Episode 50: Starting a business

/

October 20, 2014

“Stepping outside of your comfort zone is really, really hard…I did not want to raise venture capital at all. But I did want to have a big successful business. And I got to the place where I realized I’m going to have to go pitch all those guys in suits.” - Julia Pimsleur

"One of these days Mark Zuckerberg is going to hit me, but I believe that if I grew up in a household where I was told to do what I was good at and go after my talents, I would have created Facebook or something even better than that.” - Denise Barreto

24 minutes.

Female entrepreneurship is rising fast. In the US, a third of businesses are now owned by women. But look a bit deeper and you find nearly all these businesses are 'solopreneurships' - they don't have any employees and they don't bring in much money. This is sometimes by design, but not always: many women are unprepared for the inequities that still exist in entrepreneurship. Julia Pimsleur

In this show we meet two ambitious entrepreneurs who want to grow their companies: Julia Pimsleur and Denise Barreto. They have advice about how to survive in the male-dominated world of fundraising, why hiring other people is a must even when you can barely afford it, and how passion for your work isn't all it's cracked up to be.

Denise Barreto

Further reading:

Julia Pimsleur is CEO of Little Pim. She has also founded Double Digit Academy, which holds regular training sessions for women who want to raise money for their companies.

 

Read More

Episode 49: The pace of progress

/

October 5, 2014

"I often walked away from the school playground thinking, why am I doing this? I am disheveled, I am tired, I am exhausted, and it is just relentless. But then I'd get to work and think, 'This is what I am doing.'" - Carola Hoyos

"When you look at the whole career path it’s such that women just can’t be bothered. They think the workplace they’re in, at universities especially, is just so lousy that they leave.” - Curt Rice

23 minutes.

Carola Hoyos

So much attention is focused on women in the workplace these days that you might think progress is everywhere. Yes, more women are joining company boards, and some prominent women have top jobs. But other numbers haven't shifted much. In this show Financial Times journalist Carola Hoyos laments the slow pace of change in Britain in particular. But she says one upcoming move could turn things around.

One country that seems to be getting a lot right on work and life is Norway. Curt Rice has lived there for 25 years. He's steeped himself in research on why women lag behind. Still, he's optimistic about gender balance in his world of academia and at companies - partly because of an experiment his university carried out.

Read More