Podcasts about code first girls

Can Diversity Drive Profitability? Zopa Bank's Formula for Success

Co-founder Emma Harvey shares her inspiring story about how she went from being a science teacher before children to navigating a thriving career in tech between school runs since.Emma kindly shares how family loss during pregnancy gave her a new perspective on life and that having a sick infant was the catalyst for making a drastic change to her career.From starting her professional career with a PhD, Emma discusses how the decision to retrain with Code First Girls gave her the confidence boost she needed to move into a new career in tech.

Welcome our first guest of 2024, Alison Noon-Jones, Vice President and HR Director at Leidos. Alison shares the fantastic work Leidos does, from border control and supporting the frontline to how Leidos supports their employees. We discuss the importance of creativity and soft skills in tech careers, as well as the significance of continuous learning and mentorship.Listen to the full interview to learn more about the world of technology and the multifaceted aspects of career growth.To learn more about Code First Girls, and how we've taught 200,000 women to code visit our website: https://codefirstgirls.com/ Follow our channel for more: https://www.youtube.com/@CodeFirstGirls1/ #CodeFirstGirls #REPRESENT #WomenInTech #Technology #DiversityandInclusion

Dive into our recent conversation with Katie Gaffney, Vice President, EMEA Tech Regional Leadership at Goldman Sachs, we delve into Katie's fascinating background, from her childhood fascination with technology to her leadership role in finance. Check out the interview to learn:

In this episode of AlchemistX Innovators Inside, host Ian Bergman welcomes Amali de Alwis, a dynamic professional with a rich background in technology and innovation. Amali, known for her roles as CEO at Climate and Data Accelerator Subak, Managing Director at Microsoft for Startups UK, and CEO of Code First: Girls, shares her unique journey from a curious child fascinated with building and fairness to becoming a serial entrepreneur and influential leader in the tech world. The episode traverses through Amali's diverse career path, from engineering to shoe design, leading her to discover her true passion in the principles behind design and research. This shift marked the onset of her innovation journey, heavily focused on understanding the dynamics of the world and aiding brands in crafting relevant products and services. Amali's role in the tech industry was deeply influenced by her geeky side and her initial foray into software engineering. Ian and Amali discuss the sense of restlessness often experienced by individuals in large organizations, underscoring that such feelings, while challenging, can lead to significant scale and impact when effectively harnessed. The conversation then highlights Amali's impactful work with Code First: Girls, an organization she founded to bridge the gender gap in technology education. Amali shares the organization's growth, teaching over 40,000 young women to code, and its role in empowering women to enter the tech industry. Exploring the concept of innovation beyond technology, Amali reflects on her time in shoe design, emphasizing the crucial role of understanding how products interact with people, which is key to innovation in any field. The discussion also covers Amali's time at Subak, where she focused on climate data acceleration and the collective fight against climate change, highlighting the need for data sharing and collaborative problem-solving. Delving deeper, Amali discusses the intersection of innovation, fairness, and the drive to make a difference, citing examples from various organizations addressing critical issues like climate action and decarbonization.  The conversation also touches upon how income inequality and the pursuit of profit can conflict with fairness, yet underscores that innovation can still lead to a fairer world. This episode of AlchemistX Innovators Inside offers a deep dive into the complexities of innovation, fairness, and the impact of technology on society, providing valuable insights for aspiring entrepreneurs and innovators alike. Full show notes and resources at https://www.alchemistaccelerator.com/podcasts --- Send in a voice message: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/alchemistinnovatorsinside/message

Welcome our new guest Evie Dineva, Group Head of Data Engineering and Data Science at Gymshark. Evie shares her journey to Gymshark and what drew her to the team's culture. Discover how Gymshark's tech and data teams thrive on principles like innovation, collaboration, and a garage mentality.The interview highlights:

#REPRESENT is back with a new guest, Christina Scott, Chief Product and Technology Officer at OVO. Over the next thirty minutes, we talk about sustainable ways to be energy efficient from doing your washing at 4 a.m. to using solar panels to charge your car! But most importantly, we talk about how we as a nation can help to reach our Netzero targets.Christina hails from a mechanical engineering background, so she's not only an expert on what happens inside the drawing room but also on-site - whilst also being a super-mum to her children. We also get an insight into OVO's initiatives and why they have been promoted as the best place to work for all women! If you're interested in sustainable tech and working in the energy sector this is the episode for you!Our interview highlights:

Exciting times ahead in banking! We had the pleasure of sitting down with Usha Newland, CIO of Customer Care at Barclays. We delve into the evolving landscape of technology and finance. Usha shares her insights on transforming the banking experience and the future of AI.  Usha's journey also underlines the tech field's dynamic nature. She's a firm advocate for continual learning, urging you to be bold, question the norms, and ride the waves of innovation. Whether you're a seasoned pro or a newbie, her message resonates: curiosity and innovation are the keys to staying at the forefront of the tech game.If you're interested in working in the banking sector, this is the episode for you!Our interview highlights:

We were lucky enough to sit down with National Grid's Chief Information and Digital Officer Sarah Milton-Hunt. As the UK continues the fight against global warming, National Grid is at the centre of decarbonizing the power system. What is Sarah's perspective on future technology and how it will help us achieve NetZero? We find out.As a seasoned technology leader, we ask Sarah how diversity in tech teams can be a superpower. She discusses transformational leadership and the environment she has found helps her team to feel psychologically safe, unfearful to fail and truly innovative. If you're interested in sustainable tech, working in the energy sector and Sarah's journey to becoming CDIO, this is the episode for you!Our interview highlights:

In the second part of Greg's conversation with Alice Bentinck, the co-founder of Entrepreneur First, they dive deeper into the topic of diversity and inclusion in the tech industry. Alice shares her vision and mission behind Code First: Girls, a not-for-profit organization that has taught 30,000 women to code for free while they were at university. She explains why diversity is not only a moral imperative but also a strategic advantage for startups and investors. She also reveals the simple fact that every founder needs to understand to succeed in the competitive and fast-changing world of technology. If you missed the first part of our interview, where Alice talks about how to be a founder and her new book “How to Be a Founder”, make sure to check it out. And don't forget to subscribe to the Startup Science Podcast for more inspiring and informative episodes with the best minds in tech.

Read the full transcript here. What are "variance-amplifying" and "variance-dampening" institutions? Has the world been getting weirder recently? Should entrepreneurs aim for variance amplification or variance dampening? What percentage of people should be entrepreneurs? What traits and skills are necessary for successful entrepreneurship? How has ambition changed over the course of history? How can entrepreneurs know if they're really changing the world, or just doing something slightly before someone else did it, or just doing something that would have happened anyway? How can entrepreneurs avoid getting mired in "tar pit" ideas?Matt Clifford MBE is cofounder and CEO of Entrepreneur First, the leading technology company builder that invests in top technical individuals to help them build world-class deep technology startups from scratch in six locations across Europe, Asia, and Canada. Since 2011, Entrepreneur First has created over 500 startups worth over $10bn including Magic Pony Technology, Tractable, and CloudNC. Matt is also Chairman of the UK's new Advanced Research and Invention Agency (ARIA), which aims to enable exceptional scientists and researchers to identify and fund transformational research that leads to new technologies, discoveries, products, and services. Matt sits on the board of Code First Girls, which he co-founded in 2013 to teach young women how to code, and is a member of the Innovate UK Council. Matt started his career at McKinsey & Co. and holds degrees from Cambridge and MIT, where he was a Kennedy Scholar. He was awarded an MBE for services to business in the 2016 Queen's Birthday Honours. Follow him on Twitter, interact with him on LinkedIn, or learn more about his work at Entrepreneur First.[Read more]

