Most Influential Women in Web 2.0

By: Saabira ChaudhuriFri Nov 7, 2008 at 11:45 AM

(L to R: Leah Culver, Pownce; Rashmi Sinha, Slideshare; Dina Kaplin, blip.tv; Marissa Mayer, Google; Cyan Banister, Zivity; Lisa Stone, Jory Des Jardins, and Elisa Page, BlogHer; Caterina Fake, Flickr; Gina Bianchini, Ning; Kaliya Hamlin, OpenID; Mena Trott, Six Apart; Arianna Huffington, the Huffington Post.)

Women have been heavily instrumental in redefining the way we interact online. Here's a look at the most influential of these.

Marissa Mayer, Google | Courtesy of Google

Caterina Fake, formerly of Flickr | Courtesy of Caterina Fake

Leah Culver

What she's done: As the lead developer and a founder of social networking site Pownce, 25-year old Culver has made it possible for people to quickly and easily swap large media (like files, movies, photos) without crashing their systems. Now projects like Twitter's photo sharing site TwitPic and Facebook are taking a leaf out of Pownce's book.

Update: Pownce's technology was recently acquired by Six Apart. The service will be shut down on December 15th and Culver will join the Six Apart team.

How she got there: Culver started out as an art major at the University of Minnesota, but found her calling in a required programming class. "Before that I didn't even know what programming was,” she admits. After graduating in 2006 with a Computer Science degree, she worked at iLoop Mobile and Instructables, two startups in the Bay Area, before eventually deciding to start her own thing. She built Pownce from scratch using a programming language called Python.

What to learn from her: You're never too young to start your own company. And particularly if you write software, your own web site can be relatively cheap. "As a programmer the route to your own company is easy -- you build a site and get people excited about it," says Culver. Pownce hasn't needed venture capital -- Culver has relied on funds from family and friends.

Rashmi Sinha

What she's done: The CEO and co-founder of SlideShare, Sinha was the first to create a site that allowed slides to be taken beyond limited office or educational use and shared online. "As with video, where early entrepreneurs recognized that asynchronous sharing on the web could work, we realized with presentations that it was time to move beyond in-person presentations and that you could share slides on the web. Others could comment, favorite, download and build on this," she explains.

How she got there: Sinha has a PhD in cognitive neuroscience from Brown University. After graduation, she worked as a researcher at the Information School at UC Berkeley, focusing on how to optimize search engines and recommended systems (those “recommended” titles that pop up on Amazon when you're looking for a book, for instance.) She started her own user-experience consultancy -- clients included eBay, iFilm, AAA and Blue Shield -- which then eventually morphed into SlideShare.

What to learn from her: If you're tech-oriented, and particularly if you're female, Web 2.0 is the best place to start out. "There are more entry points in the Web 2.0 world than in more hardcore tech companies like Intel. Web 2.0 is also the right mix of the social and the technical so that women can prosper. They are contributing in a more visible manner than in other tech fields."

Marissa Mayer

What she's done: A 10-year veteran of Google, Mayer -- currently Google’s Vice President of Search Products and User Experience -- was a major player behind many of the company’s most popular interactive services, including Gmail, the first email program to follow a threaded-message model; Orkut, which Mayer envisioned as the first social network that wasn't angled towards dating; and iGoogle, which allows you to personalize your Google page.

How she got there: Originally a biology and chemistry student at Stanford, Mayer graduated with a B.S. in Symbolic Systems and an M.S. in Computer Science. Prior to joining Google, Mayer worked at the UBS research lab (Ubilab) in Zurich, Switzerland, and at non-profit research institute, SRI International, in Menlo Park, California.

What to learn from her: If you’re going corporate, don't just look for a role that will suit you -- find a company that will help you grow. "Find an environment where you feel very comfortable, an environment where people will invest in you," says Mayer. "Google really invested in me and I'm really at home there. Fundamentally I'm a geek, and everyone around me is a geek so I fit right in."