Last Wednesday’s New Tech Seattle “Women in Tech” event had over 400 attendees. It wasn’t as large as our University of Washington events that hosts nearly 1,000 attendees, but we packed the house to capacity at galvanize Seattle last week for the first time since we moved back to Pioneer Square.
This community made it a lot of fun and brought together a beautifully diverse crowd (see photos below and on our Meetup page). Thank you!
We’ll be having our first New Tech Eastside “Women in Tech” event on March 17th in Bellevue, and later this year we’ll have “Diversity in Tech” events in Seattle and Bellevue to support efforts to make technology careers, education and startup funding more inclusive.
Seeing so many new faces at New Tech Seattle among the people there to promote and support women in tech is the obvious positive outcome of last week’s event. On the flipside, and just as important, the feedback that we also received about the event – both positive and negative, gave us some things to work on so New Tech Northwest events continue to improve.
A couple of people emailed me, and there was an active discussion on our Slack channel the day after the event, about the “Women in Tech” event having too many brand pitches and not enough opportunities to learn.
Your honest feedback is important in helping us to keep New Tech Northwest events valuable and relevant to the community. Bringing the entire tech community together (startups, enterprise, investors, vendors, recruiters, nonprofits, etc.) in one monthly event can be an interesting balancing act. We do our best, and we know that can always do better.
Based on last week’s feedback we’ve already updated our format to shorten and break up the sponsor welcome section into two parts of the show so it is not so overwhelming, but gives our sponsors a way to introduce themselves to the community. We have also updated our presenter prep guidelines so we are better able to help them focus their presentations on being more about the technology behind their platform, how it’s helping them solve problems – as well as lessons learned/best practices and insights and where their companies are heading and what they seek from the community.
Our mission is to assist you in growing your tech careers and companies and expand awareness of tech-related issues and trends through New Tech Northwest connections, conversations and presentations.
A primary goal of New Tech Northwest is to celebrate the presenting companies for creating ingenious and innovative Northwest-based tech companies and products. In turn, the presenters are there to inspire you to go create for yourself – or join a team that motivates you.
Beyond this we’re about giving first to everyone, especially the greater Northwest community and culture that makes all of this possible.
New Tech Northwest is the big tent for our greater tech community. While we can’t adopt every suggestion we receive, we want to hear them and make changes when multiple people share similar feedback. That can only happen when we hear from you!
THANK YOU, to all of the people who’ve shared your favorite parts of our events – as well as telling us the things that you’d like to see changed so that you will walk away feeling you made some good connections and learned something of value.
We want us all to be sharing like neighbors at a block party and leaving New Tech Northwest events feeling uplifted from our conversations and experiences.
Also, don’t forget that on Thurs, Feb 25 Seattle Women in Tech is hosting “In Their Own Words: Stories of Underrepresented Voices in Tech” from 6:30 – 8:30 pm at WeWork in Seattle.
Together, we’ll keep making our tech community better and better.
See you on Slack and around town.
