Girl Geeks Unite!

A few hundred girl geeks and their dates attended the first Bay Area Girl Geek Dinner, organized by Angie Chang (one of the founders of Women 2.0) and sponsored by Google. I had recovered from my cold enough to go by the ABI office for a couple of meetings and to pick up some flyers and GHC posters. Took a quick nap at home and hopped over to Google for the event. I thought it went very well. Because it was raining the reception was held in a big tent with a bar, lots of food, and great swag: Google/GGD mugs:



I got to catch up with some of the gals I'd met at She's Geeky. Mary Trigiani told me about foldier, the cool startup she's working with. We also talked with Susan Mernit about the challenges at Yahoo with a large layoff looming. It brought back many memories of layoffs I've managed through.

The program itself was pretty good. Ellen Spertus kicked us off with her top 10 reasons why it's great to be a girl geek. There was a panel on building reputation and credibility. The moderator was Katherine Barr, with panelists Irene Au (Director of User Experience at Google), Rashmi Sinha (CEO of SlideShare), Leah Culver (cofounder of Pownce), Sumaya Kazi (founder of The CulturalConnect). As far as geekdom goes, Ellen and Leah have the highest geek cred but the panel was interesting and there was a lively enough Q&A session.