After spending years training as an opera singer, including a stint at Julliard, Michele Serro started a new career. Leaving the world of ornate costumes, librettos, and Mozart behind, she jumped into advertising and design. Just when she was getting acclimated to life as a Associate Partner at the innovative design firm IDEO, Michele switched [...]

When I graduated from college, I certainly thought of myself as a grown-up (in fact, I had decided I fit into that category about two seconds after graduating from high school). What I didn’t realize then is that there is a LOT of growing up that takes place in the first few years after leaving college. That’s where Bridget Lappert and her site BrokeButBougie.com come in. We got to chat with the 21-year-old entrepreneur about how she got her start, the challenges of owning a business, and whether it’s tough to get respect from the business world as a very young woman.

Aly Racer has an incredible pedigree in digital media, working for companies like The New York Times and Daily Candy before deciding to strike out on her own with a new social platform called Memmee. We got to chat with her about the process of forming her own startup, how she sees social sharing evolving, and her own best practices for sharing personal information online.

How did Sonia Sahney Nagar go from an engineer working for a big firm to creating Pickie, a personal shopping app that just netted $1 million in venture capital funding?

The Tory Burch Foundation hosted a select group of women entrepreneurs Monday morning in New York City to present their for-profit social ventures to 11 angel investorsfor the 2013 NYC Pipeline Fellowship Pitch Summit.

Seems you can’t throw a stone these days without hitting yet another study that claims women don’t like doing startups. But a new report from the National Women’s Business Council shows that women entrepreneurs may be gaining more traction than we thought.

Washington Post small business expert Olga Khazan explains why she thinks developing economies have a greater proportion of female entrepreneurs: “The good news? At least more women aren’t starting businesses out of desperation. Necessity pushes more women into entrepreneurship in less-developed economies, and it becomes less of a motivator as economies grow. In the most developed economies, most women start businesses because they recognize opportunities.”

Walking into the pink and orange prepster heaven that is the Tory Burch headquarters in Manhattan Thursday night, you might have thought you’d stumbled into a fashion industry insiders’ cabal. In one corner of the room was the meticulously appointed J. Crew CEO Mickey Drexler. In another, makeup guru Bobbi Brown, charming guests with plain-spoken industry wisdom.

You’d think it was the meeting of an insider’s club. That is, until you noticed the army of women toting wheelie luggage, who had travelled from both near and far to glean wisdom from the dozen or so business icons in the room. Because this was no fashionista playground; it was just the latest of Tory Burch’s efforts to help put more women in business.

What can we expect from women entrepreneurs in 2012? Well, a lot, we’d think. But for concrete answers we turned to Rachel Sklar, an expert on all things start-up (she’s an adviser to several, including Hashable, Lover.ly and The Daily Muse) and a longtime Mediaite Editor-at-Large.

We sat down with Sklar to get the dirt on her own organization, Change the Ratio, which promotes women in business, and to get her insight on how women entrepreneurs can win.