“Build a business that makes you feel happy.”
Simple, and this is the empowering message I took away from the Geek Girls Carrots’ first New York City event, which was organized by Nermine Majzoub, Founder at Petitas and NYC Geek Girls Carrots leade. Twenty-five of New York City’s millennial female aspiring founders gathered for an evening of great advice, delicious hors d’oeuvres and low anxiety networking.
Geek Girls Carrots is a community for women in IT, bringing together female admins, analysts, application architects, developers, graphic designers, IT managers, programmers, social media specialists, and system architects, with women who have startup ideas, computer science students and many more, with the purpose to educating them and inspiring their pursuits.
GGC also want to motivate women to run their own projects and establish new technology related companies.
The topic of the evening was “Authenticity in Business.”
The event opened with a series of lighting pitches; the co-founders of Vidcode, a girls-focused video coding spoke about their product and an upcoming NYC hackathon they will host this spring. Next a group of women in tech spoke with the audience; first up was Ellora Israni, co-founder of She ++ , a professional development conference for women in tech at Stanford University, and who, when she is not diversifying the STEM job market, works as problem solver at Facebook’s New York Office. Pamela Teagarden, Founder of Antheum, a management consultancy firm which uses positive psychology to help business people at all levels to develop their various skills, and Kelly Hoey, an angel Investor, writer and business strategist.
Teagarden and Hoey shared their views on how young women technologists can transition from having a boss to being the boss.
The dominant message was that women need to bring their unique approach to life to drive innovation. Teagarden, who works in the US, Europe and Asia, summed this up when she said, “a white woman from Texas, who lives on three continents sees things differently and that is what companies care about.”
For a full listing of upcoming events for the NYC startup and tech community, please visit the AlleyWatch NYC Tech and Startup Event Calendar.