Nadia Odunayo is the Founder and CEO of The StoryGraph, a new website and app for avid book readers because life's too short for a book you're not in the mood for. The StoryGraph helps you track your reading and choose your next book based on your mood, favorite topics, and themes. Victoria talks to Nadia about coming up with a product based on the concept of mood, what you're in the mood for to read, i.e., this book made me feel this way. How do I find a book that makes me feel similar? They also talk about keeping yourself open to feedback, the ability to flow and change direction, and developing a reviewing system that keeps biases in check. StoryGraph (https://thestorygraph.com/) Follow StoryGraph on LinkedIn (https://www.linkedin.com/company/the-storygraph-limited/), Instagram (https://www.instagram.com/the.storygraph/), or Twitter (https://twitter.com/thestorygraph). Follow Nadia Odunayo on LinkedIn (https://www.linkedin.com/in/nodunayo/) or Twitter (https://twitter.com/nodunayo). Follow thoughtbot on Twitter (https://twitter.com/thoughtbot) or LinkedIn (https://www.linkedin.com/company/150727/). Become a Sponsor (https://thoughtbot.com/sponsorship) of Giant Robots! Transcript: VICTORIA: This is The Giant Robots Smashing Into Other Giant Robots Podcast, where we explore the design, development, and business of great products. I'm your host, Victoria Guido. And with me today is Nadia Odunayo, Founder and CEO of StoryGraph, a new website and app for avid book readers because life's too short for a book you're not in the mood for. StoryGraph helps you track your reading and choose your next book based on your mood and your favorite topics and themes. Nadia, thank you for joining me. NADIA: Thank you for having me. VICTORIA: And you are a repeat guest at Giant Robots. But for those who missed that episode, tell me a little bit about your journey. And how did this all get started? NADIA: Okay. Yeah, so that first time was in 2015, and that was not too long after I had just got into tech. I did a bootcamp in London in 2014, Makers Academy, and that's where I learned to code. My degree was in philosophy, politics, and economics, so rather different. I worked at Pivotal for about a year and a half after I graduated from Makers Academy. And during my time at Pivotal, I got into conference speaking, and my first talk was around game theory. So I took my favorite topic in economics, game theory, and I combined that with distributed systems because that's what I was working on at the time in Pivotal on their Cloud Foundry PaaS. I think I gave it at RailsConf, and I think someone there recommended me to Giant Robots. And so Ben Orenstein interviewed me, and it was all about different types of conference talks and that kind of thing. So after Pivotal, I left and started a hybrid kind of consultancy/product company with a colleague, did that for about a year, left that, worked for about a year with my friend, Saron Yitbarek, on her company CodeNewbie. And then, when that partnership ended, I essentially had five years of runway from money that I got from the company that I started after Pivotal because we did some consulting with a bank. I'd always been entrepreneurial. I'd been doing various entrepreneurial things since secondary school, actually, high school. It was time for me to just have time on my side projects. And so I started hacking away on one of my side projects at the beginning of 2019 in January, and I haven't stopped since. That's what the StoryGraph has developed into. VICTORIA: Wonderful. And yes, I saw that the very early stages of StoryGraph started as a creative writing e-publication. Is that right? NADIA: So what happened was when I was at university, I started a creative writing e-publication, came up with the name The StoryGraph. Because we had won or we were going for some grant funding or something like that, I set up a corporate entity. And when I stopped working on that e-publication, I remember my mom saying to me, "Don't shut down the entity. I really like the name. I feel like you'll use it for something," that was in 2012. And so fast forward to 2019, and the side project that I was working on was called Read Lists. And it was very specifically focused on tracking and sharing progress through reading lists on a dashboard. But when I was doing customer research, and the scope of the project grew, Read Lists didn't fit anymore. And that's when I realized, oh, I can use The StoryGraph thing again. And so it's basically had two different lives or two different forms, the StoryGraph company. VICTORIA: That's wonderful. And I'm reading about StoryGraph and how it's an Amazon-free alternative to Goodreads. Can you talk a little bit more about the product and why people would want to use it? NADIA: So, as I said, it started life as a very specific focused side project. And I just had so much fun working on it and working in the book space. I'd always been a reader since I was a kid such that I said to myself, I need to find a way to make me building a books product a full-time thing. And so that's when customer research came in because the only way that you're going to make sure that you don't build something that people don't want is by talking to people. As I was doing customer research and figuring out, are there pain points amongst readers, people who track their reading? What would happen was the pain points that came up drove me towards building a more fully fledged reading, tracking, and recommendations product. It actually started as a very focused recommendations product. And then, we got to the point where we needed to build more around it for it to be a compelling product. And as it was growing, we never advertised ourselves as a Goodreads alternative or as an Amazon-free alternative to what was out there. But that was clearly a pain point in the market. There were tweets about us saying, "Finally a Goodreads alternative. It's small; it's independent; it's Amazon-free. And so thousands and thousands, hundreds of thousands of people have come to us because of that. VICTORIA: Wow. NADIA: And so it got to the point...mainly when we launched our payment plan, and we were trying to figure out the reasons why people were pre-ordering the plan, it was at that point where we decided to lean into the Amazon-free Goodreads alternative because that was what the market wanted. VICTORIA: Was that surprising for you? Or were there other things that came out of your research on your marketplace that kind of were different than what you thought it would be going in? NADIA: I think the most interesting thing about the product development journey was that I at least originally felt like I was building a product that wasn't for me. So what I mean by that is in my earliest rounds of research, what I was finding was that people still didn't think that they had one place to get consistently good book recommendations. And so then I started to explore, well, how do you even give somebody consistently good book recommendations? And one of the factors that kept on coming up was this concept of mood, what you're in the mood for. This book made me feel this way. How do I find a book that makes me feel similar? And so it got to the point where I said to myself, oh wow, I'm building a product for mood readers right now; that seems to be the gap, that seems to be the thing that nothing out there yet had properly attacked. And I had never considered myself a mood reader. I just thought I'm a planner. I'm an organized person. I typically decide what book I want to read, and then I read it. And so there was a point where I was concerned, and I thought, wait, am I now building something that is not for me? But then, as I started to work and do more research and talk to more and more people and thinking about my reading experiences, I developed the hypothesis or the viewpoint rather that I think everybody's a mood reader; it's just the scale. Because there are probably some books that I may have rated lowly in the past that if I had read it in a different frame of mind, or at a different time in my life, different circumstance, it probably would have resonated with me a lot more. Now, that's not to say that's true for every single book. There are some books that are just not going to work for you, no matter what. But I do think we're all on the scale of mood reading. And sometimes we say a book is a bad book, but we just read it at not the right time. And so I think the most surprising thing for me is going on that journey of realizing that, oh, I am a mood reader too. VICTORIA: [laughs] NADIA: And I ended up building an app that's a lot less focused on just the pure ratings. I was someone who, on Goodreads, if it had less than four stars, I'm not interested. And the ethos of the product is more about, well, hang on; these ratings are very subjective. And someone else's two, three-star could be your next five-star. What are the factors that really matter? Do you want something dark, adventurous? Are you looking for something funny, light? And then what kind of topics do you want to discover? And then it doesn't matter if the five people before you thought it was average; you might think it's excellent. VICTORIA: Yeah, it reminds me thinking about how bias can come in with authors and writing as well. So a simple five-star system might be more susceptible to bias against different genders or different types of names. Whereas if you have more complex numbers or complex rating systems, it might be easier to have different types of authors stand out in a different way. NADIA: That actually relates to what was going through my mind when I was developing the reviewing system on StoryGraph. You can just, if you want, leave your star rating and say no more, but the star rating is lower down on the page. And up front, we say this book would be great for someone who's in the mood for something...and then you've got checkboxes. And how would you rate the pace of the book? And if it's a fiction book, we ask you, "Are the characters lovable?" Is there a flawed narrator? Is it plot-driven or character-driven?" Questions like that because the thinking is it doesn't matter whether you are going to give the book two stars in your own personal star rating. You can still help someone else find a book that's good for them because they will be looking at the summary on the StoryGraph book page, and they'll go, "Oh wow, 80% of people said it's lovable. There's a diverse range of characters, and it's funny. So the topics fit things I'm interested in, so I care less about the average rating being like 3.5 because everything else seems perfect. Let me see for myself." And actually, we've also had a lot of feedback from people saying that "Oh, normally, I never know how to review a book or what to say. And this system has really helped me, almost give me prompts to get started about explaining the book, reviewing it for other people to help them decide if it's for them. So that's great." VICTORIA: That makes sense to me because I read a lot of books, maybe not as much as I would like to recently. But not all books that I love I can easily recommend to friends, but it's hard for me to say why. [laughs] You know, like, "This is a very complicated book." So I love it. I'll have to check it out later. It's been four years since you've been full-time or since 2019, almost five then. NADIA: Yes. VICTORIA: If you could travel back in time to when you first started to make this a full-time role, what advice would you give yourself now, having all of this foresight? NADIA: Have patience, trust the process because I can sometimes be impatient with, ah, I want this to happen now. I want this to pick up now. I want these features done now. I'm a solo dev on the project. I started it solo. I have a co-founder now, but I'm still the solo dev. And there were so many things, especially now that we've got a much larger user base, that people complained about or say is not quite right. And that can be really tough to just have to keep hearing when you're like, I know, but I don't have the resource to fix it right now or to improve it. But I think one of the things is, yeah, having faith in the process. Keep going through the cycles of listening to the customers, prioritizing the work, getting the work done, getting the feedback, and just keep going through that loop. And the product will keep getting better. Because sometimes it can feel, particularly in the first year when I was so low, you sometimes have moments of doubt. Or if a customer research round doesn't go super well, you start to wonder, is this only a nice-to-have? And is this going to go anywhere? And so that's one piece of advice. And I think the other one is knowing that there are several right paths because I think sometimes I would agonize over I want to do the right thing. I want to make sure I make the right choice right now. And, I mean, there are some things that are not good to do. You want to make sure that you're setting up your customer interviews in a non-leading way. You want to make sure that there are certain standards in the product in terms of the technical side and all that kind of stuff, so there's that. But I think it's understanding that you kind of just have to make a decision. And if you set yourself up to be able to be adaptive and responsive to change, then you'll be fine. Because you can always change course if the response you're getting back or the data you're getting back is going in the wrong direction. VICTORIA: I love that. And I want to pull on that thread about being open to changing your mind. I think that many founders start the company because they're so excited about this idea and this problem that they found. But how do you keep yourself open to feedback and keeping that ability to flow and to change direction? NADIA: I mean, I didn't set out to build a Goodreads alternative, and here I am. VICTORIA: [laughs] NADIA: I just wanted to build this specific side project or this specific...it was a companion app, in fact. Like, the first version of the thing I built, the first thing you had to do was sign in and connect your Goodreads account so that we could pull in your shelves and start creating the dashboards. So as a solo bootstrapping founder, building a Goodreads alternative was not something that I thought was going to lead to success. But through years of experience, and just hearing other people's stories, and research, I just learned that it's such a hard space just running a startup in general, and 90% of startups fail. And I just said to myself that, okay, the only way I can kind of survive for longer is if I am open to feedback, I'm open to change course, I'm patient, and I trust the process. These are the things I can do to just increase my chances of success. And so that's why I kind of feel it's imperative if you want to go down this route and you want to be successful, it's vital that you're open to completely changing the product, completely changing your direction, completely going back on a decision. You'll either lose customers or you'll run out of money, whatever it is. And so yeah, you've got to just basically be quite ruthless in the things that are just going to minimize your chances of failing. VICTORIA: That makes sense. And now, I have a two-part question for you. What's the wind in your sails? Like, the thing that keeps you going and keeps you motivated to keep working on this? And then, conversely, what's kind of holding you back? What are the obstacles and challenges that you're facing? NADIA: I think this kind of role...so I'm like founder, CEO, and developer. In general, I think I thrive under pressure and pushing myself, and trying to always be better and improve. So I'm always trying to be like, how can I improve my productivity? Or how can I run the company better? All these kinds of things. So I feel like I'm getting to explore maximizing my full potential as someone in the world of work through doing this. So that just intrinsically is motivating to me. I love books, and I love reading. I think it's such an amazing hobby. And the fact that I get to make other readers happy is awesome. So even just as the product has grown, the messages that we get about if someone got a perfect recommendation from StoryGraph, or they hadn't read for years, and now an easy form of, you know, what are you in the mood for? Check a few boxes, and we'll show you some books that fit, whatever it is. That's just so...it's so awesome just to be able to enhance readers' lives that way in terms of the things they're reading and getting them excited about reading again or keeping them excited. So those are the things that keep me going, both the personal nature of enjoying my work and enjoying trying to be the best founder and CEO that I can and building a great product. It's always great when you build something, and people just enjoy using it and like using it. So I'm always incentivized to keep making the product better, the experience better. I'm currently mid a redesign. And I'm just so excited to get it out because it's going to touch on a lot of repeated pain points that we've been having for years. And I just can't wait for everyone to see it and see that we've listened to them. And we're making progress still like three and a bit years on since we launched out of beta. What's tough? Previously, what's been tough is navigating, remaining independent, and bootstrapped with just personally trying to make money to just live my life. So I had five years of runway. And it was this tricky situation about when I had a couple of years left, I'm thinking, wow, I really like doing this, but I'm going to need to start earning money soon. But I also don't want to get investment. I don't want to stop doing this. I can't stop doing this. We've got hundreds of thousands of customers. And so kind of trying to balance my personal needs and life situations with the work I've been doing because I've been working so hard on it for so long that in the last couple of years, it's gotten to a point where it's like, how do I craft the life I want out of a product that is very not set up to be an indie bootstrapped product? [laughs] Typically, you want to do a B2B. You want to start earning money from your product as early as possible. And I feel like I've landed in a product that's typically funded, VC-backed, that kind of thing. So kind of navigating that has been a fun challenge. There's not been anything that's kind of demoralized me or held me back, or made me think I shouldn't do it. And it's just kind of been a fun challenge trying to...yeah, just navigate that. And we've been doing things like we're currently in the process of transitioning our...we have a Plus Plan. And when we launched it, it was essentially a grab bag of features. We're completely changing the feature set. And we right now have six and a half thousand people who are on that plan. But we don't have product market fit on that plan, and I can tell from when I do certain surveys the responses I get back. And so we're completely transitioning that to focus in on our most popular feature, which is the stats that we offer. And so that's kind of scary, but it's part of making that Plus Plan more sticky and easier to sell because it's going to be for your power users who love data. So they want all the data when they are reading. And then the other thing is, okay, what kind of business avenue can we start which fits in with the ethos of the product but brings in more revenue for StoryGraph? And so, we launched a giveaway segment in our app where publishers and authors can pay to list competitions for users to win copies of their books. And it's essentially a win-win-win because publishers and authors get another channel to market their books. Users get to win free books, and readers love winning free books. And StoryGraph has another revenue source that helps us stay independent and profitable, and sustainable in the long run. VICTORIA: That's wonderful. And there are two tracks I want to follow up on there; one is your decision not to seek funding; if you could just tell me a little more about the reasoning and your thought process behind that. And you've already touched on a little bit of the other ways you're looking at monetizing the app. NADIA: Since I was a teenager, I've always been interested in business, economics, entrepreneurship. I've always felt very entrepreneurial. I've read so many founder stories and startup stories over the years. And you hear about venture capitalists who come in, and even if it's fine for the first year or two, ultimately, they want a return. And at some point, that could come at odds with your mission or your goals for your company. And when I think about two things, the kind of life I want and also the nature of the product I'm building as well, VC just doesn't fit. And I know there are so many different funding programs and styles right now, a lot more friendlier [laughs] than VC. But I'm just focusing on VC because when I was younger, I used to think that was a marker of success. VC funding that was the track I thought I was going to go down, and that was what I kind of idolized as, oh my gosh, yes, getting a funding round of millions and millions and then building this huge company. That was how I used to be, so it's so interesting how I've completely gone to the other side. That idea that you could have mismatched goals and how it's ruined companies, once you take the first round of funding and you grow and expand, then you've got to keep taking more to just stay alive until some liquidation event. That just doesn't appeal to me. And I just think there's something ultimately very powerful and valuable about building a product without giving up any ownership to anybody else and being able to make it into something that people love, and that's profitable, and can give the people who run it great lifestyles. I just think that's a mark of an excellent product, and I just want to build one of those. And then I think also the nature of the product itself being a book tracking app. I think the product has done well because it is run and built so closely by myself and Rob. And so it's like, people talk about how, oh, you can tell it's built for readers by readers by people who care. And I run the company's Instagram, and it's not just me talking about the product. I'm talking with a bunch of our users about books and what we're reading. And it really feels like it's just got such a great community feel. And I worry that that can get lost with certain types of investment that I've previously thought that I wanted in my life. And so, yeah, that's the reason why I've kind of strayed away from the investment world. And then it's gotten to the point, like, now we're at the point where we don't need funding because we've been able to get to profitability by ourselves. So we don't need any type of funding. And we're just going to try and keep doing things to keep making the product better, to convert more people to the Plus Plan. And, hopefully, our giveaways platform grows in the way we want such that our goal is to just stay profitable and independent forever for as long as possible. And we think that way, we're going to have the most fun running the company, and the product is going to be the best it can be because there's not going to be competing incentives or goals for the product. VICTORIA: That makes sense. And it sounds like, in reality, in the real case, you had a team, and you had the skills yourself to be able to move the product forward without having to take on funding or take on additional support, which is awesome. And I actually really like your background. I also have a degree in economics. So I'm curious if the economics and philosophy, all of that, really lends itself to your skills as a founder. Is that accurate? NADIA: I don't think so. VICTORIA: [laughs] NADIA: I love my degree. I get sad when I meet econ grads or econ majors, and they're like, "Oh, I hated it. Oh, it was so boring," or whatever. I'm like, "No, it was so great." I'm a big microeconomics fan, so I was all about...I didn't like macro that much. I was all about the game theory and the microeconomic theory, that kind of stuff. I don't think there's anything that really ties into my skills as a founder. I feel like that's more to do with my upbringing and personality than what I studied. But, I mean, one of the reasons I did love my degree is because there are elements that do crop up. It's such a widely applicable...the subjects I did are so widely applicable, philosophy, different ways of seeing the world and thinking and approaching different people. And then, obviously, economics that's essentially behavior, and how markets work, and incentives, and all that kind of stuff. And when you get to pricing and all those sorts of things, and business, and then politics as well, I mean, everything is politics, right? People interacting. So there are definitely things and conversations I had at university, which I see things crop up day to day that I can tie back to it. But yeah, I think it doesn't really...my specific degree, I don't think it's made me a better founder than I would have been if I'd studied, I don't know, English or Math or something. VICTORIA: Right, yeah. I think economics is one of those where it's kind of so broadly applicable. You're kind of using it, but you don't even realize it sometimes. [laughs] NADIA: Yeah. MID-ROLL AD: thoughtbot is thrilled to announce our own incubator launching this year. If you are a non-technical founding team with a business idea that involves a web or mobile app, we encourage you to apply for our eight-week program. We'll help you move forward with confidence in your team, your product vision, and a roadmap for getting you there. Learn more and apply at tbot.io/incubator. VICTORIA: So what made you decide to go to a bootcamp right after finishing school? NADIA: So I'd always been entrepreneurial. I remember...I don't know where exactly it started from, whether I got it from my mom. I know she's always been very entrepreneurial and into business. The earliest memory I have of doing something that was very specifically business-oriented was in what we call sixth form in the UK, which is essentially the last two years of high school before you go to university or college; we had this scheme called Young Enterprise. And essentially, you got into teams of people, small teams, or they could be quite big, actually. It could be up to 20 people. And you started a business, and there were trade shows, and pitch meetings, and all that kind of stuff, so I remember getting involved in all that sort of stuff at school. But I'd always been on the investment banking track because when I was young...so my parents...we come from a poor background. And so my parents were very much like, you know, try and find high-paying careers to go into so that you can pay for whatever you want and you have a much better lifestyle. So I had gotten onto the investment banking track from the age of 14 when I went with a friend...at the school, I went to, there was a Take Your Daughter to Work Day. My dad said, "Oh, you want to go to try and find someone whose parent works in an investment bank or something like that. That's like a great career to go into." And so I went with a friend's dad to UBS. And I remember being blown away, like, wow, this is so fascinating. Because I think everything seems so impressive when you're 14, and you're walking into a space like that, and everything seems very lively. And everyone's walking around dressed sharp. They've got their BlackBerries. So from the age of 14 until 20, it would have been, I was very much I am going to work in an investment bank. And I did all the things that you would do, like all the schemes, the spring programs. And it got to my final internship. And I just remember at the internship being rather disillusioned and disappointed by the experience. I remember thinking, is this it? I was studying at Oxford, and I put so much into my studies. And I remember thinking; I'm working so hard. And this is what I come to? Is this it? And so around the time as well, I was also meeting a lot of people in the entrepreneurship space, social enterprises, people doing their own ventures. And I just remember thinking, oh, I feel like I've got to go down that track. And I ended up winning a place on a coding course. It was set up specifically to help more women get into tech. And it was called Code First Girls. I won a place that started...it was just part-time. What I did was I actually...I got the banking job from Deutsche Bank, it was, but I decided to turn it down. It was a very risky decision. I turned it down, and I stayed in Oxford after graduating and worked in the academic office for a while. And then, twice a week, I would go to London and do this coding course. And during it, on Twitter, I remember seeing a competition for a full-paid place at this bootcamp called Makers Academy. And I just thought to myself, having tech skills, I'd heard the feedback that it's a very powerful thing to have. And I remember thinking I should go for this competition. And I went for the competition, and I won a free place at the bootcamp. If I didn't win a free place at the bootcamp, I'm not sure what would have happened because I'm not sure whether at that point I would have thought, oh, paying £8,000 to go to a software bootcamp is what I should do. I'm not sure I would have got there. So that's how I got there, essentially. I won a competition for a bootcamp after having a taste of what coding was like and seeing how freeing it was to just be able to have a computer and an internet connection and build something. VICTORIA: Oh, that's wonderful. I love that story. And I've spent a lot of time with Women Who Code and trying to get women excited about coding. And that's exactly the story is that once you have it, it's a tool in your toolset. And if you want to build something, you can make it happen. And that's why it's important to continue the education and get access for people who might not normally have it. And you continue to do some of that work as well, right? You're involved in organizations like this? NADIA: Like Code First Girls? No. I did some years ago. I would go and attend Rails Girls workshops and be a mentor at them, at those. And while I was at Pivotal, I helped with events like codebar, which were essentially evenings where people who were learning to code or more junior could come and pair with someone more senior on whatever project they wanted to. So I did a bunch of that stuff in the years after leaving Makers Academy. And I was even a TA for a short time for a couple of weeks at Makers Academy as well after I graduated. But in more recent years, I haven't done much in that space, but I would love to do more at some point. I don't have the bandwidth to right now. [laughs] VICTORIA: And you're still a major speaker going and keynoting events all around the world. Have you done any recently, or have any coming up that you're excited about? NADIA: So before the pandemic, my last talk, I keynoted RubyWorld in Japan. That was in November 2019. And then the pandemic hit, and 2020 June, July was when StoryGraph had some viral tweets, and so we kicked off. And amongst all of that, I was being invited to speak at remote events, but it just didn't make sense for me. Not only was I so busy with work, but I put a lot of hours into my talks. And part of the fun is being there, hallway track, meeting people, being on stage. And so it just didn't appeal to me to spend so much time developing the talk to just deliver it at home. And so, I just spent all the time on StoryGraph. And I remember when events started happening again; I wondered whether I would even be invited to speak because I felt more detached from the Ruby community. Most of the conferences that I did were in the Ruby community. StoryGraph is built on Rails. Yeah, I just thought maybe I'll get back to that later. But all of a sudden, I had a series of amazing invitations. Andrew Culver started up The Rails SaaS Conference in LA in October, and I was invited to speak at that. And then, I was invited to keynote RubyConf, that was recently held in Houston, Texas, and also invited to keynote the satellite conference, RubyConf Mini in Providence, that happened a couple of weeks earlier. And so I had a very busy October and November, a lot of travel. I developed two new talks, a Ruby talk and a StoryGraph talk. It was my first ever time giving a talk on StoryGraph. It was a lot of work and amongst a lot of StoryGraph work that I needed to do. All of the talks went well, and it was so much fun to be back on the circuit again. And I'm looking forward to whatever speaking things crop up this year. VICTORIA: That's wonderful. I'm excited. I'll have to see if I can find a recording and get caught up myself. Going back to an earlier question, you mentioned quite a few times about market research and talking to the customers. And I'm just curious if you have a method or a set of tools that you use to run those experiments and collect that feedback and information. NADIA: Yes. So I remember one of the first things I did years ago was I read "The Mom Test" by Rob Fitzpatrick. And that's great for just getting the foundation of when you talk to customers; you don't want to lead them on in any shape or form. You just want to get the raw truth and go from there. So that's the underpinning of everything I do. And then, I learned from friends I made through Pivotal about how you put together a script for a customer research. You can't just have bullet points or whatever. You should have a script. And the foundation of that script is a hypothesis about what you're trying to find out in that round of research. And once you figure out your hypothesis, then you can put together the questions you want to ask and understand how you're going to measure the output. So the first ever thing I was trying to find out when I first started interviewing people was just very general. It was just like, are there any pain points? I was just trying to figure out are there any pain points among the avid reader group of people? And then I remember the results from that were, "No place for consistent, high-quality recommendations." And so then I said, okay, how are people finding recommendations now, or what are the factors that lead to people thinking a book was great for them? And that's how I ended up getting to the moods and pace. But when I do my interviews, I record them all. I watch them back. And I condense everything on sticky notes. And I use a virtual tool. And I try to take word for word. When I summarize, I still just try and use their specific words as much as possible. So I'm not adding my own editing over what they say. Every single interviewee has a different color. And I essentially group them into themes, and that's how I unlock whatever the answers are for that round. And then I use that...I might have been trying to find out what to build next or whether we should go down a certain product direction or not. And so, depending on the outcome, that helps me make up my mind about what to do. So that's the high-level process that I follow. VICTORIA: Well, that sounds very methodical, and interesting for me to hear your perspective on that. And you mentioned that you do have a redesign coming out soon for StoryGraph. Are there any other particular products or features that you're really excited to talk about coming up soon? NADIA: Yeah, I'm so excited about the redesign because we're bringing out...it's not just a UI improvement; it's a user experience improvement as well. So there are a lot of little features that have been asked for over the years. And actually, it was trying to deliver one of them that sparked the whole redesign. So people really want a marked as finished button. There's no way to mark as finished. You just toggle a book back to read. And some people find this quite counterintuitive, or it doesn't quite explain what they're doing. And so when I came to deliver the mark as finished button, this was months and months ago now, I realized that the book pane was just becoming so cluttered, and I was trying to fight with it to squeeze in this link. And I remember thinking; this is not the only thing people want to see on the book pane. They also want to see when they read the book without having to go into the book page. They also want to be able to add it to their next queue. And I just said, you know what? I need to redesign this whole thing. And so I was able to luckily work with Saron Yitbarek, who is married to my co-founder, Rob. There's a funny story about all of that. And she helped me do this redesign based on all my customer research. And so I'm just so excited to get it out because the other thing that we're bringing with it is dark mode, which is our most requested feature in history. And it's funny because I've always felt like, ah, that's a nice-to-have. But obviously, for some people, it's not a nice-to-have; it's an accessibility issue. And even me, I'm quite strict with my bedtime. I try and be offline an hour before bed. In bed by 11, up at 6, and even me if I want to track my pages, I'm like, ooh, this is a bit bright. And my phone itself is set on adaptive, so it's light mode during the day and dark mode during the night. And even me, I can see why people really want this and why it would just improve their experience, especially if everything else on your phone is dark. So I'm really excited to get that out, mainly for the UX improvements. And the other thing I'm really excited to do is transition the Plus Plan to being the advanced stats package rather than the random selection of features right now. Because not only will the people who pay us get more complex stats functionalities such that they feel like, wow, the subscription fee that I pay not only does it still make me feel like I'm supporting an alternative to Goodreads, an independent alternative to Goodreads I also get such value from these extra features. But the other thing is what I found from my customer research is that if you're a Plus customer, there's often one or two of the Plus features that you love and that you don't really use the others. But they're all really great features. And so what I'm really excited about is that we're going to make all the non-stats features free for everybody. And so I'm so excited for, like, we have a feature where if you put in a group of usernames, we look at all of your to-read lists and suggest great books for you to buddy-read together. Now, there's a bunch of Plus users who aren't social and don't care about it. But there's going to be a bunch of our free users who are so excited about that feature, probably will use it with their book clubs, things like that. We have up-next suggestions where we suggest what you should pick up next from your to-read pile based on a range of factors. It could be, oh, you're behind on your reading goal; here's a fast-paced book. Or this book is very similar to the one that you just finished, so if you want something the same, pick up this one. And, again, that's behind a paywall right now, and I'm just so excited for everybody to be able to use that. When I remember starting out with StoryGraph, I remember thinking, wow, the way this is going, wouldn't it be so cool if we could just suggest books that would be the next perfect read for you? Because a lot of people have a pile of books by their bedside table or on their shelves, and they're just like, well, which one should I start with? And this tool literally helps you to do that. And so I can't wait for everyone to be able to try it. And so that's why I'm excited about that transition because the Plus Plan will be better, and the free product will be better. VICTORIA: That sounds amazing. And I'm thinking in my head like, oh, I should start a book club with thoughtbot. Because there are some engineering management and other types of books we want to read, so maybe we could use StoryGraph to manage that and keep ourselves motivated to actually finish them. [laughs] NADIA: Cool. VICTORIA: No, this is wonderful. And what books are on your reading list coming up? NADIA: Yes. I am excited to read...I'm not sure...I'm blanking on the series' name. But the first book is called "The Poppy War." I don't know whether it's called "The Burning God" or if that's the third book in the series. But it's this very popular trilogy, and I'm excited to read that soon. I'm doing a slow chronological read of Toni Morrison's fiction. I recently read "Song of Solomon," which was great, really, really good. And so I'm excited to read more of her novels this year. I'm also on a kind of narrative nonfiction kick right now. I love narrative nonfiction. So I just finished reading "American Kingpin," which is about Silk Road. And I've picked up "Black Edge," which is about SAC Capital and Steve Cohen and that whole hedge fund insider trading situation. So I'm probably going to look for more of the same afterwards. VICTORIA: Well, that's very exciting. And it's inspiring that as a founder, you also still have time to read [laughs] and probably because StoryGraph makes it easy and motivating for you to do so. NADIA: Yeah, everyone thought that my reading would tank once I started the company, but, in fact, it's multiplied severalfold. And a couple of reasons; one is it's very important in general for me to make time for me because I'm in a situation that could easily become very stressful and could lead to burnout. So I make sure that I make time for me to read and to go to dance class regularly, which is my other main hobby. But then, secondly, I feel like I can justify it as work. Because I say, wow, me being a reader and being able to communicate with people on Instagram and on Twitter about books, not just the product, adds legitimacy to me as the founder and developer of this product. And so it's important that I keep reading. And it also helps the product be better because I understand what features are needed. So, for example, I never used to listen to audiobooks. I'm a big podcast person; I love music. So between those two, when does audio fit in? And also, I didn't like the idea that I could just be absent-minded sometimes with some podcasts, but with a book, you don't want spoilers. It could get confusing. But I started listening to audiobooks because we had a large audiobook user base. And they would ask for certain features, and it was really hard for me to relate and to understand their needs. And now that I have started listening to audiobooks as well, we made some great audiobook listeners-focused additions to the app last year, including you can track your minutes. So you can literally get you read this many pages in a day, but you also listened to this many minutes. You can set an hours goal for the year, so not just a reading goal or a pages goal. You can set an hours goal. Or maybe you're someone like me, where audiobooks are the smaller proportion of your reading, and you just want it all calculated as pages. And so I've got it on the setting where it's like, even when I track an audiobook in StoryGraph, convert it to pages for me, and I just have my nice, all-round page number at the end of the year. VICTORIA: That's so cool. Really interesting. And I've had such a nice time chatting with you today. Is there anything else that you'd like to share as a final takeaway for our listeners? NADIA: If you are someone who wants to start a company, maybe you want to bootstrap, you've got a product idea, I think it's honestly just trust the process. It will take time. But if you trust the process, you listen to customers and really listen to them...research ways to talk to customers, and don't cut corners with the process. There have been so many times when I've done a whole round of research, and then I say, oh, do I have to go through all these now and actually do a synthesis? I think anecdotally; I can figure out what the gist was; no, do the research. You don't know what insights you're going to find. And I think if you just trust that process...and I think the other thing is before you get to that stage, start building up a runway. Having a runway is so powerful. And so whether it's saving a bit more or diverting funds from something else if you have a runway and you can give yourself a couple of years, a few years without worrying about your next paycheck, that is incredibly valuable to getting started on your bootstrapping journey. VICTORIA: Thank you. That's so wonderful. And I appreciate you coming on today to be with us. You can subscribe to the show and find notes along with a complete transcript for this episode at giantrobots.fm. If you have questions or comments, email us at hosts@giantrobots.fm. And you can find me on Mastodon at Victoria Guido. This podcast is brought to by thoughtbot and produced and edited by Mandy Moore. Thank you for listening. See you next time. ANNOUNCER: This podcast is brought to you by thoughtbot, your expert strategy, design, development, and product management partner. We bring digital products from idea to success and teach you how because we care. Learn more at thoughtbot.com. Special Guest: Nadia Odunayo.

