At the recent Geek Girl Meetup at the Ansir Innovation Center, we were thrilled to meet almost 40 women (and a few brave men) who have

Entrepreneur Melani Gordon

either started, work for or aspire to start an Internet company. These cool women are knocking down the doors, breaking the glass ceiling and demanding to be taken seriously in what has heretofore been a male-dominated world.

The meetup was organized by Leslie Fishlock, the owner of Geek Girl Corp., which focuses on providing computer education to women. “My mom wanted to put the names of my swim team on a spreadsheet, and she had no idea how to use Excel. That’s when I realized that technology had passed a lot of women by,” said Fishlock.

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Entrepreneur and school board member Todd Gutschow

apple pie and ice cream. In school, they call it math.

There is little chance of success in starting a business if one is not comfortable with the numbers. Does revenue exceed expenses, and if not now, when, and then how much money do you need to bridge that gap and for how long? And then there are concepts like pre-money, post-money, liquidation preferences, dilution, return on investment. This stuff matters, and yet, in our interactions with many entrepreneurs, we’ve been surprised at how many struggle with these basic concepts.

Math is also important in “helping to prepare you for things that aren’t obvious right off the bat,” contends Todd Gutschow, co-founder of HNC Software (sold to Fair Isaac & Co.), a leader in the development of neural network technology for credit-card fraud detection. When you’re starting a company, you are in uncharted territory with a multiple series of decision trees, and each path chosen leads to another set of choices. “You have to use analytical methods and interpret those results to move your company forward successfully.”

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The goal — matrimony.

The perfect marriage: The small biotech company gets money to fund development of its breakthrough technology, and the large pharmaceutical company gets a blockbuster product. Just like online dating, a computer matched the 200 conference participants who met with each other in private 30-minute sessions in small booths that were constructed in a large meeting room at the hotel. Yes, it’s nice to marry for love, but in this case the perfect marriage also involves money, and lots of it. We are talking Elizabeth Taylor diamonds.

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Rosibel Ochoa, Executive Director. von Liebig Center

Instead, they are using college and graduate school as an incubator, and innovation is the result.

While he was working toward his doctorate in computer science at University of California San Diego, Kian Wi Ong had an idea that he thought had commercial potential, so he entered a contest at UC San Diego to try to win a $50,000 grant. “Mary Zoeller, our adviser from the von Liebig Center, gave us invaluable pointers as were preparing and helped us hone the presentation to deliver a clear value proposition for our ideas and technology,” Ong said.

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We met Peter Frykman, who visited Ethiopia when he was a mechanical engineering graduate student at Stanford, and he saw that existing irrigation systems were ineffective for small subsistence farmers. Not enough water or water pressure.

So, in 2008, he developed an innovative technology and manufacturing process to elegantly solve the problem (he laser-cut very tiny holes in a simple, inexpensive polyethylene sleeve), and today his company, Driptech, is successfully selling its product in India and China.

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Iraqi native Inas Khammi, 28, arrived in San Diego on Sept. 29, 2010. Speaking through an interpreter, she said her Chaldean Catholic family fled Iraq because of kidnapping threats due to their religion. In the U.S., she was eligible for $345 a month in cash assistance for eight months. Wanting to earn her own money, she looked at becoming a child-care provider to serve families in her community since she didn’t speak English.

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And so as we enter the new year, allow me to offer Rule No. 381:1 — It is as hard to build a small company as it is to build a big one. There are no shortcuts. Or said another way, I would like to challenge the young entrepreneur in 2012 to reach for the bigger idea, to try to solve the more difficult problem, to address the complexity of a puzzle, and not just look for an angry bird.

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Gail Naughton, Ph.D., CEO, Histogen

This year, there are 98 female CEOs of 3,049 publicly traded companies analyzed by research company GMI. That represents 3.2 percent of the total company CEOs. The numbers may be higher in midsize companies, but they are still small.

This situation puzzles us because women have been entering the business world in ever-increasing numbers in the past 20 years. So we talked with three very different San Diego women who either are or were CEOs about how they got to the top spot and their advice to other women.

When she was growing up in Brooklyn, N.Y., Gail Naughton never thought that she would end up in business, and “I thought that I would never have children.” Naughton, who has a doctorate in hematology, is the CEO of biotech company Histogen and has three children who are 30, 27 and 22.

Read the rest at UT San Diego.

Read the rest at UT San Diego.

Bill Spooner, chief information officer of Sharp Healthcare, says this vision is starting to be realized today in San Diego as Sharp has already rolled out the first iteration of personal Web portals to some patients. Our city is ground zero for personalized medicine.

Health information technology, or HIT — namely the intersection of information technology, computer science and health care — is an industry in which San Diego has the opportunity to be a game changer, according to a report released by the San Diego Workforce Partnership and University of California San Diego Extension.

However, numerous obstacles and challenges could put a damper on this bright future, the report cautions. The most significant barrier is the lack of standards for the transfer and exchange of patient data, both within an organization, across different organizations and among pieces of equipment.

Read the rest at UTSanDiego.