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we're interested - png me at [redacted]

Glassbreakers is currently only for any one who identifies as a woman (cis or trans). This is because on a global scale, women face different career challenges that are specific to their gender. We hope that by connecting the global female workforce to each other we can speed up the process of a true gender balanced workforce. We do, however, want to keep men a part of the conversation and a part of our community. Anyone who believes is the social, political and economical equality of sexes is a Glassbreaker. We're saving the information of the men who do sign up or reach out because they want to help and are brainstorming creative ways to keep them involved.

thanks so much lauren!! Appreciate you standing up for us - we were really upset this was taken off hacker news considering how deeply involved we are with this community.

Hey this is [redacted] from the article. We are a part of this community - on hacker news every day - was sad to learn this has been flagged so much. This isn't an us vs them - we're all in this together. Hope by sharing our startup story more of you who were so offended by the article can see that we're just like you, hacking and hustling on a product we love.

Glassbreakers launched today for women in technology - what industry do you think they should explore next? Film?

feminism = social political and economical equality between women and men. A company culture with feminist values means equal maternity and paternity policies, thoughtful consideration for hiring 50/50 men and women, providing health care that covers birth control, etc. Just thinking about equality in every business decision.

our company is a feminist company- it just means that feminist values are a part of the company culture.

Glassbreakers is making the world a better place by helping women connect with female mentors that can help them with their careers. The confidence gap in the work force is real and we believe Glassbreakers will be a confidence tool for many female professionals. We hope to make the world a better place by empowering women to break the glass ceiling, together.

Women are the worlds largest untapped resource. We need more women in leadership roles across industries to start making real social change and to improve the lives of women every where. There is no clear path to do that but women at the top credit their career success to mentors who helped them get there. We hope that by automating the process of mentor matching women based on skill sets we can lead of movement of global female empowerment, which will have a ripple affect on improving our society at the macro level.

you are so encouraging thanks!

that works! I'm [redacted] shoot me an email and i'll send you a calender invite.

We have a community moderator and strict guidelines to insure Glassbreakers is a safe place for women. Women.com is also gender gated and thus far, it's been full of really great conversations absent from trolls. Of course, both men and women can be trolls or write threatening things online. However, the vast majority of threats of violence or misogynistic rhetoric in online forums does stem from men. Check out #feminism on quora- total nightmare.

Thanks! Right now this product is just for women. We really want to make a safe place for women to self publish via our content platform and post anonymous questions on our forums amongst a strictly female audience in the hopes to narrow troll behavior. We're even targeting our beta communities based on industry so we can test the mentor matching product in more concentrated subgroups. Audiences and products always have the possibility of change though. For now please just tell your female friends and colleagues to sign up and we'll be sure to connect them with some amazing local women with shared career passions.

I'm in a similar space as the founder of Glassbreakers. We're automating the process of connecting women who can mentor each other. We should all lunch -

I've been working with a team of four amazing women on Glassbreakers - a mentorship platform for women. Glassbreakers connects women in the workforce who can help each other. Our minimal lovable product is a mentor matching service for women based on skill sets. Ie imagine an OKCupid for women in the work force. We've built a content publishing platform to inspire our community as well as a forum network for women to publicly or anonymously crowd source career advice.

Glassbreakers is focused on solving the problem of gender disparity in the global work force. Our platform is gender gated to insure women in business will have a safe place on the Internet to talk about work. Finding a female mentor is hard so we're automating the process of connecting women with other women who we know can help each other with their careers. Mentorship comes in many sizes. With Glassbreakers, we're facilitating mentorship both online via our forums and content as well as offline via our mentor matching service in an effort to make mentor relationships more casual and skill based.

We're applying to YC's winter batch so we can launch our product as soon as possible. We already have 1,000 women signed up for beta and enterprise customers interested in using our tool for their organizations. Tell your female colleagues and friends to sign up for beta at www.glassbreakers.co.

This is a great list! Our startup, Glassbreakers, is focused on diversity and enterprise software to help women within organizations find mentors- applying for YC's winter batch!

I have a great co-founder dating story. My advise is to know exactly what you are looking for and then recruit for that dream candidate. I built out my business, boot strapped my startup for 6 months and had a strong idea of my product vision. As I hadn't been particularly happy with my engineering team prior- i decided to start fresh with the perfect technical cofounder to build our product. I spoke to a lot of people about what they envisioned for the technical cofounder role for my product and then made a 'dream resume' of that candidate along with the personality traits that would be the ying to my yang. Once I had a good idea of what I was looking for- I went through every single software engineer connection on linkedin to see if anyone might be a match. A woman who had moved into my old room when I moved out of my house had the exact background for what I was looking for (product driven creative software engineer). I got her involved in our market research study and then asked her for drinks under the premise that she had the exact resume and personality of what I was looking for in a technical cofounder-so what would I need to do in order to find a woman like her and get her to start this company with me. She really loved my idea and more importantly, saw the opportunity for herself to build a really cool product from scratch. We are both in similar places in our career and she 180% had the drive and intelligence to start a company and build our product and technology. She said during the meeting that she was actually interested and wanted to meet the rest of the team. We spent two months working together, getting to know each other and really thinking through the product. She met with all of my advisors and poured through our research. We had discussions about communications, got into our first tiff and had multiple discussions about timeline and career goals before sealing the deal. We share many passions like art, music and most importantly, helping women with their careers. Now that she is my technical cofounder, so many amazing things have happened. She's very talented and has the type of personality that attracts good tech & design talent. We work well together because we spent time communicating what we would both need to make this work for us. So figure out what you need, design that dream candidate, go find her or him and take the time to 'date' them till you are both comfortable moving forward. My relationship with her is now the most important one in my life right now and our attention to communicating is what has propelled our product development and our team's growth.

thanks for this info. Still new to this site and I'd like to be more active in the community but it's good to know it's not a strict requirement.

thanks for this- incredibly encouraging!

thank you! I got your tweet-like I said, I'm new to this but I do want to dive into this community. Really appreciate your help!

I'm a woman who is new to hacker news. I've been told I have to be on this thing if I ever want to apply for YC. I don't know if I'll ever do that but I don't want to ruin that opportunity. I've been reading through all these comments and a lot of them make me sick to my stomach. Articles that surround women in the work force interest me because my startup is in this space, but at what cost of my sanity do I have to put up with all these sexist comments to have value to this community?

exactly

I was so happy this was published. As a female founder, the grossest things happen. It sucks, there are some VC firms where I no longer feel safe attending their events. I don't get why men I ask for business help to this day still feel comfortable asking me out knowing that a) I'm a very vocal feminist and b) I state very clearly that I need business assistance.