Following International Day of Women and Girls in Science, we're looking back on two 40 Minute Mentor episodes with two absolute trailblazers - Dr. Anne-Marie Imafidon and Amali de Alwis. Anne-Marie is the Co-Founder and CEO of Stemettes, an award-winning social enterprise working to inspire and support girls, young women and non-binary people in Science, Technology, Engineering, Arts and Maths careers. You may also know Anne-Marie from the popular Channel 4 show Countdown, or have come across her new book, ‘She's In CTRL'. Amali is the CEO of Subak, the world's first not-for-profit accelerator that scales climate impact through data policy and behaviour change. Prior to joining Subak, she was CEO of Code First: Girls - the largest provider of free coding courses for women in the UK. Anne-Marie and Amali shared so much great mentorship in their 40 Minute Mentor episodes. In today's STEM career feature, we'll focus on: ➡️ Why a societal change is needed to make Tech more inclusive [01:54] ➡️ How the industry itself is a barrier [04:21] ➡️ The importance of just getting started and finding a community [08:01] ➡️ Advice for more inclusive hiring practices [10:30]  ⛳ Helpful links:➡️ Anne-Marie's full 40 Minute Mentor episode: https://jbmc.co.uk/insights/40-minute-mentor/changing-the-face-of-stem-with-dr-anne-marie-imafidon-mbe/➡️ Amali's full 40 Minute Mentor episode:  https://jbmc.co.uk/insights/40-minute-mentor/series-8-amali-de-alwis-subak/➡️ More about ‘She's In CTRL': https://www.penguin.co.uk/books/444767/shes-in-ctrl-by-imafidon-anne-marie/9781787635029➡️ More about Stemettes: https://stemettes.org/➡️ More about Subak: https://subak.org/➡️ More about Code First: Girls: https://codefirstgirls.com/ 

