Angie O'Grady: Women's Entrepreneurship Day - Time to debunk some myths

michaelsogrady
Nov 21, 2014
2 min read

Two of Fortune’s Most Powerful Women Entrepreneurs share their stories, advice and some myths about what it means to be a female entrepreneur.

by Caroline Fairchild

Fortune

Cynthia Breazeal has never considered herself a woman entrepreneur. An entrepreneur? Yes. A leader? Certainly. But gender really has never come into play as she expanded her company Jibo, the maker of the world’s first family robot.

Still, today is Women’s Entrepreneur Day, a global movement to celebrate and support female founders and shed light on some of their challenges. So Fortune interviewed Breazeal, as well as Susan Coelius Keplinger, the co-founder of online ad platform Triggit, about their experiences building their respective companies from scratch. Both women are part of Fortune’s 2014 class of Most Promising Entrepreneurs.

“The world would certainly be a better place if we had more women entrepreneurs,” said Breazeal. “Women are going to bring a different angle to startups. The stereotype is that it is all young geeky guys and that is not true. It is critical for women to become entrepreneurs because of their unique perspective.”

Fortune: Give me a little background on your company.

Susan Coelius Keplinger: We started the company in 2005, and we started doing similar things with ads that we are doing now. It didn’t make sense to us why an advertisement on Yahoo’s homepage would sell for hundreds of dollars, but an ad on a blog shown to the same person would be some for 40 cents. If it is really about the person and the audience, it shouldn’t matter what page that person it on. We are trying to build products and get access to an audience regardless of the site itself.

Cynthia Breazeal: Jibo is building the world’s first family robot. It’s like R2D2 and an iPad had a baby. It’s the world’s first social robot. I founded the company in 2012 and now is the time to bring it to the world.

How would you describe the stage that your company is at right now?