Type-A Mom Conference – Looking Back, Looking Forward: Women’s Journeys Across the Web

It’s the very last session at the Type-A Mom Conference in Asheville, North Carolina. The closing keynote is Looking Back, Looking Forward: Women’s Journeys Across the Web with Aliza Sherman.

“This is going to be fun.” Aliza has her back turned to us and she’s singing. It’s a song she wrote when she was 16 years old. She performed it in front of a school assembly about self-image. Everyone in the audience was talking. Her drama teacher, a very commanding woman, said, “Do you know how much courage it takes to get up here and sing in front of you? You will give her your attention.” It got so quiet you could hear a pin drop, and she got very nervous.

Act I: Discovery

Explore uncharted territory.

“Girls need modems.” – St. Jude, one of the first female hackers

(She’s giving a history lesson now.) In 1987, Aliza purchased her first computer with a dot matrix printer so she could become a published writer. She got a modem to go online to the local BBS. She got her first invitation to chat, and she got freaked out at first. Then she said, “Who are you?” And it was a 17 year old boy from Brooklyn that wanted to chat. it was the first time she realized that other people out there were connected to the same computer network. Her first connection.

In 1989, some guy at CERN invented HTML. She said his name, and I missed it. Anyone want to look it up on Wikipedia for me?

In 1990-1991, AOL and other Internet service providers came on the scene. Aliza got on AOL, but Stacy from a BBS wanted her to come back to get more women on her BBS. It was a woman reaching out to make sure other women were there.

1992, Women’s Wire became the first all-women BBS. The Woman’s Room was founded on AOL around the same time. Aliza was a bit of a rebel on Women’s Wire. She deleted all of her forums when the president got fired. She caused a lot of pain when she pulled down the resource she created. It was a difficult lesson for her, that once people loved her community, it wasn’t just hers, it was theirs. Think twice before you take someone’s community away.

Photo by EdenFantasys.com

In 1994, Aliza was held at gunpoint and taken to the bank against her will on the Upper West Side fo Manhattan. After 15 minutes, she managed to escape. Left NYC and went to Santa Fe to regroup. She saw an ad in the local paper for a one-hour class on HTML for $15. She emailed and signed up for the class. “Suddenly, I was a Web expert.” The robbers, by the way, were discovered in broad daylight several weeks later when she returned to New York. Eight months later, they were in jail.

Have no fear. Once you’ve stared down the barrel of a 9mm gun, nothing else is scary. Not even starting a business.

Act II: Innovation

In 1995, Aliza decided that she deserved to do something else. She knew how to write and how to use the Internet. She started an Internet consulting company when no one knew or cared what the Internet was. She spent the first few years teaching. It’s like when social media consultants today get the “What is it that you do?” She created Cybergrrl, Webgrrls, and Femina.

Early Webgrrls started out because she wanted to meet other women who knew what the Web was. They met at an Internet cafe and talked about the Web. I can’t read how to spell the names of all of the women in the slideshow, so I will be linking to the slideshow at the end, once I get the URL.

Find a mentor. When she did presentations on the Web with her boyfriend, she would set up all of the equipment and give the presentation…and when it came to the Q&A, the men in the audience would ask her boyfriend. He would defer to her, but the men never believed she knew the answer.

iVillage and Women.com started in 1995.

Trust red flags. “I will tell you these things – not to be mean  to anybody, not to harm anybody – but because I gained strength from learning this stuff.”

When she sat in the pizzeria with her boyfriend who said, “I want 50% of your company.” “Why would I do that?” “I don’t see why we should be dating unless you give me half ownership of the company.” And then he said, “I’ll tell you what. I’ll give you 51% of the company so we can qualify as a woman-owned business.” Even in his lawyer’s office, with tears in her eyes as she signed away her company, he let her do it. And she did it because she didn’t want to lose her boyfriend.

She ran Cybergrrl and Webgrrls for five years. They were the best and worst years of her life. With a guy behind her pulling the rug out from under her whenever she got too strong.

In 1996, a lot of other women came onto the online scene. (This was the year I graduated high school and started college. And I loved AOL.) Women who co-founded companies with boyfriends and husbands, and the relationship went sour – he got everything.