Welcome to Remote Ruby and thanks for joining us! It's a full house this week as Jason, Chris, and Andrew are back together! They also have a great guest joining them, Nadia Odunayo, who's the Founder, CEO, and Software Developer of The StoryGraph, a book tracking, and recommendations app. Nadia spoke at the Rails SaaS Conference and her talk was titled, “Getting to one million users as a one-woman dev team.” After listening to this episode, you'll understand why she's such an engaging speaker.  Today, Nadia shares her journey of how she got into programming and building software apps, to being the Founder of The StoryGraph.  She shares some interesting things about scaling and Elasticsearch, we'll hear about her project Speakerline, and we'll find out how she got into public speaking and how her approach to conference speaking is like product building. Download this episode now to learn more! [00:04:07] Nadia tells us her background, what she does, and why she created The StoryGraph app.[00:07:24] We hear a great story on how Nadia got into programming. [00:11:31] Nadia explains how she first experienced Ruby at the Code First Girls program, and at the boot camp that was Ruby and Rails focused.[00:12:19] We learn about Nadia's journey from working at Pivotal Labs to where she is today with The StoryGraph. [00:15:38] In Nadia's talk she mentioned “financial independence” and Andrew wonders what kind of journey she takes when she builds these kinds of software apps.[00:19:59] The StoryGraph is written in Ruby and Jason wants to know if Nadia is still happy with her decision to use Ruby all these years later. [00:22:55] Nadia shares some interesting things about scaling.[00:29:13] Find out about Nadia's journey with Elasticsearch. [00:36:00] Dark Mode is brought up which is the most requested feature on the app and Nadia tells us that she has been working on it. Andrew of course loves it, and he tells us about using Radix colors. [00:38:18] We hear how Nadia got into public speaking, a story about meeting Sarah Mei, her project Speakerline, and she shares advice to people who think public speaking is not for them.[00:47:42] Nadia tells us her approach to conference speaking is like product building, Jason tells us his talks got better when he started bringing other people in, and Andrew highly recommends Speakerline. [00:54:00] Find out where you can follow Nadia onlinePanelists:Jason CharnesChris OliverAndrew MasonGuest:Nadia OdunayoSponsor:HoneybadgerLinks:Jason Charnes TwitterChris Oliver TwitterAndrew Mason TwitterNadia Odunayo WebsiteNadia Odunayo TwitterNadia Odunayo InstagramThe StoryGraphThe StoryGraph TwitterThe StoryGraph InstagramThe StoryGraph TikTokThe StoryGraph MastodonCode First GirlsRadix colorsSpeakerlineSarah Mei-What Your Conference Proposal is MissingRuby Radar TwitterRuby for All Podcast

