60 Seconds with WITS West Speaker — Sarah Lacy

Sarah Lacy is the CEO and Co-founder of Chairman Mom. Her session at WITS West is “Why the ad-based business model is failing women and how they’re fighting back”.

· Why is speaking at WITS important to you?

The name of the event kinda says it all: We need more women in tech and we need to see more women in tech who have successfully raised money and are building companies — particularly, IMHO, female CEOs who are mothers. Motherhood — or even just the specter of Motherhood — is used as an excuse to discriminate against funding women. The more working moms who can prove they’re building large companies, the better for the entire ecosystem.

· What inspires you?

Breaking the pattern. Silicon Valley likes to pretend it’s data driven, but it’s not really true. We’ve given them so much data on how women perform, why diverse teams perform better etc. There are plenty of “greed-based” reasons to be more inclusive, but the numbers don’t change. The other thing that will make a difference is to create a new pattern of what “success” looks like.

· When you were a kid what was your dream job?

I wanted to be a politician (for some odd reason!)

· Quote about your session

Women have been the biggest adopters of communities and social networks with ad based models, and large companies have given the men who’ve built those communities billions of dollars to reach women. And yet, women are the most abused by many of these networks. Enough. We are creating a community where women are the customers not the product. Unlike so many Silicon Valley startups, our business model is our single most important feature.