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Category Archives: Girls Rule!
Where The Boys Are…And Not The Girls: Tales from the 2012 JP Morgan Healthcare Conference
I set off for five straight days at the annual JP Morgan healthcare conference last Monday, but on the way drove the carpool to my daughter’s high school that morning in a last ditch attempt to act like a responsible and caring parent. My poor daughter gets completely abandoned during JP Morgan week every year and, as she so aptly put it, it is a mixed blessing. When I arrived home finally yesterday afternoon she said to me that she likes that I am not there to tell her what to do, but not that I am not there to act as her personal assistant and laugh at her jokes. I must admit, she is pretty funny. Especially that part about the personal assistant.
Anyway, during my last parental act of last week, my daughter’s friend, who also happens to be a JP Morgan orphan (her dad is also a healthcare venture capitalist), asked me from the back seat, “So, are there many women at this conference?”
It was interesting to get that question from a 15 year old, as it certainly wasn’t the kind of thing I worried about … (read the rest)
Posted in Girls Rule!, Healthcare, Healthcare private equity, Healthcare Venture Capital, Uncategorized, Women in Venture Capital & Private Equity
Tagged healthcare, healthcare conference, Healthcare investment banking, healthcare private equity, healthcare venture capital, JP Morgan Healthcare Conference, Pfizer, psilos, Women in finance, Women in healthcare, women in private equity, women venture capital
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Where in the World is Lisa Suennen?
Warning: shameless self-promotion today—will be back to more thematic ideas next week if my feet and I survive the JP Morgan Healthcare Conference and Circus, which is occurring this entire week in San Francisco. Pretty much the entire healthcare world shows up for this, which means you see old friends and new, as well as people you hoped you might not have to see again. If you wanted to “Occupy Healthcare,” this is the place to do it. In any event, It always an interesting experience full of insight, deal-making, cocktail therapy and blister treatments. So for now, with time somewhat limited for committing deep-ish thoughts to paper, I thought I’d put a plug out there for a few conferences at which I have been fortunate to be invited to speak.
The first is The Personalized Medicine World Conference (PMWC), which bills itself as the only fully integrated conference to examine the advances and challenges of Personalized Medicine through a practical lens. PMWC brings together the thought-leaders of business, government, healthcare-delivery, research and technology into one information-rich, two-day conference and offers a really interesting agenda looking at the ideas of personalized medicine … (read the rest)
Posted in Girls Rule!, Health and Wellness, Uncategorized, Women in Venture Capital & Private Equity
Tagged Business of Healthcare Conference, Haas school of business, healthcare conference, IBF Health & Wellness Innovation Summit, Lisa Suennen, Personalized Medicine World Conference, professional business women of california, psilos
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Newsflash: Grass is Green, Sky is Blue, VCs are White Men
Yeah, I love being famous. It’s almost like being white, y’know?—Chris Rock
On Monday November 21 the National Venture Capital Association and Dow Jones VentureSource released the results of the 2011 Venture Census, which reported statistics about ethnicity, gender and other characteristics of the venture capital industry garnered from a poll that included 600 VC industry participants. Not surprisingly, the Census reaffirmed what most of us already knew: it’s good to be a white male.
Of the total 600 respondents, 87% were Caucasian, 9% were Asian, 2% were African American or Latino, and 2% were of mixed race. This is pretty much exactly the same as when the survey was done in 2008, when 88% were white guys.
The only thing worse than being non-white when it comes to your chances of getting a VC job is being female. While 79% of the survey respondents were male and 21% were female, it’s a misleading figure since so many of the women respondents were not in true investment roles. According to the NVCA, of those who identified themselves as investors, 89% were male and 11 percent were female. This is actually … (read the rest)
Are You Dense?
Sometimes comedy and healthcare collide. I caught an episode of the Ellen DeGeneres Show recently where her guest that day was one of my favorite comedians, Wanda Sykes. Sykes was there, in part, to discuss her recent battle with breast cancer, a disease she found out she had quite by accident. Apparently Sykes had gone in for a voluntary cosmetic breast reduction (this is the cue for men everywhere to gasp in horror) and after the procedure it was discovered that the tissue removed, which is routinely examined after such procedures, was cancerous.
If you have extra time, you can watch the actual 4 and a half minute Ellen-Wanda interview by clicking HERE.
In the interview, Sykes talked about how, given her personal risk factors for breast cancer and her unwillingness to live fearing it’s sudden return, she decided to undergo a prophylactic double mastectomy in order to ensure she would not end up with breast cancer in the future. It is an extreme decision, but one that is being taken more often by women willing to trade off body parts to avoid living in fear and submitting to … (read the rest)
Posted in Diagnostics and Screening, Girls Rule!, Health and Wellness, Healthcare, Healthcare Policy, Medical Devices, Preventive Health, Uncategorized
Tagged areyoudense.com, breast cancer, breast cancer laws, breast cancer screening, breast density, breast density and mammography reporting act, breast MRI, dense breasts, gamma medica, lumagem, mammogram, MBI, molecular breast imaging, psilos, wanda sykes
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Gravity is a Bitch
Hi everyone. A few weeks ago I had the honor of receiving a very prestigious Corporate Director’s Forum award for Board Director of the Year. The award is given each year to Board Directors who are nominated in 6 categories (corporate governance, enhancement of economic value, companies in transition, corporate citizenship, not for profit governance and lifetime achievement). The awards are presented at a gala dinner; I received my award at a lovely event in San Diego on September 14th attended by more than 500 people. I have been asked by multiple people to send them a copy of my speech as it seemed to be pretty popular. Thus, I decided to publish it below.
