re still not convinced about the success of SlideShare, have a look at these stats; they will blow your mind.
“Today SlideShare is the world’s largest community for sharing presentations, with 60 million monthly visitors, after which it was acquired by LinkedIn”. – SlideShare
Eventbrite – Julia Hartz
“Eventbrite merges eCommerce with the social graph to democratize event ticket sales. The Platform has helped event organizers sell more than $1 billion in ticket sales”. – Mashable.
Alongside her husband, Julia Hartz co-founded Eventbrite in 2006. Since then the startup has raised over $80 million. Before the Eventbrite endeavor Julia worked as a television development executive at MTV and FX Networks. She now manages a growing team of 300 employees at the company voted ‘Best Places to Work in the San Francisco Bay area’.
In an interview with Forbes, Hartz explains her vision for Eventbrite; ‘we wanted to use that entry point of online payment processing to democratize the industry, and create this link between great technology and live experiences’.
With her husband’s experience with online payments (he was one of the first investors in PayPal) they’ve managed to merge their expertise to create a platform accessible to those creating events in the entertainment industry.
Polyvore – Jess Lee
Jess Lee isn’t your average girl. This lady has a Computer Science degree from Stanford and was a product manager at Google Maps for four years before becoming the CEO of Polyvore. Before she joined the team she was an avid user and fan of Polyvore and become obsessed with creating her own Polyvore sets. When asked about her life experience and background in an interview with Huffington Post, Lee explains why she didn’t have to make a mindshift in gender roles:
“When I was growing up, my mom ran her own small business out of our apartment. Because of that, it never occurred to me that women weren’t commonly CEOs”.
Polyvore has seen partnerships with fashion moguls such as Heidi Klum and Tory Burch and their ad campaigns lead to starting out as a bootstrapped company to becoming one of the biggest fashion sites on the web with over $22 million in funding.
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