Tech Boss Lady: How to Start Up, Disrupt, and Thrive as a Female Founder

Skimpy advice for founding a company arrives from Girls in Tech founder Gascoigne. Purporting to relate what’s really involved in starting a business, the book is aimed at first-time founders of any type, title notwithstanding; every business, Gascoigne points out, needs technology to scale, even if it’s selling a physical product. She uses her own story—of founding her foundation to help women in tech find and support each other—as a case study, along with those of high-powered women such as VC Heidi Roizen, former Basecamp COO Mercedes De Luca, and Gascoigne’s own mom, a former Mexicana Airlines employee who started her own successful travel agency. Topics addressed include “intrapreneurship” (entrepreneurship within organizations), managing stress, maintaining partnerships, hiring a team (she advises founders not to neglect finding a good HR person early on), and facing failure. More of a go-get-’em cheer than a compendium of usable advice, the book is undercut by Gascoigne’s desire to appeal to a young audience, leading to exhortations for business-founder hopefuls to “cut the manis and pedis” and warnings that, at pitches, one’s ideas are “suddenly public AF.” This slim offering is a natural graduation gift for entrepreneurial young women, but it delivers little. [em](May) [/em]