"No men will be allowed in the room."

It was sort of like this, but way lovelier.

This weekend there was an enormous meeting of the minds between West Coast and East Coast women, focusing on growing entrepreneurship opportunities and encouraging venture capitalism among women. Called together by business champions Ms. Perry Piscione and Janet Hanson, 100 women sat across from one another and talked possibility.

I haven't quite mastered how to format links and references, so below is an excerpt from the NYT article. This event is incredibly exciting to me - not only because I will probably be seeking investors for a new company within a year but because this weekend, in Menlo Park, California, there was a room full of female role models for me to look to. Possibility abounds.

"Ms. Perry Piscione sees West Coast businesswomen opening their Rolodexes and, perhaps more important, their wallets for one another, and she says she believes their East Coast counterparts have something to learn. “There are all of these women who made tons of money and now are not doing anything with it,” she said. East Coast women may have attended top business schools and reached the apex of corporate America, but Ms. Perry Piscione said, "they’re not making their mark.” They are losing relevance, she said, in the “new economy.”

With that in mind, she has joined with Janet Hanson, the former Goldman Sachs and Lehman Brothers executive who founded 85 Broads, a global network of professional women, to organize what they are calling “Alley to the Valley,” an invitation-only event this week for 50 women. Twenty-five self-made women from the East Coast, many with net worths of more than $100 million, are traveling to the Rosewood Hotel on Sand Hill Road in Menlo Park, Calif., the heart of Silicon Valley, to meet with 25 of their West Coast counterparts and talk about thinking and investing more entrepreneurially. The event begins Thursday night with a kickoff dinner at the Atherton, Calif., home of Linda Law, the founding partner of Law & Associates, a real estate development company, and an active investor in start-ups.

Sheryl Sandberg, the chief operating officer of Facebook, will deliver the keynote speech to a group that is expected to include Theresia Gouw Ranzetta, a partner at Accel Partners, and Sue Siegel, a partner at Mohr Davidow Ventures, both of whom were entrepreneurs before becoming venture capitalists. Among those Ms. Hanson has invited from the East Coast are Barbara Byrne, who is a vice chairwoman of Barclays Capital and was vice chairwoman of Lehman Brothers; Maria Cirino, who was a successful serial entrepreneur before becoming a co-founder of .406 Ventures in Boston; and Pauline Brown, who recently resigned as a managing director at the Carlyle Group, a private equity firm, to pursue entrepreneurial and socially oriented projects. No men will be allowed in the room." (NYT 11/10/10)