Here Are The Women of Y Combinator And They Are Awesome

I would normally rather have a root canal instead of write about the issue of women in technology. I just find most essays on this really tedious and obvious. (Sorry Alexia.)
But I do want to point one thing out. When I went to my first Y Combinator Demo Day three years ago, there was one woman. At this week?s Demo Day, there were four companies with one or all female founders among the 66 startups in the class.
I?m going to keep this post simple. No complaining. Less navel gazing. Just more role models. So here are the women of Y Combinator and they are awesome.
(Ladies, if you?re interested in joining the next class, the deadline just passed. But there are two classes a year, so the next one will come up soon.)
Nikki Durkin, 99Dresses
Durkin wrote her first business plan when she was eight years old. As a girl growing up in the Australian countryside, she desperately wanted a horse. After begging didn?t work, she biked down to her local co-op, determined the price of hay, calculated out operational expenses and wrote a cost-benefit analysis, even sticking in a risks section just in case the horse died.
?Ever since then, I?ve been pretty good at figuring out how to get what I want,? she said.
At 15, she and her thirteen-year-old brother started their first online business called KultKandy, where they designed T-shirts and drop shipped them from China.
While in college, she came up with a concept around dress swapping. She put her idea on Facebook and sent it out to friends in Sydney. In less than three weeks, suddenly 20,000 women signed up from around the country.
?It wasn?t really planned out to the nth degree, but it really resonated,? said Durkin, who is now 20 years old. ?Girls absolutely loved it.?
The idea was to have a market where women post pictures of their clothing and swap it. The seller would set the price and handle shipping costs. Instead of using a real currency, Durkin wanted to use a virtual one so that the experience would really feel guilt-free. She asked the communit