In less than two weeks, one woman entrepreneur and her tech startup will win a spot in I/O Ventures' four-month Startup Accelerator program that includes a $25,000 investment, office space at the organization's San Francisco Bay Area headquarters and mentorship from some of the leading entrepreneurs in the technology arena.
Although the number of females in technology has been growing in recent years, women still only make up a small portion of leadership in tech-related sectors. According to 2008 data from the National Center for Women & Information Technology, 25 percent of professional IT-related occupations in the US workforce were filled by women and only 11 percent of corporate officer positions of Fortune 500 technology companies were held by women. The fact is, men continue to dominate tech industries.
In hopes of helping change this fact, blogger Arianna Huffington, designer Donna Karan and former UK Prime Minister Gordon Brown's wife Sarah Brown have teamed up with I/O Ventures to help take a female innovator's idea from just that, an idea, to launch. The winner of the Women: Inspiration & Enterprise prize will relocate to the company's office where she'll get valuable firsthand advice and one-on-one mentorship from the company's founders, who are leading innovators and successful entrepreneurs in technology. They include MySpace co-founder and CTO Aber Whitcomb, BitTorrent co-founder and president Ashwin Navin, Digg founder Kevin Rose and Yelp co-founder and CTO Russ Simmons. The winner will also receive mentoring from leaders in Women 2.0, a WIE partner and networking organization that operates under the goal of increasing the number of tech startups founded by women.
At the end of the program, the winner will have an opportunity to share her company's story with leading angel investors and venture capitalists from Silicon Valley.
The deadline is September 10, so there's still time to enter. Visit the WIE Network or I/O Ventures for more information. To apply, go here.
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