The future (of startups) is female

IT isn't every day that you meet a person who intrigues you. Last Sunday, I did - while thumbing through my work e-mail on the go and stumbling on a note from a Christina Teo, founder of Startup Asia Women (SAW), a support group for women in the startup community.

In the e-mail, Ms Teo introduced herself as a tech veteran - having taken on corporate roles at Acer, IBM, DEC, 3COM - and the first general manager of Yahoo! Singapore. She had just returned to Singapore to care for her aged mother, after working abroad for the last 27 years.

And home, interestingly, is where she discovered startups, and an ecosystem that welcomed them. She t…