Entrepreneur, Mompreneur | featured news

Some families where either the mom or dad decided to stay at home with their kids during the early years have decided against going back to the corporate craziness and instead are choosing entrepreneurship.

Lost among all the buzz about the uber-funded successes of Gilt Groupe, Beautylish and Etsy, three successful online businesses which rely heavily–if not exclusively–on the power of the female click and credit card, is the fact that all three companies were actually founded by men. No, the founding owners were not Alexis Maybank, Mariam Naficy and Maria Thomas, but rather Kevin Ryan, Vu Nguyen and Rob Kalin, respectively.

There is a swelling class of first-time entrepreneurs, and they need help. This class includes, among others, mompreneurs (women who saw business-building as a way to bolster their retirement stash and waning self-esteem from being out of the workforce for years); homepreneurs (recently laid-off cubicle warriors, or just those fed up with their 90-minute commutes); and boomerpreneurs (50- to 70-year-old careerists driven to pursue lifelong dreams while they still have the health and gumption to do it).