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Women Entrepreneurs Have A New BFF And She Is Always There For You

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Some say entrepreneurship is a lonely journey. Others know that those who are successful consult advisors, mentors and sponsors, professionals and peers

Whether you are asking for help during the busiest time of day or in the dead of night, you want someone who is always there for you. You want someone who will never complain if you ask a lot of questions and won’t judge you if your questions seem silly to him or her. That new pal for entrepreneurs is Alice. She has endless patience and wisdom. Like Apple’s Siri, Amazon’s Alexa and Microsoft’s Cortana, Circular Board’s Alice uses artificial intelligence and machine learning. The more questions she is asked, the  smarter she gets and the better Alice gets at answering your questions.

Circular Board is a virtual accelerator and, with help from Dell Technologies and one of its companies, Pivotal, they birthed Alice. Alice connects entrepreneurs with information, mentors, referrals, and other resources from some of the most well regarded sources in the country, including Case Foundation, Dell, Johnson & Johnson, the Kauffman Foundation, the Small Business Administration and Y Combinator.

“I started Circular Board to provide connections and answers which I wish I’d had when starting my business,” said Carolyn Rodz, its co-founder. Coming out of investment banking, she didn’t have the entrepreneurial connections to make her first company (a retail line of high-end gifts that sold at Neiman Marcus, Bloomingdales and Harrod’s) a sucess.

Women’s smaller networks impact the number of firms they start and how big their firms grow. Women are underrepresented as business owners — owning 11.3 million businesses versus men owning 15.5 million businesses, according to American Express’ 2016 State of Women-owned Businesses. The difference in size of business is even more dramatic — the average female-owned business generates $143,000 in revenue and their male counterparts $674,000.

But there was a limit to how many people Rodz could help through the accelerator model. Human capital is finite. Artificial intelligence is infinite. Alice could help millions of entrepreneurs around the world.

While any entrepreneur can use Alice, it is designed to address the ways women learn. “ In general, women like a step-by-step framework,” said Rodz.” They go from A to B and so on. They like working together. Women entrepreneurs like promoting each other. Importantly, they want information from trusted resources.” Men, on the other hand, "start with the big picture then drill down. They are competitive — may the best man win,” she continued.

Alice addresses the biggest pain points of women entrepreneurs such as funding, commented Elizabeth Gore, Dell’s Entrepreneur in Residence. Alice went through extensive user testing to be able to customize answers by stage of company, location and industry.

Why the name “Alice?” “The idea of Alice in Wonderland came up,” says Rodz in Vanity Fair. She feels that Alice’s adventures are reflective of the wild ride entrepreneurs take in order to succeed. The Queen’s comment to Alice encapsulates what entrepreneurship is all about, “I’ve believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast.”

Alice uses a freemium model. Basic service will always be free but, in the future, there will be fees for premium services, such as person-to-person communications and virtual experiences to connect users with experts who can share their expertise and resources.

What questions will you ask Alice?

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