In 1999, women made up 51% of the Internet population. but those are just numbers. It’s not just that we’re there; it’s what we do while we’re there.

Know when to walk away. She walked away from Cybergrrl and Webgrrls. She had some strange notion that her relationship with her boyfriend would improve if they didn’t have a company between them. He walked away with the companies, and he still has them. He “let” her call herself “the original Cybergrrl.” (I felt her pain, sort of, when I had to stop calling myself QualityGal, the brand I helped create.)

“I learned a lot about losing. Sometimes you have to lose to win. Sometimes you have to lose a company to win yourself back.”

1999-2000, Blogger, Digital Room, and Culture Kitchen were created.

Do something different.

After Aliza quit her company, she went online, bought an old RV, and drove around the company by herself for a year. She lived off the advance she got off a book…and a whole lot of credit cards. She had a Web site called RVgirl (I think) that she hand-coded herself.

When September 11 happened, she was at a KOA campground in Nebraska. She tried going back to New York, but she couldn’t stay there. She moved to Wyoming. She took a regular job. And she started trying to get pregnant and stay pregnant.

In 2001, Six Apart, Seeing Black, the WHAMMY Awards were founded.

2002-2004 were the years of Flickr, Dooce, and Ning.

There are women often behind the scenes in the biggest companies out there, and Aliza is stymied that they’re not getting recognized.

Hire trusted advisors.

Aliza ended up with an $80,000 lien against her bank account. Those papers she had signed at the lawyer’s office made her personally guarantee loans to buy things for the company she had walked away from. The only way to get out from under that was to declare personal bankruptcy, and she did that in 2002. She was being filmed as a successful woman in technology…but the film crew was told to pull out. She wishes she’d been able to tell her story back then. “Do as I say and not how I have done.”

In 2005, BlogHer, Meebo, and Lifehacker came on the scene. She didn’t make it to the first BlogHer conference because she had just gotten married. She didn’t make it to the next conferences because she kept miscarrying again and again.

2006-2009: Pistachio, OneForty, and Slideshare were founded.

Learn from your mistakes. Aliza had chosen a bad business partner the first time around. In 2008, she approached a good friend, one of the early Webgrrls. She had once said, “Your business partner has been really hitting on me. Is he going out with  anyone?” Another red flag she missed. Her friend had to think about it when Aliza approached her about joining her social media consulting company. She appreciated her due diligence.

Conversify was founded in 2008.

Act III: Reinvention

Now it’s  2010. Women’s Internet History Project. Suport it. Our stories are getting lost. We’re not telling them enoughl. We’re not tooting our horns loudly enoughl. But no one else is telling them at all. This site is telling those stories. All of us are role models for the women who follow.

“And me? I’m wearing tiaras now. The boa’s upstairs. I’ll bring it down later. Why? Because I can. Why? Because I want to stand out. Because I want to stand out. Because I want people to walk up and not feel intimidated.” She hopes that she is proving that you can do something wacky, silly, unexpected… “and it is so damn okay.” That is what she hopes the boa and tiara tell people.

Why it’s important to be bold. What are you afraid of, and how are you going to overcome that? We can all learn from those stories.

The chain of daisies project. It’s to get more women speakers and more women keynote speakers at technology, business, and venture conferences. It’s going to help conferences who are looking for more qualified women speakers and help women who speak to have a support system. She might have to rename it.

Believe in yourself. The reason she never, ever paid attention to the red flags was because she didn’t believe in herself. She thought she was  alone and didn’t realize she had the support of friends. Don’t make the same mistakes.

Dream. Learn. Do. Become. (Something she pulled out from a speech by Jack Welch.) That should be our mantra.

Be who you are meant to be. “I really hope that you will share your stories with me.” @AlizaSherman “I would love to tell your stories because you are part of this rich, amazing history.”

Standing ovation.

Christina Gleason (976 Posts)

That’s me: Christina Gleason. I’m a writer, editor, and disability advocate. I'm a multiply disabled autistic lady doing my best in this world built for abled people. I’m a geek for grammar, fantasy, and casual gaming. I hate vegetables. I cannot reliably speak, so I’ll happily conduct business over email or messaging instead.