Gratitude Monday: Systerhood

Something really serendipitous happened last week. The SVForum, a non-profit that fosters information exchange around the tech industry here in the Valley They Call Silicon, put on a day-long conference Saturday in conjunction with International Women’s Day, which was yesterday. They called it Women in Tech Festival, and it cost $150 to attend.

Well, as you might imagine, that put it out of my reach.

As it happens, I’m a member of several women-in-tech email downloads, most of which are focused on various local areas (DC, Seattle, Bay Area). But one of them, Systers, is run by the Anita Borg Institute (those wonderful people who bring us the Grace Hopper Celebration every year; you may recall that GHC last year was where Microsoft’s CEO Satya Nadella forgot that one of women’s superpowers is their Twitter accounts); that one is global, and there are a lot of very interesting discussions passing across it.

On Tuesday, a Syster from Girls Can Hack announced that she had one free pass to the conference, which she’d give to whichever one of us emailed her first. I didn’t see the announcement until two hours after it had hit the list, and I figured that it had pretty much been snapped up within the first five minutes. But I thought, what the hell; I emailed her, and I forgot about it.

Well, blow me if that evening she didn’t reply telling me I got the pass! I know you don’t want this mental image, but I was doing the happy dance.

And as it happened, it was a great conference—very energizing speakers and panel discussions, fascinating startup pitches, good networking setup and well-planned transitions. I was particularly heartened by the diversity of attendees—more than just ethnicity, there were ages ranging from early 20s to probably 60s and maybe beyond; and way more than software developers. And yes, even a few men.

(I got a particular kick out of one speaker, who dared organizations to distinguish between real innovation and supplying a ping pong table when it comes to corporate culture. Also, the moderator of a panel who described her career path as “directile dysfunction”.)

Plus—and here’s the kind of spooky part—they had a small “trade show” area, where the startups and sponsoring organizations could demo their products. One of the displays was for HP recruiting, since this was held at an HP facility. And so it was that the very first person with whom I chatted was their recruiter, who came to HP with their acquisition of Autonomy, which is one of my target organizations (they do major league actionable data analytics, and I am all about the knowledge management, baby).

She’s got my details, and she said she’d reach out to me this week to make a connection with that division, so fingers crossed…

Well, it was a terrific day all around, and I am profoundly grateful to Girls Can Hack, to Systers and to the serendipity of me sending that email even though I was sure I was spitting into the wind. Sometimes, I guess, the wind turns just as you’re in the act.