Opportunities Abound for Web-Savvy Entrepreneurs

As these 20 companies profiled in this book illustrate, web-savvy women entrepreneurs are seizing the vast opportunities made possible by the Internet by starting and growing successful online businesses. Moreover, seasoned executive women are increasingly leaving their traditional, brick-and-mortar corporate positions to head up web startups. Some of the most successful Internet companies -- from eBay to Exodus Communications -- are led by hired women CEOs. Considering how few women are to be found in the executive ranks of technology companies and the corporate sector overall*, the proliferation of Net startups with women founders and CEOs is astonishing.

Are you interested in starting your own online business? The explosive growth in e-commerce means that there will continue to be precedent-shattering opportunities for entrepreneurs to enter new markets in the months and years ahead. Stories abound about both mom-and-pop and venture-backed operations setting up shop on the web and exploding into thriving e-businesses whose greatest challenge is scaling operations quickly enough to keep up with their swelling customer base.

The emergence and rapid growth of e-commerce since the release of the Mosaic web browser in February 1993 is a sea change that is revolutionizing the business world. Forrester Research sees the consumer "e-tail" market hitting $184 billion by 2004. This represents more than 7 percent of all retail sales and an increase of more than 800 percent from the 1999 level of $20 billion. And the B2C market pales in comparison to the growth forecast for the B2B market: By 2003 it's expected to zoom to a whopping $1.3 trillion or 9.4 percent of all business sales from its 1998 level of $43 billion -- an annual growth rate of nearly 100 percent.

The high number of women web entrepreneurs is consistent with the huge growth in the number of all types of female-founded businesses. Women in the United States are starting businesses at a rate twice that of the national average. In 1999 the number of women-founded ventures topped 9 million. This represents 38 percent of all businesses and more than double the number of women-owned businesses that existed in 1987. Moreover, 30 percent of women-owned startups launched in 1999 were in the technology sector.

Although you wouldn't know it from reading the U.S. press, women-founded web ventures are also springing up globally. The two overseas companies profiled in this book -- eSampo.com in Tokyo and SuperVertical in São Paulo -- point to the emergence of women-founded web ventures abroad. The growth in the number of women-led companies overseas is especially inspiring since the barriers that women entrepreneurs in other countries must overcome are usually considerably greater than those faced by their counterparts in the entrepreneur-loving United States.

The Internet is enabling unprecedented entrepreneurship and presents a huge opportunity for motivated, smart business women. "Within the past year, women entrepreneurs have started looking at the Internet and technology as the answer to their prayers," says Amy Millman, Executive Director of the National Women's Business Council. "The Internet represents the biggest untapped market for business women."

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