Tag: Women in Tech

On International Women’s Day 2014, Sarah Moran sat down with the women who would become her fellow Girl Geek Academy co-founders to lament the state of hackathons—events, which can go on for days, focused on bringing tech minds together to build products, launch apps, and engage in collaborative computer programming.

We all know the stats around women entrepreneurs are a mixed bag. Access to capital remains a significant barrier, with just 2% of venture capital going to woman-led companies in 2017. The data is even worse for women of color. However, women are starting businesses at a higher rate than ever, and they have a $3 trillion economic impact in the U.S. alone.

“I’m actually an unusual tech co-founder,” Polina Montano says. And it’s true: while Montano’s isn’t exactly a rags-to-riches story, it is a gas-stations-to-striking-tech-gold story. Coming from a retail background, Montano was a small business owner for most of her life—starting with a fashion store and moving up to a chain of gas stations—before the inspiration for Job Today struck. In fact, Montano says, she started pondering the concept of Job Today in earnest thanks her hands-on gas station experience

For a deeper dive into the world of design startups, we are featuring Canva, Figma, and InVision as our hot startups of the month.

Looking to democratize design for everyone, Melanie Perkins co-founded Canva in 2014 to reimagine design for the Internet age.

As part of the Diversity Series organized by the Amazon Web Services We Power Tech program, AWS Technical Evangelist Tara Walker led a panel at re:Invent 2017 to discuss how best to champion diversity and inclusion in tech.

Honesty is the name of game for Ruth Penford, the director of talent acquisition for Shazam. In fact, Penford believes honesty is so critical for recruiting, the first thing she did after joining the music sharing startup was to invite in a group of consultants to ask current employees about how they felt about the company.

2017 has been a great year for Kathryn Petralia. In the past twelve months, Kabbage, the financial services and small loan company she co-founded with Rob Frohwein nine years ago, raised $250 million from Softbank.

As the CEO and co-founder of Peanut, a social networking app for new mothers, Michelle Kennedy knows a thing or two about growing a company from scratch.