J'ai tapé ma première ligne de code en HTML en octobre 2017 avec Code First: Girls. Quand j'ai fait apparaître "Hello, world" dans le navigateur, je n'avais que de l'excitation. Un an plus tard, je me suis mérité une place dans le Code First: Girls Nanodegree, anciennement connu sous le nom de «The FurtHer Program»; un programme de codage intensif numérique gratuit à temps plein me dotant des compétences d'un ingénieur logiciel. Depuis mon entrée dans l'industrie technologique en 2019, je suis devenu un ingénieur DevOps plusieurs fois primé, un blogueur technique, un conférencier principal et un défenseur de la neurodiversité et de l'inclusion au Royaume-Uni. Je siège au conseil de coproduction d'une association caritative, "Neurodiversity In Business", et je suis également le fondateur de The Opal Blog ; une plate-forme reconnue pour ses histoires humaines sur mon expérience de femme noire et neurodivergente dans l'industrie technologique. J'écris également du contenu axé sur les technologies au sein de DevOps et de la neurodiversité dans le but d'éduquer ceux qui souhaitent en savoir plus sur DevOps ainsi que ceux qui souhaitent en savoir plus sur la neurodiversité et l'inclusion dans l'espace technologique ainsi qu'en dehors de celui-ci. J'ai été lauréate des Tech Women 100 Awards 2020 et du Rising Star Award aux Black Tech Achievements Awards 2020. Parallèlement à cela, j'ai remporté de nombreuses nominations et reconnaissances, comme celle d'être nommée l'une des femmes les plus influentes dans le domaine de la technologie par ComputerWeekly.com en 2019, 2020 et 2021 et nominée pour le Rising Technologist Award 2020 pour les Technologist Playmaker Awards de Booking.com. 2020. J'ai été présenté dans Refinery29, The Guardian, BBC News, Silicon Republic et plus encore. J'ai co-écrit un livre intitulé 'The Voices In The Shadow'; un livre qui présente 51 histoires de femmes noires dans la technologie, y compris la sienne. Le livre est distribué dans les écoles du Royaume-Uni et d'Irlande et vendu dans le monde entier. En tant que conférencier principal, j'ai travaillé avec Bloomberg, Google, HackaJob, Coding Black Females, Code First: Girls & WeAreTechWomen pour n'en nommer que quelques-uns.

