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Jodi Turek, President of  The Women's Forum

by Peg Townsend

Jodi Turek has built an important voice and representation for independently owned sites focused on the women's market.

Lots of people would have killed to have Jodi Turek's job as a producer for the Montel Williams talk show.

 She had a great salary, a beautiful office and a wide-open future with a network TV show.

  "I was miserable," Turek says.

  She had come to the job after years of being a TV reporter, of covering stories on breast cancer, homeless women and welfare.

  Williams had been supportive of her approach to do human stories from a seed of hard news, Turek says, but when her first show aired, her heart dropped.

  Her idea had been to do a story on how women make ends meet on welfare.

  "It came out: 'I'm Embarrassed My Mom's On Welfare,'" Turek says.

  "I thought, 'I'm here 18 hours a day and I hate it.'"

  Disillusioned after only a few months, Turek quit.

  Today, the 35-year-old is president of The Women's Forum at womensforum.com, an online partnership of women entrepreneurs which provides information and services to millions of women.

  But back then, the experience was devastating.

  Turek had always had success in whatever she had tried to do.  She had won awards, gotten good grades, was praised for her reporting work. Leaving a job that everyone told her was the brass ring made her feel like she had failed.

  Like lots of women, she says, she blamed herself.

   It took her a few years to realize the truth.

  "Sometimes, things just aren't right for you," she says.

  "That doesn't make you a failure."

  Turek grew up on Staten Island, the daughter of a bagel store owner and a mother, who she says, was a cross between Joan Rivers and Henry Kissinger.  It was a rich, diverse childhood filled with noisy family dinners and playmates whose parents were Jewish, Polish, Russian and Italian Catholic.

  Turek was one of those high school students who got good grades; who never rebelled. "I didn't even know anybody was doing drugs or having sex," she says.

  She excelled at writing and went to Boston University where she couldn't decide whether to be a doctor or a reporter. But a stint working for Michael Dukakis' presidential campaign convinced her that journalism was a profession where she could make a difference.

  She got a job at a local television station.

  "I did everything from cranking the teleprompter to writing the news, to producing it," says Turek, a woman with long, dark hair and wide-set eyes. "Eventually, I became a reporter."

  Stories on issues that affected women were what the Turek loved, and she remembers the Mother's Day she spent in a homeless shelter for a story she had conceived.

  "I remember so clearly that on one side of the street were women in Chanel suits going into the Ritz for tea and across the street were women who were wearing borrowed clothes and living in a shelter," Turek says.

  She sat there, listening to the homeless women's stories and their dreams; hearing the excitement in their voices when they talked about how their son was coming to take them to brunch or how they were going to fix their hair for when their children came to visit.

  "They had such dignity," she says.

  Then came her stint with network TV, followed by jobs as a freelance magazine writer and work at a cancer hospital.

  Turek hadn't even considered a job in high-tech.  In fact, she had never been online until a few months before The Women's Forum was born.

  Turek has no trouble remembering the details of the day it all started.

  It was a Sunday in November, 1996, she says, and Turek and her boyfriend, Mark Kaufman, were curled up on the couch watching a football game on television.

 In between plays, she began to tell him about the websites she had discovered while working at her new marketing job for an Internet startup.

  There was a great site about pregnancy and a food site written by a wonderful chef, she told him.  There was a gardening site and a travel site - all conceived and carried out by women.

  "Mark said, 'there's something here,'" Turek remembers.  "He said, why not put together a network and create a supporting infrastructure to help them grow."

  Turek laughs.

  "I didn't even know what he was talking about."

  But what she did know was that these homespun, women-run sites were fueled by passion and hard work.

  She also knew they offered something other women were seeking.

  Turek wasn't sure what was going to happen, but she spent the next couple of days calling up the women who ran the web sites and talking to them.

  A few days later, she and Mark had the guts of their business.

  "It was a crazy time," Turek says.

  The idea behind The Women's Forum was that linking these small-business sites together with support and advertising would not only provide women with information they needed but would provide a boost to the part-time Web entrepreneurs too.

  "We thought: If everyone shared a little, they would all get more," Turek says.

  Turek spent her days at her regular job and nights working on this new venture.  But she realized that if The Women's Forum was going to fly, she had to devote herself full time to it.

Just like the women she was trying to help, she quit her job and followed her dream.

  "We went on instinct and a lot of hope," Turek says, "and just kept believing that if we helped women turn their Web sites into businesses by supporting them and introducing them to others like them, that they, and we, would survive."

  Their model was in stark contrast to corporate sites fueled by big money - but little heart.

