Women 2.0

I have returned from my West Coast adventure! There’s much to report on, namely the Armory tour I mentioned, but first I need to do some serious shout-outs. The impetus for this trip was a conference hosted by a super cool organization called Women 2.0.

Although I am no developer (and believe me, I am positively kicking myself for not taking computer science…), I do indeed work in the tech industry. That means everything you think it means: a geeky, socially awkward workplace with more dudes than ladies and emails that go like this: “Basically, it looks like a slow response from the servers combined with the fact that the ‘maxconn’ for each server is set at 1 causes haproxy to wait until the existing connections are closed before letting the next through which starts causing a mini dogpile at the haproxy.  This in turn causes a timeout by the client in the API servers.”  We also have ping pong tables and unlimited soda and other fun stuff.

This conference was about promoting female entrepreneurs, sharing start-up lessons, and facilitating conversations between start-up founders, funders, and developers. I wish you all had been there, because the speakers were seriously awesome. Follow them, read about them, learn from them:

• Sheila Marcelo – Founder and CEO of Care.com (@smarcelo)
• Leah Busque – Founder and CPO of TaskRabbit (@labusque)
• Robin Chase – Founder and CEO of Zipcar (@rmchase)
• Deena Varshavskaya – Founder and CEO of Wanelo (@siberianfruit)
• Caterina Fake – Co-Founder of Flickr (@caterina)
• Women 2.0 (@women2)

Highlight of my fangirl experience:

I’m going to try to distill some of the mad awesome knowledge they dispensed later this week. There was fascinating stuff about start-up culture, about humanizing vs. dehumanizing technology, pitching strategies, networking, and measuring your impact with proof points. SO MUCH KNOWLEDGE.

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