“If we're trying to say that the only way to find answers and the only way to fund climate issues is through equity based investment, it's just not going to work. It doesn't suit every type of business.” In this week's 40 Minute Mentor episode, we're joined by the brilliant Amali de Alwis, CEO of Subak, the world's first not-for-profit accelerator that scales climate impact through data, policy and behaviour change. Prior to joining the team at Subak, Amali was Managing Director of Microsoft for Startups UK and CEO of Code First: Girls.Amali is a woman of many talents who wears many hats, including being a Board member at Ada National College for Digital Skills and the Raspberry Pi Foundation. It was a great honour to have Amali join us on the podcast and she shares some really insightful mentorship, including: ➡️ What her nonlinear career has taught her and why changing careers frequently can have positive effects on your trajectory [05:46] ➡️ How she landed her first CEO role [12:39] ➡️ Amali's journey with Code First: Girls and the milestones she's most proud of [16:22] ➡️ What the tech industry needs to do to level the playing field and make it more accessible for women and especially women from underrepresented backgrounds [20:41] ➡️ Why you just need to get started if you're looking to get into tech [26:06] ➡️ Subak's incredible mission and why Amali got involved [28:19] ➡️ What Founders can expect from the accelerator [32:16]➡️ Why equity based investment can simply not be the only solution to tackle climate challenges [34:42]➡️ Why we all need to start understanding the data behind climate change [36:32] ➡️ The importance of having a strong board of advisors [39:17] ➡️ How Amali juggles her many responsibilities and why being a board advisor makes her a better CEO [41:51]  

