Word: valleys
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Passion may be the most overused word in Silicon Valley, but here it's unlikely to refer to romance. While the second-wave emigres may be socially savvy, the enthusiasm they bring to bear on their businesses is narrowly focused. Distractions, including relationships, are largely unwelcome...
...public. The 15-month-old Internet start-up Della & James hasn't had its IPO yet, but so far it has nailed down the idea (an online bridal registry), the VC (Kleiner Perkins), the hiring (15 to 70 employees in six months) and the buzz (everybody in the Valley has heard of Della & James). But there are some twists: their office is more Pottery Barn than grunge. The ambitious geeks didn't bother to graduate Stanford. And they're not geeks; they're two well-adjusted married women...
While the hiring this summer of Carly Fiorina as the first female CEO of Hewlett-Packard was considered a seismic event among the Valley's pocket-protector set, members of the dot.com generation barely shrugged. For many of them, the boss already is a woman. The boom in e-commerce--and the relative unimportance of engineering expertise, where men have ruled--has produced dozens of young entrepreneurs like Della & James' founders, Jessica DiLullo Herrin and Jenny Lefcourt: business-savvy women running Internet companies that cater mainly to women, peddling everything from wedding gifts to cosmetics to knitting. "Women are looking...
Lefcourt and Herrin are poster girls for the Valley's new emphasis on business creativity. "I've never been conscious of being a woman in doing this," says Herrin. But there are still moments when it confronts them. When she walked into a meeting with Kleiner Perkins, Lefcourt "looked around and thought, 'This room is huge and filled with men.' It occurred to me then that I must be a woman." And yet their pitch was convincing precisely because they could explain the nuances of wedding registries to highly credulous men. "We had an instinctive understanding of something they didn...
...week after arriving in the U.S., they have met with lawyers and potential investors. After spending the day tooling through San Francisco on a rented scooter, they arrive at Elroys elated, having found an apartment and office space. They are so fresh to the Valley that Luis and Thomas still don't have visas to work in the U.S., which is why they ask that their last names not be published. Their sense of possibility is so corny it's infectious. By the end of dinner, they are even using the right metaphors. "Everybody wants the gold," Thomas says...