HarQen Adds In-Browser Recording to Voice Advantage

— Kris January 27th, 2012

Job candidates can now use Voice Advantage anywhere they have an Internet connection—with cost savings for international job interviews

MILWAUKEE, Jan. 18, 2012 — HarQen, Inc., today announced the addition of in-browser recording to Voice Advantage, its flagship product that lets users use their phone and a simple web-based dashboard to create and distribute custom, recorded phone interviews. For the first time, job candidates will be able to use Voice Advantage anywhere they have an Internet connection and browser.

Voice Advantage in-browser recording is a free upgrade to Voice Advantage customers, and does not require any software download. All that’s required is a PC or Mac with a microphone. Users now have complete flexibility to use either a telephone or the in-browser recording feature to record their conversation.

Voice Advantage candidates can now record interview answers using their PC, Mac microphones or their telephone.

“As HarQen expands our reach internationally, Voice Advantage has already solved international interview scheduling problems by allowing recruiters to record interviews that candidates can take at any time. Now with in-browser recording, candidates can respond to interviews with their computer instead of a phone. This combination provides employers a powerful and cost-effective alternative to high international recruiting telephony costs,” said HarQen CEO E. Kelly Fitzsimmons.

In addition to international cost savings, in-browser recording also allows candidates to participate in self-service voice interviews at kiosks in regional offices or retail locations. This is a very convenient option for drop-in candidates to progress quickly in the interview process without additional burden on recruiters.

In-browser recording is also being added to HarQen’s newest product, Symposia, which adds presentation, collaboration, archiving, note-taking and sharing tools to any conference call.

Availability

Voice Advantage in-browser recording is available immediately as an option for all Voice Advantage.

In-browser recording for Symposia will be available to beta customers immediately.

This article was filed under Press Releases.

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Symposia Helps Providers Save the Conversation

— Kris December 8th, 2011

HarQen’s white label solution allows telecoms and collaboration service providers to employ game-changing new technology—and integration with enterprise systems—to capture the value otherwise lost in business conference calls

MILWAUKEE, DECEMBER 8, 2011 — HarQen, Inc., whose products unlock the value of the human voice in business conversations, today announced the immediate availability of HarQen Symposia to deliver the conference call of the future. With Symposia, business conversations are no longer just about listening; communications can now be captured, shared, enriched, searched, and analyzed—all of which makes insights actionable.

HarQen’s Jeff Fitzsimmons, co-founder and VP of product development, will debut Symposia and speak today at GigaOM’s Net:Work conference in San Francisco.

Symposia is a cloud-based collaboration offering that dynamically transforms any conversation into an interactive synopsis that lives long after the conference call, meeting, webinar or presentation has ended. Symposia’s hosted voice management platform and API enables the configuration and deployment of enterprise grade, white-label solutions, making Symposia compatible with applications and business environments such as collaboration and telecom service providers, Salesforce.com, SAP, and Oracle.

With Symposia, conversations are forever accessible, interactive, and useful for specific business purposes in the proper business context. Customer communication can be conducted and accessed in CRM (Customer Relationship Management) applications and job candidates can be interviewed and archived right in the ATS (Applicant Tracking System) environment. In addition, Symposia provides an in-depth set of analytics that enable businesses to gain critical insights into their performance.

“Symposia lets communication services deliver an entirely new level of value for their customers,” said Fitzsimmons. “Why are we sending our top resources into meetings to share their valuable ideas and then throwing them all away when the meetings are over?”

Because Symposia collaborative notes and collective feedback on calls, events and meetings, can be navigated, analyzed and shared with individuals or groups (even those unable to participate), the most relevant audio snippets that capture the essence or details of any insights can be gained without having to listen to the entire session recording. Symposia lets users pluck back the few minutes that really matter. For example, participants can quickly review detailed information about a follow-up item discussed in a meeting. A VP can review the conversation around the specific slides that matter to her in a presentation that she missed, and the moments where customer support resolves a tricky customer issue can be shared with the entire support team. And this value can be realized globally.

“Since we focus mainly on collaboration and activity-based organizations, Symposia is equally valuable in any language,” said Fitzsimmons. “There is a tremendous amount of business intelligence and huge competitive advantage to be gained by capturing and organizing these important conversations that happen every day.”

“There were over 45 billion minutes of conference calls through more three dozen different conference service bureaus in North America in 2010, with minutes growing at about 8 percent per year,” according to Elliot Gold of TeleSpan Publishing Corporation, which has tracked the conference call industry for over 30 years.

