Remember your favorite health and fitness duo Laura Putnam and Patty Purper from WomenRock this year? Well you'll be thrilled to find out they sent in several articles and guides as follow-up resources for you all!

Be healthy, stay fit and be good to yourself! Enjoy!

 

Motion Infusion's Guide to Sweating the Small Stuff 

 

TimeOut Services' Guide to Tackling Stress

 

Burn Calories Using NEAT - Non-Exercise Activity Thermogenesis

As promised, here are some more fantastic resources courtesy of our very lovely WomenRock speakers!

• Sylvia Ventura (Hub Ventures) provided us with a her list of some of the best business accelerators in the Bay Area, including...
  • 500StartUps (tech)
  • Founder Labs (mobile technology)
  • HubVentures (social)
  • WomenImpactProject.com (women+impact)
  • GreenStart (cleantech)
  • Y Combinator (tech)
• Others worth considering:
  • MassChallenge (non profit)
  • Unreasonable Institute
  • TechStars
  • SeedCamp
  • Startup Weekend
  • Startup Garage
  • FounderLY
  • Founder Institute

Finally, she recommends the Business Model Generation by Osterwalder & Pigneur a great read for people considering launching a venture.

• Sarah Brown (@guruofnew) is offering 30 minutes of Guru of New Trencasting for FREE with the purchase of her new mystery, DEAD.COM. After buying the book on Amazon, send an email to This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it with the name of the tech legend Samantha Darling is interviewing and she will set up your FREE training.

 

Happy reading ladies!

 

Missed our resources from Alicia Morga and Linda Adler last week? Find them here.

 

Notes from an intern and aspiring Fearless fem:

 

Having just finished David Kirkpatrick's The Facebook Effect over the weekend (which I would definitely recommend anyone), I feel more excited than ever at the thought of new ideas, jobs, startups and endless possibilities that come alongside the disruptive, tradition-challenging digital revolution. As so beautifully stated in Facebook's recent film, The Social Network, "inventing a job is better than getting one," and what better time than now in the new Renaissance of the Silicon Valley?

Working for Fearless, I constantly see new opportunities in these emerging industries. Mobile apps, social media, blogging, online advertising, and on and on and on! Yet something stood out to me when I finally returned from my reading trance this weekend - there are a million and one opportunities, but where are all the women?

I hadn't before thought twice about this phenomenon. In fact, I loved The Social Network the first time I saw it. But just pre second viewing over the weekend, my friend made a small but disturbing comment - "Oh my god, women were represented terribly in this movie." What on earth are you talking about? I've seen this movie before and found no fault with it! And this is 2011 - by now we have to have reached a level of politically correct portrayals of women. But throughout the movie, I couldn't help but notice this time how little credit any girl was given for having half a brain.

Now before I go any further, I want to make a small disclaimer: I am not a self-proclaimed feminist, nor do I think The Social Network needs to be deprived its Academy Award, but I am concerning myself with this subject because I must look at it through a lens where my own future and career goals are affected. In the field of Media Studies, we call the process of identifying with characters interpellation. But between all the players I admire as thought-leaders in revolutionary technologies - Steve Jobs (Apple), Mark Zuckerberg (Facebook), Eric Schmidt (Google), Biz Sone (Twitter), Bill Gates (Microsoft), etc., etc. - where is awoman I can relate to?

According to this article in the New York Times, while women own 40 percent of the private businesses in the U.S., they create only 8 percent of the venture-backed tech startups. By now we've come a long way from the domestic expectations of the 50's in almost all industries, so why in such nascent industries where the playing field is theoretically level are we back on the sidelines? And I don't want to hear the excuse that boys are more "into" video games and computer programming. Women thrive in the Web 2.0 world - we're inherently social, creative creatures, and what better sandboxes to play in than in new media, social media, and all other interactive Web 2.0 communications?

Sheryl Sandberg is one influential woman highlighted in the book who currently serves as Facebook's COO, and in the TED Talk embedded below she makes a lot of thoughtful points of her own attempting to explain the lack of women in leadership positions today. I think it is dangerous to stand by complacent in leaving women out of the big decisions in the new and exponentially growing tech industries. There are too few women leaders for us to look up to and use to imagine our own careers in tech, so we had better start stepping up to the plate so our children will eventually have some role models. It's time for a Silicon Valley takeover and for a little more estrogen on the interwebs.