  There wasn't any road maps or directions back then about building an incubator for women's online businesses. But Turek's passion for what she was doing rivaled the women she was trying to help.

  She spent long hours stitching together the quilt of what the Women's Forum would become.    She talked with women entrepreneurs; sought out new sites.

   First there were 13 partner sites.  Then 30.  Then 50.

  Soon, several hundred thousand people were visiting womensforum.com each month.

  Turek and Kaufman knew they were on to something and that if they wanted to grow, they couldn't do everything by themselves.

  They formed relationships with national advertising sponsors and ecommerce partners.  Producers helped the new entrepreneurs with content and business development.  They organized conferences where the budding web businesswomen could share stories and strategies.

   By 2000, they had 90 partners and almost 4 million hits a month.

  The site is a mix of the homespun and hard-hitting, offering everything from new medical technologies for infertile couples to giving tired wardrobes a makeover.

  With profiles, chat and information, it has become the cyber equivalent of what happens whenever a group of women get together.

  Recently, it was named as one of the leaders in the women's online market by Media Matrix.

  "Last year, we realized that in order to make a run for it, we needed to raise some money," says Turek sitting in her San Francisco office dominated by a Sylvia Plath poster that reads: "Sometimes Just Being a Woman is an Act of Courage."

  So, she and Kaufman met with a venture capital group and made their presentation.

  It wasn't polished.  It wasn't sophisticated. But Turek caught their attention.

  "I told them this was completely organic.  That women are building these websites and no fluctuations on Wall Street are going to change that," Turek remembers.

  The company offered them $7 million in venture capital.

  "I almost fainted," Turek says.

  Sitting in her small office, dressed in a knee-length black skirt and royal blue T-shirt - what she calls her "Jodi uniform" -  Turek can look out over the new headquarters of The Women's Forum and see what that November afternoon idea has become.

  She and Kaufman moved from Chicago to this office in San Francisco.  They hired a dozen staffers and set to work upgrading The Women's Forum's site. They bought stakes in some of their partner's sites.

  And next year, they will make their union of ideas and dreams official.

  Turek and Kaufman are getting married.

  It was a partnership that has worked on both levels - the personal and the profitable.

  "Sometimes you really have to not be afraid to fall on your face," Turek says.  "For someone like me who is a perfectionist, that was a hard lesson to learn.

  "You have to listen to other people and go with your gut."

  And, she says, most importantly, don't doubt your instincts and think that because you're not a techie, you can't succeed.

  As their venture began to grow, Turek remembers visiting dot-com companies with huge, bustling offices of 200 or more employees. 

  "I thought, 'oh God, we'll never be able to do this.' I thought they knew something we didn't,'" Turek says.

  But some of those same companies are closed now, while Women's Forum quietly continued on.

  "That was a lesson: Not to be intimidated and to just go for it," Turek says.

  She's learned other lessons too.

  One was that things you do naturally, Turek's ability to connect to people and to have passion for what she does, for instance, can translate into success in business.

  "If you tap into your natural abilities, you'll do better and you'll be happier," Turek says.

  The other lesson was much harder, and Turek's voice grows quiet when she talks about it.

  Over the past few years, two of her closest friends have died: one hit by a drunken driver and another dying of a heart attack.

  She didn't have time to say goodbye to either one.

"I realized what we all face eventually -  that there is no guarantee in life and that today is as good a day as any to make your move, have your say, tell someone you love them or change something you just can't tolerate any longer," Turek says.

  "I don't take things for granted at all."

  When Turek thinks about the success of The Women's Forum, she smiles.

  It's not about money, she says.

  "I get excited when I see changes in our partners' lives.  When women send me emails to tell me they quit their job to do this full time or that they're making more money than their husbands now," she says.

  When someone's passion turns into a job, when women entrepreneurs come together and become a success, when one of their partners goes public - that makes her happy. 

  "I'm proud to see it come all together," she says.

  "I'm proud of them and proud of the company."

A FEW MORE MINUTES WITH JODI TUREK:

TD:If you could have dinner with any two people, living or not, who would they be?

Turek: Sylvia Plath and one of my girlfriends who died last year.  I'd give the world to be able to pull that one off.

TD:What's your favorite quote?

Turek: My mother only said it once, but it was: "Gee Jodi, I think you're right."

TD:If you were to choose a different profession, what would it be?

Turek: Something in the arts - writer, producer, actor, something out in front getting the laughs, the tears, or the tomatoes.

 Peg Townsend is an award winning writer with Central California Newspapers and a contributor to TECHdivas.com   (c) TECHdivas, 2000