Availability
HarQen Symposia is available immediately as a SaaS white-label service for collaboration and communications service providers.

This article was filed under Press Releases, Symposia.

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Renowned Voice Strategist Joins HarQen as Chief Intellectual Property Officer

— Kris November 17th, 2011

Jim O’Shaughnessy adds HarQen to his storied career in global IP positioning

HarQen today announced the appointment of Jim O’Shaughnessy as its chief intellectual property officer responsible for expanding HarQen’s patent portfolio to maximize market opportunities globally. O’Shaughnessy brings more than three decades of strategic expertise to HarQen’s intellectual property initiatives.

As a partner with Foley & Lardner LLP in the 1990s, O’Shaughnessy helped grow Foley’s practice into the then largest intellectual property practice worldwide. Recruited away by Rockwell International to be its Chief Intellectual Property Counsel, he was responsible for successfully compiling and then selling Rockwell’s expansive voice-patent portfolio to Aspect Technologies in 2004 among a range of other duties in the intellectual property space.

“I have had the good fortune to know and work with Jim since my earliest days as an entrepreneur,” said HarQen CEO E. Kelly Fitzsimmons. “Jim understands the global nature of the unfolding competitive landscape and possesses the rare expertise necessary to align HarQen’s intellectual property strategies and portfolio with the extraordinary market conditions today.”

In little more than the past 90 days alone, more than $18 billion has been spent acquiring not companies, but voice-related intellectual property. These transactions have included Google’s purchase of Motorola Mobility Holdings for $12.5 billion; the purchase of Nortel patents at auction for $4.5 billion by Apple, Microsoft, Sony, Ericsson and others, and IBM’s sale of more than 1,000 voice patents to Google for $1 billion.

“We view Voice 3.0 – which distinguishes itself from Voice 2.0 by the ability to monetize voice as content — as an emerging trillion dollar market,” said Fitzsimmons. “And it’s clear we are not alone.”

“HarQen is a trifecta for me — smart and highly energetic people who are defining new market opportunities,” commented O’Shaughnessy.

“Were any one missing, I would be too,” joked O’Shaughnessy.

O’Shaughnessy views intellectual property as the DNA of the organization and has played a vital role in its development and positioning for many Global 500 companies throughout the Americas, Europe and Austral-Asia. He has also served as an expert witness in several patent-infringement cases, including the Ronald A. Katz Technology Licensing LP litigation.

O’Shaughnessy received a Bachelor of Science degree in Materials Engineering from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute before earning his law degree from Georgetown University Law Center in 1977. Currently, he serves on the Board of Directors of Rovi Corporation (Nasdaq: ROVI) and the Council of Advisors of The National Institute for Play.

This article was filed under Announcements.

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Startup Creates Jobs, Attracts Investment in Wisconsin

— Kris October 12th, 2011

Milwaukee-based HarQen plans to use latest investment capital to expand team and intellectual property portfolio

Creating jobs and attracting financial backing from investors in Wisconsin is nothing new for Milwaukee-based startup HarQen, Inc. Now in the midst of another successful round of investment funding, HarQen exemplifies the type of women-led entrepreneurial companies that are doing their part to get the economy moving again.

HarQen Co-founder and CEO E. Kelly Fitzsimmons joined a number of other women entrepreneurs and investors today at a statehouse news conference to discuss investing in Wisconsin sponsored by Springboard Enterprises.

Fitzsimmons said HarQen, a four-year-old innovator in enterprise communications with a focus on collaborative voice services, has already secured more than half of the $4 million Series B funding effort it launched only a month ago.

“HarQen has been oversubscribed in every round of financing, with the majority of our capital coming from Wisconsin investors,” she said.

“The purpose of this round is to expand our Wisconsin-based team, beginning with the addition of a chief intellectual property officer,” Fitzsimmons said. HarQen has five U.S. patent applications pending and plans to expand its IP portfolio internationally.

Since 2007, HarQen has created 25 jobs in Wisconsin during the height of the economic downturn. With the current financing and growth trajectory, HarQen plans to hire dozens more, she said.

“We have been proud to lead all three financings for HarQen to date,” said Lauren Flanagan, HarQen’s board chair and general partner of Phenomenelle Angels Fund. “We were able to gather together a great group of fellow Wisconsin investors, including Silicon Pastures, Women Angels, Wisconsin Investment Partners, and Capital Midwest.”

