By L. A. Chung
Mercury News

What happens when a New York media organization specializing in “women’s news'’ wants to make its first West Coast foray to meet supporters? It gets Margarita Quihuis, Silicon Valley venture capitalist, to make the introduction.

“In many parts of the world the news, `It’s a girl!’ is met with disappointment,'’ Quihuis said to guests at the evening reception honoring Bay Area women in San Francisco Thursday night. She said the reason she joined the board of the non-profit online news service, Women’s eNews, was that it provides the opportunity to put issues overlooked by other media on the national agenda.

“We can’t solve problems unless we know they exist, we can’t manage what we don’t know, we can’t solve what we don’t know,'’ she said, sounding for a moment like the Stanford engineer she was trained to be.

Fostering entrepreneurs

Quihuis sees connections between the work of the news service and the work that has interested her in the past several years — private equity, incubation, wealth creation, and now international development. Quihuis is a Stanford-educated petroleum engineer and a venture capitalist, the first in her working-class Mexican-American family to go to college.

As the founding director of the Women’s Technology Cluster, she helped female entrepreneurs raise capital. Now a Reuters Digital Vision Fellow at Stanford, she is developing a project to foster entrepreneurship with the profits generated by remittance services — patronized by Mexican immigrants who send money home.

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