Renée-Louise Nzegbulem is a #SoftwareEngineer @Beamery . Prior to this, Renée was a Mathematics Teacher after completing her Economics degree, and a year later took a leap of faith into the tech industry. The serendipities of life landed Renée a fulfilling role at a scale up, as a software engineer. She now specialises in #frontend development, building products for some of the biggest fortune 500 companies in the world. She talks us through her journey of switching from #teaching to #technology and how joining various communities with likeminded people helped her land an #engineering role within a year, with no formal experience! She completed both the @Code First Girls and @Black Codher @Coding Black Females #bootcamp at the same time! Stay up to date by following us on our socials: Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/glowingintech Twitter: https://www.twitter.com/glowingintech Show notes with timestamps and resources mentioned: https://www.notion.so/glowing-in-tech/Episode-15-Ren-e-Louise-Part-1-Maths-Teacher-to-Software-Engineer-Code-First-Girls-Nanodegree--257d183834104be5b5d6c93ea02f01ea --- Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/glowing-in-tech/message

Today's guest is Anna Brailsford, the CEO of Code First Girls, a UK-based coding school giving free coding education to women. They have just raised £4.5m and are using it to create 1 million learning opportunities for women . Code First Girls was set up to alleviate the colossal gender gap that exists in coding. It is actually quite frightening: 93% of all professional tech developers identify as men.The consequences of this are very real too - GCHQ has partnered with Code First Girls to improve their diversity in order to tackle threats ranging from foreign states to child online safety.With coding guaranteed to be one of THE jobs of the future, this is a fascinating episode with the woman in charge of making sure that everyone can access this vital skill set. Make sure you subscribe so you don't miss any new episodes, releasing every wednesday.You can sign up to Jimmy's Notebook here.Once again thank you to our series partner Octopus Group, a collection of 8 entrepreneurially minded businesses that look to back the people, ideas and industries that will change the world.In this episode with Anna we discuss: Code First Girls - Where did the name come from?Why the name is beloved by the CFG communityHow big the CFG community has grown to become a global communityHow do they define coding as a skill?The challenge of explaining coding to a 10-year-oldAnna's career-long passion for ed-tech inspired by her mum's entrepreneurial lifestyleImportant skills people need to have for the futureIf Anna was 22 in 2022 what sector would she look to work inAnd why you don't need a computer science degreeThe difference between being a CEO versus a founder and what makes an entrepreneurAnd why forgiving yourself is so importantCode First Girl's huge news announcement… a £4.5m raise and a £1 billion economic opportunity for women.What jobs are CFG hiring for?Why having more women in our security services makes the UK harder to attack.Their collaboration with BAE systemsWhy has coding been dominated by men in the past?How did Anna find female mentors?Anna's advice for young people graduating now: Understand your own worth and realise that not everything comes at once.What book would she recommend - Black Box Thinking by Matthew SyedPass the mic- other female entrepreneurs that deserve more spotlight - Michelle Kennedy

This week we discuss:1:49 Sorare lands huge NBA deal6:00  Code First Girls raises £4.5m to make coding more diverse9:40 Lightyear raises €81m to get its solar-powered car on the road11:57 Former Revolut big cheese Alan Chang's Tesseract raises $78m for climate startup16:00 Have we finally cracked lithium ion battery recycling"?18:07 Why did Snap shut down French social app Zenly?Want to talk to Freya Pratty about climate tech? Email her at freya@sifted.eu

The brand new series of Jimmy's Jobs of the Future is here - and you're going to love it.We're launching with one of the most inspiring UK entrepreneurial stories with Romi Savova from PensionBee. In series 5 we talked to some of the biggest institutions in the UK, including the Bank of England and the next Prime Minister of the UK, Liz Truss. In this series we are going back to our roots with a female founder who has taken a business from seed funding right through to IPO, transforming lives and the pension industry with it.  Make sure you subscribe so you don't miss any new episodes, including next week's guest Anna Brailsford, CEO of Code First Girls.You can sign up to Jimmy's Notebook here.Once again thank you to our series partner Octopus Group, a collection of 8 entrepreneurially minded businesses that look to back the people, ideas and industries that will change the world.In this episode, we talk with Romi about:Where did the name PensionBee come from? The early stages of PensionBee- how she raised such a large seed round.The first hires Romi made and why this was always made with the ecosystem in mind.Her lifelong passion for pensions.Transforming lives with the biggest financial decisions of their life.Where has Romi made hires where she didn't expect to?Transforming pension marketing.How Romi brings in the value of love into the workplace.The distinctive culture and how that attracts certain types of talent- but also may repel others.Taking her children to the listing on the London Stock Exchange.How did she deal with the pandemic?Adapting her own skillset.Changing from a big finance background to a solo entrepreneur- what skills did she learn and what did she leave behind? The rise of ESG investing and why it is getting even more necessary.How the government can help entrepreneurial journeys- and why that means government stability.If she was starting now, what would've been the greatest help to the entrepreneurial ecosystem?Balancing children and taking a business from seed to IPO.What content does she find most inspiring?Pass the mic- Seen On Screen founder, Bonnie Lister Parsons. 

It's the news you've been waiting for...The new series of Jimmy's Jobs will launch next Wednesday 7th September.Last season was a recording-breaking season for Jimmy's Jobs, starting with the Governor of the Bank of England and finishing with the candidates to be Prime Minister, Rishi Sunak and Liz Truss. This new series I'm kicking off with one of the most incredible female founders in Romi Savova, CEO and co-founder of PensionBee. It's a remarkable journey, going from seed to IPO in less than a decade and it's a fabulous discussion about her compelling story as well as how they innovated in part due to their way of hiring...Later in the series, we're talking to other amazing guests like Anna Brailsford from Code First Girls, Tania Boler from Elvie and Paul Bate from the UK Space Agency. And finally, thank you the Listeners for spreading the word about this show and making the Jimmy's Jobs community what it is today. We'll have a teaser episode of our first ever live show this Saturday before the series starts in earnest on Wednesday.

"Getting your genetic information isn't just [of] your own, it belongs to your ancestry too."   On today's episode of The G Word, Chris Wigley, our CEO is joined by Georgia Whitton, the Senior Genomic Data Scientist at the Wellcome Sanger Institute. She is also a broadcaster on YouTube. She hosts 'Genomics with Georgia', and is bringing new talent into the tech and science field through volunteering with Code First Girls and many other great activities. From aspiring actress to senior genomic data scientist, Georgia walks us through her genomic journey, starting with her A-level choices to deciding which variant of COVID-19 was infecting the UK. Chris and Georgia also discuss her current work in genomics surveillance and amplicon sequencing of malaria. 

Cracking The Code On Gender Inclusivity with Anna Brailsford, CEO of Code First Girls

This episode is a bit different, as we are welcoming not one, but TWO guests on the podcast! We are joined by two brilliant speakers, coaches, and educators; Lily and Alex. Lily is a bonafide West End star, and Alex is the legendary confidence coach that has supported our Nanodegree candidates through their interviews with tech companies. Despite their backgrounds and successes, both still struggle with impostor syndrome from time to time and take a minute to share their techniques and tips for working through those dark moments. This conversation is so fun and so encouraging! Lily has a brilliant tip about a way to focus on the positive moments, so take a big note on that one.Make sure you've joined the Code First Girls community and join us at Code Fest 2021, available fully remote and online!

On this episode of the Tech Leaders Podcast - Women in Tech series, we are joined by the inspirational Alice Bentinck; co-founder of Entrepreneur First and Code First Girls - where she's worked tirelessly to give others opportunities that they otherwise wouldn't have had to become entrepreneurs, as well as encouraging more women into the tech sector.Alice opens up to discuss how she got to where she is today, what mistakes she made along the way, how she grew her business and what advice she'd give to others as well as why she thinks ambition is key to everything an entrepreneur can achieve and shouldn't be seen as a bad word. 02:26 - Introduction to Alice & Entrepreneur First04:20 - Giving permission to be ambitious07:20 - Alice's First Startup Process10:25 - How Networking attracted the head of LinkedIn12:31 - The Story of Code First Girls16:34 - Alice's Advice on growing your network18:15 - Gender Diversity in the Tech and entrepreneurship sectors22:27 - Alice's Journey into Coding24:46 - How to stay resilient26:30 - How Business owners can create a culture encouraging female ambition30:42 - What is Web 3.0?