Flanagan credits Wisconsin’s Act 255 as being very helpful in securing HarQen’s financing from local angels to date. She also was quick to praise the Wisconsin Technology Council and Springboard Enterprises for their support of HarQen.

Recently, HarQen made Wisconsin and its angels proud by being honored as the Angel Capital Association’s (ACA) 2011 Silvertip PwC Entrepreneurship award winner. HarQen was chosen out of 170 other ACA portfolio companies for its ability to scale revenue.

This article was filed under Press Releases.

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Taleo and HarQen Partner to Deliver an Integrated Voice Interviewing Solution

— kevin September 13th, 2011

HarQen, Inc., a leading intelligent voice services company and pioneer in virtual interviewing announced on September 13, 2011, that HarQen’s flagship product, Voice Advantage™, is now integrated into Taleo’s (NASDAQ: TLEO), Talent Management solution and available via Taleo’s Solution Exchange.

The integration provides unprecedented insight into the talent lifecycle and promises to deliver greater efficiency to HR professionals leveraging Taleo’s applications.

Read more here: http://bit.ly/oXC6mq

This article was filed under Announcements, ATS Integration, Partnerships and given the following tags: , , .

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Voice Assist and HarQen Form Strategic Alliance to Deliver Next Generation Conference Call Capabilities to Carriers and Enterprises Alike

— Kris August 25th, 2011

LAKE FOREST, Calif., Aug. 23, 2011 — Voice Assist, Inc. (OTCBB:VSST) and HarQen, Inc., today announced a strategic alliance designed to deliver a carrier-grade conference calling solution, which promises to redefine standard bridge call capabilities. The innovative solution allows participants to initiate a call with spoken commands, take notes with their voice, and then have the call organized so that it can be searched, reviewed, analyzed and shared afterward. The combined solution eliminates the logging of call details into popular CRM solution, such as Salesforce, as well as all the team’s notes, PowerPoint presentations, images, and original voice contributions would be organized automatically and ready for review.

“Voice Assist is pleased to be chosen by HarQen to provide hands-free, voice-enabled commands to better enable the conference call experience safely while driving,” said Michael Metcalf, chairman and CEO of Voice Assist. “This agreement demonstrates our commitment to expanding the capabilities of Voice Assist’s unique voice services platform.”

Voice Assist and HarQen have teamed up to provide a better way to conduct more productive and efficient meetings than ever before. Voice Assist is the leading cloud-based platform provider for enabling enterprise and telephony services through voice. Voice Assist’s Voice Mode™ is changing the way business is done, making workers safer and increasing their productivity with the most basic of all communication tools – the human voice. An end-to-end solution, Voice Mode™ allows conference calls to be initiated and notes taken via spoken commands that are non-disruptive to other call participants.

HarQen uses voice technology to streamline business processes through voice capturing and collaboration, and has enjoyed significant success with its Voice Advantage virtual interview product for recruiting. Through this alliance, the companies plan to leverage their expertise and award-winning technology to create a next generation of voice-enabled conference bridge solutions that will be integrated into CRM applications, such as Salesforce, and other data management applications.

According to a survey published by the Annenberg School of Communications at UCLA and the University of Minnesota’s Training & Development Research Center, executives spend upwards of 50% of their time in meetings.

“Up until now, we have not had an easy way to initiate a conference call nor a meaningful way to organize, access or share these meetings later,” said E. Kelly Fitzsimmons, CEO of HarQen. “Voice Assist is made up of true industry pioneers and experts. We believe that the combination of our team’s talents and award-winning products will forever change the way people think of voice communications.”

About HarQen

Founded in 2007, HarQen unleashes the richness of information trapped inside conversations – transforming talk into actionable insights. HarQen’s award-winning Intelligent Voice Service enables meetings, interviews and other business conversations to be captured, enriched, organized, navigated, shared and analyzed – improving collaboration and adding a new layer of business intelligence to existing data management systems.

For more information, visit www.harqen.com.

About Voice Assist

Headquartered in Lake Forest, Calif., Voice Assist is a hosted speech services company that enables voice in any application, network and device. The company’s cloud-based speech platform eliminates the need to use a keyboard or keypad to interact, and enables users to communicate, connect or transact using any application on any phone or IP-connected device. The Voice Assist platform includes a fast and safe way to make calls, manage your e-mails, send text messages and post to social networks such as Facebook and Twitter by voice commands and provides a scalable solution for developers to add voice to any application.