The Corporate Directors Forum event is quite a big production and it has a theme every year. This year’s theme was The Right Stuff, the 1983 movie about the original US Mercury 7 astronauts. It’s a great movie that covers the history of the U.S. Space program and the wild and crazy pilots that became the first astronauts. The event had all sorts of movie and NASA footage and cool space gear in … (read the rest)
We are limited, not by our abilities, but by our vision
“We are limited, not by our abilities, but by our vision.”–Ralph Waldo Emerson
Xconomy (a great web publication of life science and technology news and analysis that targets the “innovation community”) asked me to serve as their roving correspondent to provide a view from the MedTechVision Conference, held September 15-16 at the Rosewood Hotel in Menlo Park, CA. Here is my report:
“I hadn’t given any thought to the fact that it was theoretically a ‘women’s conference before I walked into the room. I’d just promised the organizer, a friend, that I would come,” said Vance Vanier, CEO of Navigenics. “But walking into the room full of women had quite an impact; I realized how much I stood out and it was worth noting. It made me realize what women experience when they go to events like this.”
Vanier was commenting on his experience as a male attendee at the conference, which was intended to provide a platform for the many women executives in the medical technology field to wield the microphone. Some 200 women and 3 intrepid men spent two days in a room hearing … (read the rest)
Posted in Girls Rule!, Healthcare, Healthcare Information Technology, Healthcare private equity, Healthcare Venture Capital, Medical Devices, Uncategorized, Women in Venture Capital & Private Equity
Tagged amy belt, angela macfarlane, bikini medicine, Bray Patrick-Lake, Deneen Vojta, Denise Zarins, Dr. Betsy Thompson, ellen zane, Erica Rogers, ferolyn powell, ginger graham, healthcare IT, healthcare venture capital, Karen Talmadge, medical devices, medical technology, MedTech Vision Conference, Michelle Heying, molly coye, psilos, Robin Cisneros, Stacy Enxing Seng, vance vanier, women in medtech, women in private equity, women medtech conference, women venture capital
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Man! I Feel Like a Woman!
Today’s post was generated as a result of a request by PE Hub’s editor, Jon Marino, who asked me to author a piece for his publication about how male venture capital and private equity executives could “redeem themselves” in the eyes of women in the field. As you can see if you read further, I took another tack with the story, as I am pretty confident that most of the men in my profession don’t view it as their job to redeem themselves for this purpose.
I have been fascinated by the feedback I get on the articles I write on the male/female interaction in my field, as nearly 100% of the emails and written comments I get are from men. Women colleagues will sometimes mention they have read them, but male colleagues take action and write—very interesting. The comments I get from my male fans and detractors range from telling me I am completely off-base and borderline insane (hard to argue with that one) to resounding apologies that men are, in fact, the root of all evil, at least when it comes to the gender-based tensions in the … (read the rest)
It’s Different for Girls
I had one of those moments today that make you realize how complicated the challenge of achieving equality of the sexes in the workplace (or anywhere) really is. I was sitting in the lounge at the gym watching the communal TV. On the screen: Piers Morgan and another guy talking about Hurricane Irene and specifically about the flooding at the Jersey Shore (now that is a Situation). A basic run-of-the-mill middle-aged white guy who looked to be about 50 years old sat down next to me on the couch to watch the TV, which had no audio since the sound was turned off.
For no obvious reason, Michelle Bachman came on the TV screen in the middle of the hurricane story. I said, “I hope that the audio is saying that she got washed out to sea in the storm.” My new seatmate says to me, “It must be really hard being a woman and watching her in a leadership role.”
Because I just can’t help myself, I said back to him, “I really don’t think of it that way. I just think she’s her own isolated idiot. I mean, … (read the rest)
FemBots, Rise Up!
If you are a regular follower of my blog, you know I like to write about the plight of women in business and the challenges we sometimes face in being treated equally to our male colleagues. As a regular reader you would also know that I am fascinated by how technology is being adapted and adopted to improve the human condition and that I sometimes like to make fun of some of the more over-the-top applications (see FitBit article HERE). And yet, when I read a story in the International Business Times entitled IBM Develops Brain-like Chip, I immediately recognized that my two of my pet issues were on a collision course.
According to the IB Times article, “IBM is deploying its [research] expertise in the attempt to accomplish the unthinkable: developing a chip to mimic the human brain. IBM says its new chip, called SyNAPSE, comes closer than anything done before at replicating the human brain, a breakthrough considering the system is capable of “rewiring” its connections as it encounters new information the same way the biological synapses of a human brain would.”
According to IBM Research … (read the rest)
Posted in Girls Rule!, Healthcare Information Technology, Random Thoughts of the Day, Uncategorized, Women in Venture Capital & Private Equity
Tagged brain chip, cognitive computing, Dharmendra Modha, healthcare IT, IBM, psilos, SyNAPSE, women in private equity, women venture capital
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Peer Pressure Cooker
There was an article in the August 8th issue of Venture Beat entitled, “Do teens make good founders? 6 teenage teams make their debut to find out.” As the parent of a teenager, my immediate thought was, “yeah, sure, right after they clean up their rooms and set the table, they can be totally awesome founders, as long as they can tear themselves away from the latest installment of the Twilight series.” What do I know? As it turns out, some kids actually do get off the couch and take action to be the next Steve Jobs.
The VentureBeat article I mentioned above is about an entrepreneurial incubator put together by Teens in Tech. The Teens in Tech Incubator is an 8-week summer program which helped six teams of young entrepreneurs launch six products over the course of a summer. Teams come with ideas, get paired up with mentors and resources, and are guided through the process of bringing their ideas to life. At the end of the 8 weeks, the teams present their startups to a group of venture capitalists, tech influencers, members of … (read the rest)