Top Women in Tech Tell All: Lessons Learned + Strategies for Success

Event Details

This event is sponsored by

According to the latest iteration of CrunchBase's yearly study on female founder representation in U.S.-based startups, only 17 percent of companies had at least one female founder in 2017 — the same percentage found in CrunchBase's first study on the subject in 2009! When it comes to funding, the image is slightly encouraging with women capturing a little more venture capital for their companies last year than in previous  years, as Fortune highlights. On all fronts, female-led startups still have a long way to go. For women not born in the U.S., the road to entrepreneurship is paved with added obstacles.

In honor of Women's History Month and International Women's Day, we're gathering a panel of promising international female founders and VCs to shed light onto — and offer constructive solutions to — the continued lack of representation of women in tech leadership roles. Led by Adriana Gascoigne, founder and CEO of renowned international organisation Girls in Tech, our panelists will discuss the shortage of VC funding going to female-led companies and other unique roadblocks female founders face in tech, share their most effective coping mechanisms and strategies, their advice for women starting their own companies, and more. 

As always, we will open the discussion up to the audience. Please bring your questions for our panelists!

Agenda

5:30 - 6:00 pm | Happy (Half) Hour

6:00 - 6:30 pm | Panel Discussion

6:30 - 7:00 pm | Audience Q&A

7:00 - 7:30 pm | Networking

Registration Required.

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About the Sponsors

Growth Circuit San Francisco offers a comprehensive suite of services to assist Emerging Country Startups research, launch, succeed, and expand in the United States. Growth Circuit offers end-to-end to those promising companies with potential to be highly successful in the U.S. market.

Their mission is to enable and foster the growth of technology startups in Turkey through their accelerator programs in San Francisco, global network, valuable partners, and funding at all stages from Pre-Seed to Series A.

For more information on Growth Circuit, click here.

Spry, the first mobile public relations (PR) network, brings the sharing economy to the public relations industry with a new on-demand platform. The female-founded technology start-up delivers communications services from top PR and journalism talent via the Spry app, and is designed for start-ups, entrepreneurs, big brands, and all marketing teams that want to make their budget work smarter.

Try Spry Today—just download the app and use the promo code ROCKET50 for 50 percent-off all orders in March.

For more information on Spry, click here.

About the Moderator

Adriana Gascoigne

Adriana is the founder and CEO of Girls in Tech (GIT), the world’s first group focusing on Millennial women in technology and entrepreneurship. She created GIT in 2007 because of a crucial need she lacked herself at that time in her tech career — a support framework to help women advance their careers in STEM fields.

Adriana has worked with tech companies like Indiegogo, Involver (Oracle) as an advisor, Change.org, Social Gaming Network (SGN), and Algentis, and has led GIT to where it is today — with 100,000 members in 60 chapters across the world, igniting women in tech movements into countries like India, Kuwait, Nigeria, Chile, and Japan.

Her background includes key executive roles at Ogilvy & Mather, Interpublic Group of Companies and SecondMarket, the largest secondary trading platform.

Adriana is a Singularity University Impact Fellow Scholarship Recipient and holds degrees from the University of California at Davis and El Tecnologico de Monterrey in Aguascalientes, Mexico. She is fluent in Spanish.

About the Panelists

Lisa Tamayo

Lisa serves as CEO for Scollar, bringing over 25 years of experience in financial planning and analysis, strategic planning, business development, and leadership to the company. She has extensive experience in Arts Administration and has worked with the San Francisco Opera Center and Yerba Buena Center for the Arts in San Francisco, as well as Luther Burbank Center for the Arts in Santa Rosa. She was a co-founder of Green Building Studio, Inc., which created a SaaS tool and XML schema to condense weeks of architecture and engineering work into mere minutes, and Green Building Studio, Inc., which was acquired by Autodesk in 2008. Lisa served for five years on the Board of Directors and Program Committee for the North Bay Angels. Lisa holds a BA in Electronic Music and an MBA in Sustainable Enterprise.

Sara Ahmed Holman

At Innovation Endeavors, Sara Ahmed Holman advises portfolio company founders on strategic growth and business development. She also works closely with Fortune500 executives on developing their innovation strategies and finding the most cutting edge technical solutions. Additionally, Sara acts as an advisor and board member to various tech startups in the Bay Area.

Prior to joining Innovation Endeavors, Sara was Associate General Counsel at Lookout, a unicorn cyber security company headquartered in SF. Before that, she was Corporate Counsel for Weebly, an e-commerce and website building platform. Sara started her practice at the international law firm Bryan Cave, where she represented clients of all sizes, including large financial institutions as well as startups in the food, agriculture, and retail spaces.

Prior to entering law, Sara was a Coro Leadership Fellow in New York where she worked on joint ventures between the private and public sectors, including consultancies in the fields of national security, financial services, and politics.

Sara holds a BA from Hampshire College, where she was a Non Satis Scire Scholar, and a JD from UCLA's School of Law. She is a member of California's Standing Food Law Committee, often serves as a legal expert for news outlets, and has authored pieces on laws affecting the global food system, including co-authoring amicus briefs for the Ninth Circuit.

Yumi Alyssa Kimura

Yumi is the CEO and Co-founder of Lead, a San Francisco startup that builds a platform that encourages employee engagement and diversity through AI, leveling the playing field for all employees to advance purely based on their merits. It allows any organization to build an unbiased promotion pipeline through internal mentorship and analytics.

She is also a partner and founding member of Spinnaker Partners, a Tokyo-based international advisory company for venture capital focused on the technology industry. Prior to her current role at Lead, Yumi worked as Meitu's first Country Manager for their Japan market before and during Meitu's $5 billion IPO in 2017 in Hongkong, helped Meitu's app reach 33 percent market penetration amongst Japanese women, and increased revenue eightfold.

As a serial entrepreneur, she started her own translation company, model agency, and real estate business when she was 18 in China, selling her first real estate listing for $4M when she was 20. She graduated from one of the top private colleges in Japan, Kwansei Gakuin University with an LLB (Bachelor of Law) degree. Currently, she is also a committee member of IEEE for AI Ethics.