For more information on the company, visit www.voiceassist.com.

Forward-Looking Statement: Forward Looking Statements such as “We believe that the combination of our team’s talents and award-winning products will forever change the way people think of voice communications.” involve risks and uncertainties, including, but not limited to functionality of our technology, and any other difficulties related to risks and effects of legal and administrative proceedings and governmental regulation, future financial and operational results, competition, general economic conditions, and the ability to manage and continue growth.

Should one or more of these risks or uncertainties materialize, or should underlying assumptions prove incorrect, actual outcomes may vary materially from those indicated. Important factors that could cause actual results to differ materially from the forward-looking statements we make in this news release include market conditions and those set forth in reports or documents we file from time to time with the SEC. We undertake no obligation to revise or update such statements to reflect current events or circumstances after the date hereof or to reflect the occurrence of unanticipated events.

This article was filed under Partnerships.

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Breathing Life Into Dead-End Conversations

— Kris June 29th, 2011

HarQen Introduces Symposia™ at eComm 2011

SAN FRANCISCO, June 29, 2011 — Imagine being able to share the two minutes that matter from any conversation, anywhere. It would be the death of dead-end discussions and circular meetings, where we find ourselves endlessly “recapping,” “regrouping” and “getting up to speed.”

“The amount of information lost in our daily business exchanges is truly extraordinary,” said HarQen CEO E. Kelly Fitzsimmons. “By not capturing conversations in a trusted system, we are asking people to memorize all their conversations and then recall them accurately in an instant. No wonder we feel increasingly overwhelmed by communications today.”

This week at eComm 2011, HarQen, Inc. will demonstrate Symposia, a new cloud-based offering that dynamically transforms any conversation into an interactive synopsis that lives long after the conference call, meeting, webinar or presentation has ended. With Symposia, organizations can capture and enrich conversations so greater insight can be retained and shared; ushering in a new era of business intelligence.

“HarQen Symposia is an example of how voice is evolving,” said Rich Nespola, Chairman and CEO of TMNG Global. “HarQen has figured out how to monetize voice by transforming it into valuable, reusable content.”

HarQen Symposia converts conversations — in all their various forms and languages — into searchable, referenceable and actionable insights. Initially, Symposia will be focused on use cases for sales-related presentations, customer-service exchanges and account status calls. HarQen is integrating Symposia into key Customer Relationship Management systems (CRMs), such as Salesforce.com, leveraging their privacy and security features.

Symposia allows conversations to be captured as they occur, both visually and aurally, and then enriched collaboratively with notes, tags or uploaded imagery via Smartphones, using classic social media conventions. With this approach, participants can organize the content around key ideas, themes or action items, so the key information is always accessible and sharable.

“Prior efforts to isolate phrases and assign meaning largely missed the boat,” said Dan Miller, Senior Analyst at Opus Research. “Context, sentiment and much of the meaning is distilled out of conversations when voice is rendered as text and then subjected to analysis according to static business rules,” explained Miller. “Even with ‘state-of-the-art’ recording and analytics, there is no timely way for people to find and share what they found to be the most important parts of ongoing interactions.”

Symposia unleashes the wealth of information trapped within conversations by allowing users to:

  • Capture on-the-fly conversations via voice, tags and images from Smartphones
  • Enrich meetings with dynamic collaborative content — without technology barriers
  • Organize sales calls within CRM solutions and review unfiltered customer reactions
  • Navigate in any language with multiple ways to find key information anytime, anywhere
  • Share insightful exchanges via existing data management systems using HarQen’s API
  • Analyze what webinar attendees find important and share in real-time

Availability

Symposia will be available later this year.

This article was filed under Symposia and given the following tags: , , , .

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HarQen CEO Talks Voice Innovation with Frank Peters

— kevin June 15th, 2011

On the heels of the Silvertip PwC Entrepreneurship Award win, HarQen CEO Kelly Fitzsimmons talks to Frank Peters about the future of intelligent voice services.

In their twenty minute conversation, Kelly and Frank discuss how voice has been treated as a “disposable asset.”  Voice today is largely about transport, but HarQen’s tools are making all that voice data accessible and useful, dramatically changing the voice service landscape and ushering in the era of Voice 3.0.

