This is part of Folksonomy's Featured Female Entrepreneur of the Week series of interviews.

Jessica Hardwick is the founder & CEO of SwapThing, Inc. SwapThing harnesses the power of the Internet to provide a new and unique method to barter. They have several meaningful goals to improve the lifestyle of people. They exemplify the true meaning of what Entrepreneurship should be. People are the main priority not money. An inspiring female entrepreneur that would leave me willing to part with my dinner money at any day of the week. Read their blog here.

What is your dream for forming a startup like SwapThing?

SwapThing is all about bartering or swapping which to us is a much more prominent and socially feasible way to get goods.

So one of our dreams at SwapThing is to be truly global and to cross economic barriers and be useful at both ends of the economic spectrum. Part of that dream is to monetize computers so that everyone regardless of economic status can have one.

For example, we can help put a system in every homeless shelter where people can swap their labor skills in exchange for their daily necessities. Essentially, we can help provide a way for people to work their way out of poverty.

SwapThing can then be part of the solution of getting people out of their dire lifestyles into something better.

Other goals we have here at SwapThing are we can help the world in promoting family-to-family swapping with catastrophes like Katrina or something less dramatic like swapping your cleaning services for brand new clothes and shoes.

SwapThing can be used to generate money and meaning by helping people with not just their moments of need but also with their everyday needs. If we can move durable goods up and down the economic chain, we can reduce waste.

The question I ask myself is how do you break the cycle of poverty without possessing the necessary computer skills? I do not feel that this is something that the government/educational system should be solely responsible for but, rather that industry needs to take a hand in creating the next generation workforce.

We see SwapThing’s purpose as doing our part for the industry to better lives by making it possible for people to swap their other skills for learning the essential computer skills. Education and training can help to break the cycle of poverty, and we would love to help lead the charge of business partnering with education at all levels to provide opportunities at all levels.

Having founded two startups, Geek2Chic and now SwapThing, what was the most important lessons you learned about building successful startup companies?

The only thing that matters is the people.

Give your employees the same level of success as you give yourself and they will give you their best.

You must have commitment. That is to say, you must be willing to give up your personal and social lives (for the time being). There needs to be a prioritization of responsibilities Entrepreneurship is NOT a part-time endeavor.

Last but not least, there has to be chemistry with everyone on the team.

What were some of the unique challenges you faced as a female entrepreneur and how did you address them?

Females want to work in an environment where they can make everyone happy. Women have the tendency to want to please everyone and want everybody to like them. So one of the biggest challenges that I faced was understanding that not everyone is going to like you and not everyone is going to be happy.

Another challenge I faced was one with prioritizing my responsibilities. My priorities were first to my service, then to my employees, and finally to my investors (this last one is going to make some people unhappy).

We knew that our service is needed, could be used to help the world, and had to exist in the world. That meant having to sacrifice on things like not making money initially and working in a garage to ensure its success.

Is there any connection between your successes at SwapThing and your educational experience?

ABSOLUTELY! I cannot have created this new market if I did not have the economics background.

It is on this note, that I give high tribute to Milton Friedman. It was his work on free market economics that is the foundation for SwapThing.

We created the mechanism through which people could swap their items, services, knowledge, and virtual goods, but all participants still have the choice on where and how they transact and what the balance is between trading and buying.

Allowing cash instead of using an intermediary currency creates a true free market. I was lucky to have some excellent free market economics professors available to me to help shape my vision for what SwapThing would become.

What words of wisdom or encouragement can you give to female entrepreneurs that are in the midst of growing their startup or are still having ambivalent feelings whether or not to “just do it?

What I can say is that if you are ambivalent about it don’t do it.

The right time to take the entrepreneurship plunge is if the idea won’t leave you alone.
It has to be such a strong desire for existence that it keeps eating at you until you do it.

After Geek2Chic, I didn’t have any plans to do another startup. However, after swapping to save my cats life, I just couldn’t stop thinking about how we needed a market to make swapping easy.

Don’t ever give up. If its not working, figure out what’s wrong and try to fix it.

If you have already built something and you absolutely have to give up, find out if there are people that are interested in what you already have built or try a change of management.

Network but don’t over network. Don’t get me wrong. Networking is vital, but if you are spending more time networking than you are building your product, then you are over-networking.

Don’t burn any bridges. No matter how busy you are, try to make it a point to stay in touch with people. Sometimes, if a business relationship you have isn’t working out, the key for me is being honest and straightforward about the reasons it isn’t working and always leave the door open for working together in the future.

Sometimes you can soften it by introducing them to another company they can work with to create value.

Two other hard rules that work for me is never drink at a business event and never date people in the business world.

Silicon Valley is the center for Entrepreneurship. It is a small world. You will run into people that you know at events like the Women 2.0 events.

For the same reason, if relationships turn sour, you might run into an "ex" at an Entrepreneurship event. Makes it even more worse if your startup has a chance to grow but past relationships got in the way of people working together.

If you can’t support somebody shut up. Negativity doesn’t in anyway make the world a better place. The old adage always holds true that "if you can’t say anything nice, don’t say anything at all."

Web 2.0 is an ecosystem – the more companies that thrive, the higher your chances of succeeding in the ecosystem. But the more people you shoot down, organisms die, and you lose your chances of working together in the future.

In Silicon Valley, we are still living in a male-dominated society so don’t let sexist remarks bother you. While you need to grow a thick-skin, there is no need to suffer in silence. If someone really offends you let them know, privately, and politely. For women to succeed, we need to be vocal and willing to take risks.

The last word of wisdom I’d like to say is “be cheap.” That is, be cost-efficient in the way you spend your money and limited resources. For us that means swapping. Something that every startup should keep in mind to do to conserve cash.

We are proud of the fact that we have swapped for as much value as we have spent cash on, and that has helped us grow on very few resources. Don’t pin everything on getting outside funding, instead get creative about what you can do to grow your business.

For a woman to enter the world of entrepreneurship, what frame of mind or sacrifices need to be made and thought about before taking the plunge?

You need to be willing to give up your entire life. This is how much I believed that SwapThing would be able to help the world in better ways that I gave up my friends and overall social life. I pretty much ate, breathed, and worked SwapThing for four years. I found myself running everything through the filter of SwapThing. I thought about things like "could we work with them," "SwapThing would be the perfect solution for that," or "those people need to know about us."

Message to leave with:

Here at SwapThing, we have a program for non-profits to receive donations for them through what we call a “ShareThing” program.

We also have a “SwapAffiliates” program where different sites can get together based on special hobbies. Niche websites can then form what is known as a “SwapCircle” and affiliate sites can make a commission on the people that use their “SwapCircle” to swap.

Our goal is to monetize and make it easy for everyone in our webspace to setup SwapThing and use it to their advantage. Shared revenue is the best incentive. By monetizing niche sites, we are helping the site owner, the users, and increasing the number of swappers.

"Stay tuned next Tues. for more female inspiration."