TGGD #11 Michal Berman, founder, EmbarkOnIt.com

Last night the Toronto Girl Geeks gathered and over a few beverages and some nosh to hear Michal (Mic) Berman, founder of EmbarkOnIt.com share her insights on entrepreneurship, career development and start-ups.

Mic is a self-described serial entrepreneur, team-builder and someone who gets companies focused on results. She's also a straight-shooter and gave a wonderful talk. Thanks to Mic for taking time to join us and share her insights.

Our sponsor, Web Host Industry Review (TheWhir.com) helped make our event last night happen. A huge thank you to our friends at The WHIR. If you're getting yourself up and running with a website or a web-based business, they've got all insight and advice you need. Check them out.

Mic and Nathalie photo by Heather Leson

Mic talked about building out a team and used her experience at Yahoo! Canada as a case study. Some of her points:

• Hire the best people you can find and you'll rock
• Know what you're trying to achieve
• Establish a core focus so you can follow through quickly
• Filter every obstacle that comes your way through your goals; determine if it matters or if you need to resolve it
• Make decisions quickly but check back against your core goals
• It is easy to get distracted when you're fighting fires and working quickly
• With focus and great people you can achieve amazing things (such as an increase in year-over-year sales by 300% and a 30% increase in market share year-over-year)
  

From her experience working on Firefox with the Mozilla Foundation, Mic shared a story about the power of Open Source and community. The Firefox release process is unique because their work base is largely volunteer and organizes through Google groups to complete all the work needed to release a new version. Firefox has developed and incredibly loyal global base of volunteer contributors from the Open Source community. They've fostered this community because people feel they are part of something special in Firefox. A Firefox t-shirt carries a lot of currency with their loyal volunteer contributors and in the Open Source community.

Mic ended her talk with 3 Rapid-Fire Strategies for Start-ups and Entrepreneurs:

1. Go as fast as you can. Set your major milestones and go kick ass.
2. Build the best team around you. Use your passion to sell people on your ideas to convince them to join your team. Build a good advisory board.
3. It doesn't need to be as hard or as perfect as you think. Give up on perfection and just do it. Put context around your work. Use words like "alpha" and "beta" and "coming soon". People will forgive you because they just want to see what you're doing and talking about.
   

As always, our Toronto Girl Geeks had lots of questions and there was great discussion. Some of the attendees have left comments and feedback at Meetup.com - feel free to add your voice and give us your feedback. Thanks very much to everyone who came forward to volunteer. I'll be in touch soon.

I hope to see everyone out to our event in April.