To be honest, when I reached out to Adriana about starting a chapter of Girls in Tech in Santa Cruz I wasn’t sure what kind of a response I was going to get from the local community. I knew we had a huge pool of talent who commutes over the hill into Silicon Valley every day but wondered if people would be interested in taking more time out of their day to “talk shop”.
The response from the community has been overwhelming. In addition to having a hot line-up of speakers for our events, like Sarah Lacy (TechCrunch, BusinessWeek, and Author of ‘Once You’re Lucky, Twice You’re Good‘), Tina Seelig (Executive Director, Stanford Technology Ventures Program and acclaimed Author), Veronica Belmont (Co-host of Revision3’s tech-centric show, Tekzilla, and Qore on the PlayStation Network) and Girls in Tech’s own lovely Adriana Gascoigne, small businesses and organizations around town have been rallying around us to assist the group with promotion or even venues for our events.
NextSpace, has offered to host our event with Sarah Lacy on April 9th as well as the event with Veronica Belmont on May 13th. NextSpace is an entrepreneurial catalyst located in Santa Cruz, CA. They have a mission to catalyze local talent, local ideas, and local capital to create products, services, and solutions for the global marketplace. They have been such a help in event planning and promoting the cause here in Santa Cruz! If you are working locally and are interested in finding a place to work rather then your second bedroom, check them out.
Bookshop Santa Cruz has also offered to help us organize book signings and has partnered with our local chapter to promote their events as well as ours. Bookshop is the group behind bringing Tina Seelig to Santa Cruz and we are really excited to be working with them on ‘An Evening with Tina Seelig‘ for April 29th as well as additional events in the future
The Santa Cruz Chapter of Girls in Tech has grown to almost 40 members in about a month and I look forward to seeing how high we can take this organization in our community and in the global community of women in tech.
Cheers, Girls!
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