My recent op-ed published about Portland and startups

I was featured in the Portland Business Journal last Friday! I wrote an essay on startups and the experiences of women in the Portland tech community that have caused me to not refer women into startups for jobs unless the startups are run by fellow PyLadies.

Some excerpts:

It takes more than one CEO’s alleged behavior to cause 56 percent of women to leave technology related fields by mid-career, according to a Harvard Business Review study. That’s twice the rate that men leave the tech industry.

After all, 63 percent of women in STEM industries (science, technology engineering and math) have experienced sexual harassment, according to a 2008 study.

I can’t recommend that women work for startups in Portland.

Startup funders should keep holding executives accountable. Company cultures grow from the seeds planted by their leaders.

These companies need [qualified HR, skilled with workforce diversity issues], and our tech leaders should demand it.

Read the whole thing at the Portland Business Journal’s site!

Registering as a Foreign Corporation in Virginia

As COO of Prime Radiant, I am tasked with several bits of paperwork like making sure our taxes get filed and tending to our status as a corporation. One such task was registering as a Foreign Corporation in the state of Virginia. This is a step along the path of paying a salary to a remote employee working from there.

In the words of Colin:

You’d think you could say, “Hi, VA! We want to start throwing fistfulls of income tax at you. Is ok?”

and they’d be like, “Awesomez! Here iz tax id #. kthxbye!”

But no.

So, I created a checklist for all the steps needed for this process. Virginia, unfortunately, still uses a paper form. Some states (including Oregon, yay!) have web forms for this. But few states provide a checklist for all the information you need to successfully complete any particular form.
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Facebook acquires Instagram (and a Postgres cluster) for $1billion

Today’s big story is that Facebook just acquired Instagram for $1 billion.

Instagram is a hugely popular image sharing app – until recently only for iPhone. Last week they released an Android version, which caused many of my friends to finally start using it. 😉

But you know what’s an even bigger story? Instagram runs Postgres. And, their engineering team has been posting juicy tidbits about PGFouine and pgbouncer over the last year.

I love that companies are succeeding with Postgres in a huge way.

We’re seeing Postgres become the default technology choice for new tech companies. As those companies grow or are acquired, we’ll see Postgres becoming an important part of many more organizations.

It’s no coincidence that Bruce posted this morning about “The New Postgres Era“. The quality of the Postgres community’s software products is recognized, and the developers who use our software are succeeding.