Bay Area Girl Geeks Dinner

Lindsay, my only female coworker, and I went to San Francisco for the first Bay Area Girl Geeks dinner on Thursday, January 31st. These dinners were first put together in London and have been spreading around the globe. Angie Chang, of Women 2.0, organized this event and had it sponsored by Google. It was a great party! We were given plenty of space in both an outdoor tent and a lecture hall on the Google campus. They spoiled us with appetizers, sushi, open bar, and schwag!

The night was kicked off with some humor from Ellen Spertus, a research scientist at Google. The panel was moderated by Katherine Barr, a partner at Mohr Davidow Ventures The women on the panel were Leah Culver, Co-Founder and Lead Developer of Pownce; Sumaya Kazi, founder of The Cultural Connect and Sun Microsystem’s Social Media Manager; Irene Au, Google’s Director of User Experience; and Rashmi Sinha, CEO of SlideShare.

More than anything else, I was so impressed with the kindness of everyone I met at the dinner. It seems that San Francisco is a great place to network and people are really available to help each other. The panelists really reinforced relationship building. While they all use a lot of technology, they all rely primarily on personal connections.

After the panel, I met some great women. The ones that stick out in my memory are Erica, because she's my namesake! Plus, she recently sold her hosting business and temporarily retired. She told me she blogs a lot. Wow, I'm SO jealous. How I would love to be able to write all day. I also met Angie Chang, the organizer. She was so nice and very popular! (Do you see the stack of business cards in her hand? Everyone wanted to meet her!)

Finally, Lindsay and I met Arena who is a designer at Pivotal Labs. We had so much to talk about since our companies are in the same space and both using Agile methods. Arena invited us to their office the next day where we had breakfast and spent some time with Edward and Alex talking about Agile. It was a great learning experience! I was so, so impressed with the helpfulness and sharing from everyone at Pivotal. It will be great to see Arena again in March when we're both at SXSW.

Naturally, Lindsay and I took the opportunity for some sightseeing in San Francisco. I haven't been to San Francisco since 1995 when I visited a friend in Oakland. It's such a beautiful city (despite the rain). At the end of the day, we met some of my blogger / SXSW friends for dinner - Kristin, Jessica, and their significant others.

This was the perfect trip to me - a lovely mix of a little work, meeting new people, connecting with old friends, learning new things, and just a dash of sightseeing. Look at the set of all my pictures from San Francisco.

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