Category: General

Girl in the valley. Entrepreneurship. Stickiness.

Hi, my name is Angie Chang and I’m an entrepreneur. It’s been five months since my first event, and I’ve been at it ever since. Background - I was hired as a web producer at a startup in Palo Alto last fall, and started going to various entrepreneurship events with coworkers and friends in the area. After all, we are in “The Valley” and everyone is looking to “do something more with their lives”.

At all these entrepreneur and business networking events I was going to… I started realizing that I was one of the few girls ever present. We’d gravitate toward each other and after talking to them, I’d get kinda disappointed that they hadn’t actually done anything.. yet. I see so many people calling themselves entrepreneurs cuz they have entrepreneurial ideas but they haven’t executed on them, citing issues such as difficulty finding “the right idea” or someone to implement the idea.

Screw perfectionism - I just did it. As a designer myself, I scoffed at MakeUpAlley.com for YEARS for having a horrendous GUI and incompetent search functionality. One day I was chatting with Esther and realized that she was learning MySQL and Ruby on Rails. This is my friend Esther from Berkeley who majored in French and psychology, mind you. We realized that hey, we can do this - we build a bigger and better makeup review site and be better than MakeUpAlley.

When you’re located in the heart of Silicon Valley and breathe new technology every morning with a passion, and you have this amazing friend in the tragically hip LA area named Esther who is an absolute Web 2.0 guru, you owe it to yourself and the world to do something with all these resources at hand.

We started building this site called TheMintPages in February and released the Beta version in March after a few weeks of coding. I started going to events and pitching, to find out the holes in my business plan and to find pro bono Ruby on Rails devs to join my cause.

We all strive for greatness and in that we find ourselves tethered by perfectionism, the need for things to be perfect before we release the Beta product or announce our stealth startup to the world. It really takes for you to have a conversation with a passionate entrepreneur (such as myself!), preferably over coffee, to be sold on the product that is so early stage that it is requesting venture capital or private seed investment (us!). If you want to have that conversation, I’m here - angie [at] themintpages.com

* * * * * Sorry, random note:
One thing that I really enjoy about my situation is how the entrepreneurism bug is spreading and I can see it filtering thru my degrees of separation. Before, I was that artsy chick who designed cute stuff. Now, I design on a grander scale. People look at my going out on a limb and doing all this junk and go “hey if she believes she can do it, I most certainly can!” — and get off their asses to try to one-up me or to prove to themselves that this 23 year old humanities major isn’t going to beat them. And you know what, I’m glad everyone’s getting off their apathetic asses because it’s about time I had some company in this World 2.0. Where my girls at?