Girl Geeks Inspire

By Alex Ho 

The Bay Area Girl Geek Dinner took place at the Google headquarters in Mountain View on a cold rainy day but still managed to attract a huge crowd of attendees. The successful event was organized by Angie Chang of Women 2.0 and brought together five successful entrepreneurs/professionals for an inspirational panel to discuss building credibility and reputation in technology and business. The event attracted a broad audience from all industries as well as college students and provided a night of food, drinks and socializing.

The event hopefully inspired the people in attendance as the members of the panel discussed how to succeed in achieving your goals by using resources such as networking, blogs, education, and social networks. My highlight of the night was when Sumaya Kazi asked how many people in the audience knew of and have been to a Lunch 2.0 event and not many people raised their hands. She then went on to explain the idea of Lunch 2.0 and many people heard about this for the first time. So obviously this was not your typical techie crowd. Another highlight was the discussion of how being a girl geek can be both used as a way of meeting guy geeks as well as attracting guy geeks whether for business or for leisure.

Featured Speakers:
Katherine Barr (moderator), Partner, Mohr Davidow Ventures
Leah Culver, Lead Developer & Co-Founder, Pownce
Sumaya Kazi, Entrepreneur & Social Media Manager, Sun Microsystems and founder of TheCulturalConnect.com
Irene Au, Director of User Experience, Google
Rashmi Sinha, CEO, SlideShare

Opening Speaker:
Ellen Spertus, Research Scientist, Google

Event Curator:
Angie Chang, Co-Founder, Women 2.0

 
Angie Chang, the event curator watching on.

Ellen Spertus, of Google opening the event wearing the corset in which she won the Sexiest Geek Alive pageant in 2001.

Full Flickr set here