“The central premise of Moneyball,” (says Wikipedia) “is that the collected wisdom of baseball insiders (including players, managers, coaches, scouts and the front office) over the past century is subjective and often flawed.”
Moneyball charts the rise of Billy Beane’s Oakland A’s by looking beyond “instinctive wisdom” about who does or does not “look like a ballplayer.”
Which brings me to a small blip from the Mercury News, on the conference She’s Geeky:
A venture capitalist who rejected Mary Hodder’s start-up for funding later told her he did so in part because Hodder had no male co-founder, and he thought she would quit because she’s a woman. Hodder didn’t quit. Her video search and social networking Web site, dabble.com, is doubling its registered users every 2 1/2 months.
Mary herself says the VC was not “a bad guy,” adding that “we all have our stereotypes, our biases, our prejudices.”
But how much more money, it seems to me, a VC will make who can Billy-Beane his (or her) bias. I’m sure Harvard drop-out Bill Gates didn’t “look like” success. To quote some statistics from Score:
- Women represent more than 1/3 of all people involved in entrepreneurial activity. (Source: Global Entrepreneurship Monitor (GEM) 2005 Report on Women and Entrepreneurship)
- Between 1997 and 2002, women-owned firms grew by 19.8 percent while all U.S. firms grew by seven percent (Source: SBA, Office of Advocacy)
- The number of women-owned firms continues to grow at twice the rate of all U.S. firms (23 percent vs. 9 percent). (Source: SBA, Office of Advocacy and Business Times, April 2005)
Score adds that “The greatest challenge for women-owned firms is access to capital, credit and equity.” I’m sure the big-money players who did bet on Mary will do very well.