What does that mean?  To use an example, one application of HarQen’s technology is to power Voice Advantage, a tool that allows recruiters to conduct phone screens with candidates asynchronously.  No longer does the recruiter keep her notes and then “throw away” the interview.  With Voice Advantage, the candidate’s original voice is captured in all its rich entirety and stored in a way that is easy for the recruiter to access, review, and analyze.  This helps put the right person in the right job, faster.

As Frank and Kelly discuss, PricewaterhouseCoopers awarded HarQen the Entrepreneurship Award because — of all the Angel Capital Association portfolio companies in the running — HarQen was identified as having the potential for the greatest revenue growth over the next five years.

Given the scale and value of voice communication in our work and personal lives, we’re excited to be making PwC’s calculations a reality!

This article was filed under Awards, Media and given the following tags: , , , , , , , , , .

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Redefining the Future of Voice Communications, HarQen Wins ACA Silvertip Award

— Kris April 18th, 2011

PwC Entrepreneurship Award presented for revenue potential and scalability

Boston, MA, April 5, 2011 – The Angel Capital Association (ACA), the trade association of leading angel investment groups in North America, announced that HarQen, Inc. of Milwaukee, WI is the inaugural winner of the Silvertip PwC Entrepreneurship Award honoring entrepreneurship and fast growing companies.

ACA, with PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC), launched this award to bring international attention of investors, strategic partners, and potential acquirers to the top angel-backed companies and their supporting angel groups. HarQen received the award at the 2011 ACA Summit in Boston, MA. The sponsoring angel group is Phenomenelle Angels Fund of Madison, WI.

“The Silvertip Awards honor the most outstanding and successful ACA member portfolio companies throughout North America,” said Marianne Hudson, executive director of ACA.

“The PwC Entrepreneurship Award specifically recognizes the company most likely to generate the most revenue growth over the next five years. With more than fifty customers and a powerful disruptive technology that makes voice content readily accessible, HarQen is an outstanding example of a startup that demonstrates enormous potential for exponential growth,” said Hudson.

“We are honored to receive this award,” said E. Kelly Fitzsimmons, HarQen co-founder and CEO. “Thanks to visionary investors like Phenomenelle Angels Fund, we have discovered a scalable way to monetize voice content, which promises to change voice communications as we know it. Lauren Flanagan, our lead investor with Phenomenelle and board chair, was the first to see how big our vision was. She got it immediately. Voice is the forgotten rich media.”

Other technologies capture voice, but they require special equipment and extensive, complex storage capabilities. Accessing a specific portion of voice records from meetings or conversations isn’t easy or quick. HarQen’s Voice Management (VM) platform captures and organizes voice information in an entirely new way. By embedding voice back into the larger data management applications, HarQen is able to extract new information, intelligence, and value from what was once disposable content.

“The spoken word is an asset that we don’t save or use in all the ways we could,” said Lauren Flanagan, managing director of Phenomenelle Angels Fund and chair of HarQen’s Board of Directors. “Think of the nuances you can pick up from voice that you can’t get from any other source.”

Initial HarQen applications include candidate screening, sales training, and true Voice of the Customer (VOC) surveying.

“When we think of voice capture, we think of unwieldy, unsearchable voice records,” said Fitzsimmons. “No one wants to listen to an hour-long conference call twice. Yet by organizing the conversation while it is being captured, HarQen allows participants to find and share the two minutes of that call that actually mattered.”

HarQen’s flagship product, Voice Advantage, captures previously lost conversations, such as phone interviews, so that staffing professionals and hiring managers can get a sense of a candidate in a fifteen-second “listen” instead of an hour-long live phone interview. Winning the “Top HR Product for 2010″ from HR Executive magazine, Voice Advantage has created a new business category-the virtual interview.

The two largest staffing companies in the world are already HarQen customers as well as many of the largest retail banks and call centers.

“Like all great disruptive technologies, HarQen’s platform is powerful and easy to use,” Flanagan said. “There is no equipment to install. Users are able to upload their voice to the web by initiating an outbound telephone call. It’s not interactive voice response (IVR), but rather opt-in, call-out telephony, which feels familiar and friendly.”

HarQen is moving assertively into additional markets beyond recruiting and staffing. Applications range from customer service and call center management to e-dating and storytelling.

“HarQen has a great team of people, led by a great serial entrepreneur,” says Flanagan. “We have a terrific, engaged board of directors. The company is producing revenue and has signed large, global customers. We believe HarQen has home run potential.”

