From: http://www.betaboston.com/

The Greater Boston Chamber of Commerce’s first women’s networking event to focus on venture capital drew hundreds of attendees – but relatively few entrepreneurs and investors – to discuss how to advance and prosper in a field dominated by men.
Jodi Goldstein, the director of Harvard’s Innovation Lab, led a panel discussion over breakfast with three Boston venture capitalists. Payal Agarwal Divakaran, a senior associate at .406 Ventures, joined CommonAngels senior managing director Maia Heymann and Rudina Seseri, a partner at Fairhaven Capital, to discuss their outlook on the field and topics like how to effectively pitch a company to venture capitalists.

The event started with a few dismal statistics. Goldstein said the fraction of venture capital partners who are women had dropped since the 1990s, from around 10 percent to 6 percent today. Panelists said the problem stemmed not just from the dominance of the field by male investors, but from attitudes among women entrepreneurs, such as a willingness to admit to weaknesses in their business models and provide conservative estimates for success.

“All these social norms about being nice – you have to fight all this cultural upbringing and say, ‘Dammit, I’m good!’” Heymann said.

Many of the topics were no different from other panels on venture capital. Attendees asked questions about the value of studying for an MBA and the role of tech incubators and accelerator programs like MassChallenge. Seseri, who has invested in marketing tech and media companies like CrowdTwist and SocialFlow, forecasted that machine intelligence – cameras that can use software to “see” and distinguish objects, or robots that learn from humans’ social cues – would be an important field for the next decade.

Attendees said the panelists’ remarks reflected their own experiences. Kathy Pattison, the senior vice president of marketing at the mobile ad company Fiksu, said panelists’ venture capital expertise came through in their responses.

“It’s their job to weed out the wheat from the chaff,” Pattison said. “There were no surprises.”

Only a handful of the 300 attendees at the event raised their hands when asked whether they worked at startup companies or venture capital firms. But for Malena Gonzalez, a health data entrepreneur whose startup is run out of MIT, the event was still a valuable networking opportunity. Reaching into her front pocket, she grabbed a thick stack of business cards she’d collected from other attendees.

“When I woke up this morning, I specifically looked for a dress with pockets,” she said.