Things I Learned Attending My First Geek Girl TechCon
Last month, as part of my internship with Hera Labs, I was fortunate enough to attend Geek Girl TechCon. The event took place at the University of San Diego and the purpose is to connect geeks (especially girl geeks!) to build their skills, attend educational workshops, see and pitch new ideas and connect with other like-minded professionals. Geek Girl brought in many professional speakers that are experts in their field to teach about technology that can advance one’s business.
The mission of this conference is to bring like-minded women together with basis of their talent in technology, in the understanding of an industry that to the world’s eye is a man’s world. I was extremely encouraged to see that 37 of the 47 speakers were women teaching men and women about technology and business. These women have fully embraced the unordinary and know that there will be obstacles ahead but, they are fully capable of conquering them.
With the multitude of breakout seminars available, attendees could learn about coding, marketing, finance, website building and designing, etc. Each class was an hour long; with the speakers trying to get as much depth and perception to their topic in that amount of time because, of course every topic if you went to every aspect and detail could take the whole day. Every topic was interesting and brought something new to the table every hour whether, or not you were taking classes on the same topic or switching up every time.
During these seminars, however, a very important yet different lesson was going on called “Sharkette Tank”. Sharkette Tank is where startup leaders are pitching either a new business or idea that is being placed into action and they need help with either, funding, connections, introductions, and partnerships. This year on Sharkette Tank twelve companies pitched and, at the end of the day, three companies won. These three companies got recognition as successful startups that can be used as leverage for better funding and connections in later on pitches and free consulting with the panel of judges, which our very own CEO, Silvia Mah was on.
This year’s first place winner was Motor Mood, whose innovative product Carmoji is a stick-on, light-up emoji for the back of your car. For example, when a person lets you in on the highway during traffic you usually wave because that is driving etiquette. With Carmoji, now if that happens you can press a button and your emoji will light up as a thank you for the car that let you in. Second and Third place winners were, Neqtr and Hope Bras, respectively, and Honorable Mention went to KidHire.
At the end, it was a successful day of teaching and learning, with brave souls who got up on stage and pitched and completely full of Geek Girls (and some men) from head to toe. Have a wonderful Geek-filled day!
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Josephine Lee is an intern for Hera Labs and originally from Texas. She is fascinated by entrepreneurship and hopes to start her own business one day. Learn more about Josephine by going to her blog, The Young Octavia.
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