Angel Capital Association

The Angel Capital Association is the trade association of leading angel investment groups in North America. The mission of ACA is to support the growth, financial stability, and investments success of its member groups. ACA’s mission is accomplished by providing professional development, best practices, networking and collaboration opportunities for angel investors who belong to member angel groups. Today 160 angel groups are members of ACA, and those groups represent over 7,000 accredited angel investors. More information is available at www.angelcapitalassociation.org.

The PwC Network

PwC firms provide industry-focused assurance, tax and advisory services to enhance value for their clients. More than 161,000 people in 154 countries in firms across the PwC network share their thinking, experience and solutions to develop fresh perspectives and practical advice. See www.pwc.com for more information. “PwC” and “PwC US” refer to PricewaterhouseCoopers LLP, a Delaware limited liability partnership, which is a member firm of PricewaterhouseCoopers International Limited, each member firm of which is a separate and independent legal entity.

What is a “Silvertip”?

Some of the best angel investors are “Guardian Angels” who are sophisticated in their search for innovative companies with great potential and also provide the mentoring and support their portfolio companies need to be successful. In the spiritual world of angels, different types of angels are denoted by the colors of their wing tips-and Guardian Angels have silver tips. The ACA Silvertip Awards recognize Guardian Angel Investors through the great portfolio companies they have helped nurture and the fact that they help select the winners of the competition.

Further Contact

This article was originally published by the ACA. For more information, contact:

Marianne Hudson
Executive Director, ACA
913-894-4700 x1
mhudson@angelcapitalassociation.org

This article was filed under Awards.

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On the Silver-Tipped Wings of Angels

— kelly April 6th, 2011

As I stood on stage at the Angel Capital Association’s Silvertip awards ceremony yesterday, I realized I was surrounded by some of the best and brightest entrepreneurs in the world.  But more than bright, these were the kind of overachievers that at the end of their journey – the sleepless nights, missed payroll and mortgage payments – they turned around and decided to help other entrepreneurs.

In Buddhism, there is the concept of the Bodhisattva.  A bodhisattva is an enlightened being that forsakes nirvana until all other sentient beings reach enlightenment.

The concept of a guardian being is a reoccurring theme in religion for a reason.  It is one of the highest expressions of self and selflessness.  Instead of parking their butts on a beach in Bali (permanently), these brave beings reenter the startup arena to help create the next Google, Facebook, HarQen — dedicating their time and hard-earned resources to fuel great ideas and entrepreneurs across that perilous chasm between start-up and scalable business.

As the recipient of the PwC Entrepreneurship award, I was humbled to be recognized by this amazing group.  Even more profound, I was surrounded by women on stage.  Our ACA member sponsor was Phenomenelle Angels Fund, led by Lauren Flanagan, who is our board chair and most ardent evangelist.  Next to Lauren, was PwC’s Managing Director of Emerging Business, Claire Hayes.  Not only were we three women, but three Irish lasses nonetheless – one (Claire) complete with the brogue!

A hundred years ago, it would have been inconceivable to have someone of Irish decent recognized in this way.  Sixty years ago, great aunts changed the family bible to say we were Scottish (and they were 10 years younger) – to improve their marriage prospects.

Twenty years ago, I wonder how many women were Managing Directors in the then Big Eight…

And today, only 5% of venture back startups are women-led.

And yet, there we stood.  And not just us, but two other ACA winners, InRange Systems and Canary Systems, both had women founders and executive leadership.  (Even more fun, InRange was founded in Wisconsin too – Go Pack!)

Thanks to the support of my individual angels and the groups – Silicon Pastures, Women Angels, Wisconsin Investment Partners, Golden Seeds, and Phenomenelle Angels Fund – we were able to stay in the arena during some of the toughest play that the economy could throw at us.  It was their faith, guidance and enduring enthusiasm that saw us through.

Now, it’s my turn to give back.  Last week, I became a charter LP in BELLE Capital, Lauren Flanagen’s new fund for women-led businesses in the Midwest that just formally closed its round last week.  I know what Lauren is like during due diligence up close and personal.  If she thinks something is a good deal, I tend to agree.

So now it comes full circle. If you are a Midwest-based women entrepreneur (or in senior leadership) and are looking for early stage investment, I invite you to text VCPITCH to 90206 and give BELLE your best elevator pitch.  We’d love to hear your story!

This article was filed under Awards and given the following tags: , , , , , , , , , , .

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