Girls In Tech

This weekend, Girls in Tech held our first Annual Retreat in Santa Cruz.  The day was packed full of hands-on learning sessions, starting with a Social Media Boot Camp with JD Lasica, a leading expert on social media and founder of socialmedia.biz.  JD shared best practices for businesses engaging in social media and identified leading campaigns that have been successful.

Photo credit: Seana Norvell

Kristin Schaefer and Bronwyn Saglimbeni got us out of our chairs and led an interactive and powerful Public Speaking Workshop.  Here are a few of the tips and tactics they shared with us on being a good speaker

1. Be a great story-teller and keep it conversational (people love to hear stories!)
2. Pick a person or several people to talk to (engages the audience)
3. Fewer words are more powerful (avoid fillers i.e. um, like, you know, I think…)
4. Use the physical space you have (don’t be rooted to one spot)
5. Keep an open, active, pose and free your hands to express yourself as you talk
6. Be authentic (Who are you and what are you here to do?)

Our keynote speaker was Megan Smith, VP of New Business Development at Google and General Manager of Google.Org.  Megan talked about the power of data and interconnection to change the world.  She gave us several examples including how the connection of data has been used to:

1.)    Track public health issues – Using Google Health, Google is able to see the correlation between the number of searches on a particular health term such as “flu”, and reports from the CDC on flu numbers.
2.)    Power people’s ability to advance civil liberties. (by making information available in countries where the media is tightly controlled)
3.)    Help the environment.  Google .org’s PowerMeter is a free electricity usage monitoring tool that people can use to review their power usage.

In summarizing the trait that has allowed Megan to be amazingly successful in her career, her good friend, David Hoffman, volunteered that “When faced with challenges, she believes there has to be a way.”

After the keynote, Gina Bauman and Elizabeth Weil of Institutional Venture Partners gave us a quick overview of the venture capital space.  And to close out the day Priya Ganapati sat down with Plantronics’ VP of Innovation, Joyce Shimizu.  Joyce shared the following tips on being a successful leader:

1.)    Be responsive to Change
2.)    Learn how to fly the plane, as well as land it (be able to set the 30,000 ft vision)
3.)    For work life/balance: Keep a short list of priorities, and enjoy the journey, don’t just concentrate on the destination.

Big thanks to all of our amazing speakers and to Seana Norvell, Managing Director of our Santa Cruz chapter, for organized an awesome first annual GIT retreat.