Postcards

Wealth advice from Arianna's mom

Agapi Stassinopoulos

When I ask powerful women what made them who they are (a question I've asked constantly over the years), they often tell me about their parents and then say, "Oh, my mother...!"

So when I read one mother's take on the topic of wealth, below, it struck a familiar chord. The passage is from Unbinding the Heart, a new book by Agapi Stassinopoulos, Arianna Huffington's sister. I knew a MORE

Will peer pressure help women?

Sheryl Sandberg keeps on giving. Journalistically, that is. Last week, here on Postcards, we riffed on the New York Times profile of Sandberg, whose ambition for young women in business seems to match her ambition for Facebook, where she is COO. That is: Just do it...take over the world.

On Saturday, CNN.com ran a story titled "How to have more Sheryl Sandbergs." The key? "Peer influence," posed the authors, Courtney E. MORE

Startup advice: Find the shortest distance from A to B

Credit: Ana Schechter

The best entrepreneurs see a gap in the market and fill it. Today, the start of Fashion Week in New York, is a good time to share  lessons from Mona Bijoor, who spotted inefficiency in the fashion industry and created a company to fix it. With $2.25 million from Battery Ventures and angel investors, Bijoor, 34, is building an online marketplace for boutiques and brands to buy and MORE

Facebook COO Sandberg's next crusade?

Credit: maryannerussell.com

Sunday brought another glowing profile of Sheryl Sandberg. The Facebook COO, who is No. 12 on Fortune's Most Powerful Women list, is on a PR roll. Though being called "the Justin Bieber of tech" in the New York Times comes close, I think, to jumping the shark image-wise.

The Times article honed in on Sandberg's third "job" besides playing backup to Mark Zuckerberg at Facebook and wife and mother MORE

How Indianapolis won the Super Bowl: a lesson in persuasion

Photo by Peter Bick

When I read in the New York Times last Sunday that Indianapolis won the opportunity to host the Super Bowl by sending a bunch of eighth graders to appeal to NFL team owners across the U.S., I wanted to know more about this tale of masterful persuasion. So I called Allison Melangton. the president and CEO of the Indianapolis Super Bowl Host Committee, and asked her if MORE

Sandberg's Facebook pay places her on top

Who is Facebook's highest-paid executive? Sheryl Sandberg.

The Facebook COO received a base salary of just $300,000 last year, but Sandberg's total comp turned out to be $30.8 million, according to Facebook's pre-IPO filings. Meanwhile, her boss, CEO Mark Zuckerberg, got $500,000 in salary and some $1.5 million in total comp. (Don't feel too sorry for Zuckerberg. The 27-year-old boss owns more than a quarter of the company he co-founded--a stake MORE

Before Google, the Wojcicki girls learned from Mom

Photo by Jack Hutcheson

Her daughter Susan is the most powerful woman at Google (GOOG). Her daughter Anne started 23andMe, a company that dissects your DNA makeup. Her daughter Janet is a PhD anthropologist and epidemiologist.

You have to figure that Esther Wojcicki taught her daughters pretty well.

The mother of Silicon Valley's well-known Wojcicki sisters is, in fact, being honored today, Digital Learning Day, as one of a small group of "great MORE

The money behind Glenn Close's Oscar bid

When I ran into Glenn Close at the Berkshire Hathaway (BRKA) annual meeting last spring, she told me that the movie she had just completed, Albert Nobbs, was one of the most challenging projects of her career.

This morning, Close got an Academy Award nomination for her offbeat role in the film: Close plays a woman posing as a man in order to get a job and survive in nineteenth-century Dublin. MORE

Where the girls aren't: finance...and are? Healthcare

Lisa Suennen is one of the few big-deal venture capitalists in health care. Not that this distinction makes her happy or proud.

Suennen, whose Psilos Group has $577 million under management, would rather see more of her kind in her industry, as she wrote today in a Guest Post on my colleague Dan Primack's Term Sheet. Attending JPMorgan's Healthcare Conference last week in San Francisco, Suennen noticed that only about 10% MORE

Handler and Huffington on managing stress and life

Chelsea Handler showed us a new side of her media brand-ness last night on the premiere of the NBC (CMCSA) sitcom Are You There, Chelsea? The standup comic/late-night TV host/best-selling author/rising-star entrepreneur plays main character Chelsea's pregnant and proper sister on the show.

Let's be clear, this is not Handler's fantasy life. At the Fortune Most Powerful Women Summit in October, Arianna Huffington tried her best to convince Handler of the MORE