Join me tomorrow in a Twitter chat dedicated specifically to WHY WOMEN ROCK! Follow the convo by using the hashtag #WomenRock, and share with us why you think women belong in the top leadership positions. Tell your friends and followers to join the #WomenRock convo, too, and maybe we can finally generate some buzz around this issue. Then, September 21 join us in the Silicon Valley to extend the conversation at our WomenRock conference.

 

Kim Bielak is a third year student at UC Berkeley pursuing a degree in Media Studies. She is our current Marketing and PR intern, and enjoys bringing you this very newsletter every week! Email Kim at This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it or follow her on Twitter via @kimbielak.

Notes from an intern and aspiring Fearless fem:

Last week I had the honor of hearing two incredible speakers share their stories and inspirations at an event brought to campus by NetDay Silicon Valley.

First I must acknowledge the unbelievable talent we up here in the Bay Area. It really hit me just how fortunate I am to have fallen into such a mecca of innovation and excitement about the future! The climate we currently inhabit thrives on precisely the collaboration, new ideas, and risks that startups and entrepreneurs require. And the possibilities to connect with people doing amazing things are endless!

Edith Yeung, founder of the BizTechDay entrepreneur conference (biztechday.com) and host of the SF Entrepreneur Meetup (sfentrepreneur.com), started off the evening with her personal anecdotes about leaving the safe environment of business for a riskier but more satisfying career. She recounted the time she broke down in tears after waiting over an hour in commute traffic for a job that just wasn't worth it:

"If the rest of my life is stuck in traffic for a business I don't believe in, shame on me," she said.

Carlos Emilio Goméz, a young Spanish brain at Google, also spoke about taking risks, listening to your intuition, and taking the alternative route. Most poignant to me was what Carlos explained to be his ultimate reason for taking his current job at Google: If he looked 4 years into the future on one path, he knew exactly where he would be. It was good. If he looked 4 years down the Google road, he didn't know where he would be. But guess what - that meant no limits and no boundaries on his growth.

The theme to the event was "What do you want to be when you grow up?" and it wasn't until this point that I realized this question was not to make us reminisce about what our dreams were when we were 6 in order to make us feel bad about our failures to become astronauts and ballerinas. It was about shaping our dreams now. 

You see, we never stop growing unless we let ourselves. Edith declared that only when you reach a certain point, and you get too comfortable, do you then inhibit your ability to grow. So guess what? You can still ask yourself this question everyday. You can still ask your friends and colleagues this question. Since when did it switch from the optimistic "What do you want to be when you grow up?" to "What the heck can you do with that degree?" to "When are you going to retire?"

And who decided the subjective age of "grown-up" anyway? I say keep growing, and keeping creating and recreating your dreams for when you grow up, because you've really got nothing to lose. The only reason you don't have another ridiculous vision of becoming the next big Hollywood director is because you didn't think you were still allowed to have that vision.

Edith ended by quoting a personal favorite Frost piece of mine, "The Road Not Taken," which I hope you will find just as inspiring:

 

Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,

And sorry I could not travel both

And be one traveler, long I stood

And looked down one as far as I could

To where it bent in the undergrowth;

 

Then took the other, as just as fair,

And having perhaps the better claim,

Because it was grassy and wanted wear;

Though as for that the passing there

Had worn them really about the same

 

And both that morning equally lay

In leaves no step had trodden black.

Oh, I kept first for another day!

Yet knowing how way leads on to way,

I doubted if I should ever come back.

 

I shall be telling this with a sigh

Somewhere ages and ages hence:

Two roads diverged in a wood, and I--

I took the one less traveled by,

And that has made all the difference.

 

To be an entrepreneur, to take the road less traveled, or even to have the guts to go out and start something on your own and leave behind the trail - that to me is true Fearlessness. I have such a great respect for the people who still have dreams for what they want to be when they grow up, and I for one will continue to mold my own.