By Kimberley Campbell, Head of Communications at Pioneers Festival
Dear ladies, we would love to have some of the BG community represented in Vienna at Pioneers so if anyone would like to experience a tech festival unlike any other, please email Candy (candy.behunin@starteurope.at) as we are giving away 4 tickets to whoever responds first. See you soon!
Women have more to offer than office management and baking cakes: Be aware of the Pioneers Festival women
Pioneers Festival – The #1 event for the start-up world, will open the doors of the Hofburg Imperial Palace in Vienna from 29th to 31st of October and is gathering 2500 international participants, 60 world class speakers and the crème de la crème of 50 start-ups selected from over 850 applications. The Pioneers Festival is like no other conference you have attended. The Conference Days are a mixture between discussions, speeches and interactive workshops with topics ranging between entrepreneurship, innovation and technology, while also infusing a Festival feeling by blending in local and international focus events, entertainment, extreme sports sessions, gaming and a huge Halloween closing party. It´s just a different kind of tech event!
Yes, this is all true and fabulous, but today I would like to highlight a different reason why Pioneers Festival is just a different kind of tech event: The women who will be at the Pioneers Festival! Even if numbers of women are considerably less than men and it feels like there is still an unbreakable glass ceiling for females in tech events, there could be no better a perfect moment to honor our independent female entrepreneurial community!
- Female speakers at the Pioneers Festival
Looking through our speakers portfolio, it´s not a big surprise that most of them are men. From 60 speakers only four women can be seen. However, those females are strong leaders in their backgrounds and frankly, we think they kick ass!
Esther Dyson, an influential venture capitalist, Terese will showcase the invisible bicycle helmet,Colette Ballou, the founder of Ballou PR and Ayelet, founder of Blonde 2.0
- Female top 50 start-ups at the Pioneers Festival
We received over 850 applications from all over the world! It´s amazing to see how global and diversified the power and belief behind starting your own idea is - an external jury picked the 50 most promising start-up teams. From each participating team, let’s meet a couple girls behind these future-oriented start-ups:
Caterina: X&Y Genomics, Anna: Omyconf!, Maria and Oksana: MirrorBird LLC, Stefanie:Gabi, Ekaterina: Toyemic, Sara: Honestly, Raquel: PanamNav, Nell: Poikos, Genna: TaDaweb,Ivvet: Richseam
With so much incredible girl power, even the Spice Girls would be jealous. The STARTeurope team is a young team of 22 people, mostly comprised of students and of course, a heavy influence of males. But - the girls are slowly taking over! So who are the female hearts in the STARTeurope team, who have much more to offer, than office management and baking birthday cupcakes for team members?
- Female organizers at the Pioneers Festival
Henrietta, responsible for speakers, Laura, our “travel agent”, Miriam, organizes the Hackathon & student communication, Christine, helps with PR and press issues, Nathalie, event manager and has stunning design skills, Maria, our start-up and Pioneers Challenge angel and myself, responsible for all kinds of communication. After I have been the only girl in the team for quite a while, I feel very happy to now have super intelligent female support.
Go Female tech power! I have come to the conclusion that this is much more than I thought it would or could be. The sky is the limit and sooner or later, we girls will break that freakin´ glass ceiling. Now it´s up to you: Pack your bags and get yourself ready for the beautiful opportunities that await for you in Vienna, because we are offering four free tickets for women who want to experience the one and only, Pioneers Festival!