Welcome to the "Journey Into Tech Series" Ft Amber from the UK! Not only is she an Ambassador and Instructor for Code First Girls she is also a Junior Software Engineer! I hope you are just as inspired as I by her journey into tech!!! Stay in touch with Amber here: Twitter: https://twitter.com/codeherjourney Instagram:https://www.instagram.com/codeherjourney/ Personal Twitter: https://twitter.com/amberleetech --- This episode is sponsored by · Anchor: The easiest way to make a podcast. https://anchor.fm/app Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/browntechbae/support

Matt Clifford is the co-founder of Entrepreneur First. One of the most successful British accelerators, specialising in supporting the most talented engineers they can find to build companies from scratch. Their programmes are in London, Singapore, Toronto, Bangalore, Paris and Berlin. EF aims to give those who get in the best possible chance to build a world-class technology company. EF have helped over 3000 people build 500 companies with over $5bn portfolio value. Matt Clifford - Twitter 'Why start a startup?' - Matt Clifford, Entrepreneur First, excellent three hour video Entrepreneur First Youtube Entrepreneur First channel CAMentrepreneurs About Matt Clifford Matt Clifford is co-founder and CEO of Entrepreneur First, which he started with Alice Bentinck in 2011.Matt sits on the board of Code First Girls, which he co-founded in 2013 to teach young women how to code. Matt started his career at McKinsey & Co. and holds degrees from Cambridge and MIT, where he was a Kennedy Scholar. He was awarded an MBE for services to business in the 2016 Queen's Birthday Honours. About Richard Lucas Richard is a business and social entrepreneur who founded, led and/or invested in more than 30 businesses, Richard has been a TEDx event organiser, supports the pro-entrepreneurship ecosystem, and leads entrepreneurship workshops at all levels: from pre-schools to leading business schools. Richard was born in Oxford and moved to Poland in 1991. Read more here. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/entrepreneurship-and-leadership

On this episode of the Humans of DevOps, Jason Baum is joined once again by Pauline Narvas (@paulienuh) and Leonardo Murillo (@murillodigital) for the first-ever Humans of DevOps panel! They chat with host Jason Baum on what imposter syndrome is, why imposter syndrome affects certain groups more, how to identify imposter syndrome, how to combat it and more. Pauline Narvas is a Community Engineer at Gitpod and community founder of Ladies in DevOps. Pauline is an international speaker, blogger at pawlean.com and host of the By Pawlean podcast. Pauline is also an ambassador for Code First Girls and the author of the DevXDigest newsletter. Pauline was on episode 58 of the Humans of DevOps where we learned about her journey into tech, including starting to code and build websites at age 8, the importance of community and finding your tribe, cloud developer environments and so much more! If you didn't catch that episode, please be sure to listen. Leonardo Murillo is a Cloud Native Technologies Expert, DevOps Institute Ambassador, Co-Chair GitOps Working Group. Leo was on episode 45 of the Humans of DevOps where we learned about his journey into IT at 13 years old, founding the second BBS in Costa Rica, being an assistant network administrator for the first commercial ISP in the country at age 15, becoming an IT Director at age 20. If you didn't catch that episode, please be sure to listen. Want access to more content like this? Gain the tools, resources and knowledge to help your organization adapt and respond to challenges by becoming a professional member of DevOps Institute. Engage in one of the fastest-growing DevOps communities today! Get started for free: https://www.devopsinstitute.com/membership/ Use promo code HODPOD21 at this link for 20% off your Premium Membership. Have questions, feedback or just want to chat? Send us an email at podcast@devopsinstitute.com Please visit https://www.devopsinstitute.com/resources/ for a lightly edited transcript.

Matt is the Co-founder & CEO at Entrepreneur First, and Co-founder & NED at Code First Girls. We talk with Matt about: Internet in an era of "dampened variance" Increasing democratic participation Bull and Bear case for creativity What Matt looks for in people before investing Role of geography in entrepreneurship And MUCH more! Follow Matt on his Twitter at https://twitter.com/matthewclifford and subscribe to his newsletter at http://tib.matthewclifford.com/

On this episode of the Humans of DevOps, Jason Baum is joined by Pauline Narvas of Gitpod. Pauline discusses her journey into tech, including starting to code and build websites at age 8, the importance of community and finding your tribe, cloud developer environments and so much more! Pauline Narvas is a Community Engineer at Gitpod and community founder of Ladies in DevOps. Pauline is an international speaker, blogger at pawlean.com and host of the By Pawlean podcast. Pauline is also an ambassador for Code First Girls and the author of the DevXDigest newsletter. Want access to more content like this? Gain the tools, resources and knowledge to help your organization adapt and respond to challenges by becoming a professional member of DevOps Institute. Engage in one of the fastest-growing DevOps communities today! Get started for free: https://www.devopsinstitute.com/membership/ Use promo code HODPOD21 at this link for 20% off your Premium Membership. Please visit https://www.devopsinstitute.com/resources/ for a lightly edited transcript.

Alice Bentinck MBE is one of the co-founders of Entrepreneur First, one of the world's leading talent investors that helps people develop their startup ideas. Away from EF Alice is also one of the founders of Code First: Girls, an organisation which offers free web programming courses for women in university. In 2015 Alice was named one of the Fifty Most Inspiring Women in European Tech by Inspiring Fifty.James and Hector sat down with the former McKinsey Management Consultant to discuss what drove her to launch her own business, what Entrepreneur First looks for in potential founders and why it is important to adapt to different business cultures when expanding globally. Make sure to like and subscribe to the Riding Unicorns podcast to never miss an episode. Also don't forget to give Riding Unicorns a follow on Twitter and LinkedIn to keep on top of the latest developments.

Tonya Hall interviews Anna Brailsford, CEO at Code First Girls, about how partnerships with big industry names can help bring more women into tech. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

What's the difference between a commercial data science project and a Data Science project for social benefit? Often so-called Data Science for Good projects involve a throwing together of many people from different backgrounds under a common motivation to have a positive effect.We talk to a Data Science team that was formed to tackle the unemployment crisis that is coming out of the pandemic and help people to find excellent jobs in different industries for which they have a good skills match.We interview Erika Gravina, Rajwinder Bhatoe and Dehaja Senanayake about their story helping to create the Job Finder Machine with the Emergent Alliance, DataSparQ, Reed and Google.Further InformationProject: Job Finder Machine Project Group: Emergent Alliance and DataSparQShout out: Code First Girls for fantastic courses, mentoring and support for women in tech and data scienceSome links above may require payment or login. We are not endorsing them or receiving any payment for mentioning them. They are provided as is. Often free versions of papers are available and we would encourage you to investigate.Interview date: 25 March 2021Recording date: 13 May 2021Intro audio Music 4 Video Library (Patreon supporter)

Cat De Roure is Senior Software Engineer formerly out of Intuit London and now currently residing in the Bay Area. Prior to working at Intuit, she worked as an engineer at several startup companies. In this episode, she shares how her involvement in women in tech initiatives inspires her and her teammates. Cat leads and coordinates the Code First Girls partnership with Intuit, an 8 week course where women, young and old, learn software engineering skills and have the opportunity to shadow engineers at Intuit. Please note this is a previously recorded episode.

In today’s 40 Minute Mentor episode, we’re joined by the Co-Founder of Entrepreneur First and Code First: Girls, Alice Bentinck MBE. Frustrated by a business landscape that found latent talent shackled by predetermined career paths, Alice set out to challenge cultural norms when she co-founded Entrepreneur First in 2011 – an accelerator that celebrates and invests in talented, ambitious individuals, and looks to match-make Co-Founders to launch successful businesses. Almost 10 years later, Entrepreneur First has launched over 300 companies with a value of well over £2billion, which is testament not only to their passion for the work they do, but also to their tenacity in the face of adversity in those early years. During our conversation we cover some really interesting and insightful areas, including: - The most important traits to look for when you’re investing in talent and how to shift culturally pre-determined career paths. - The many benefits of having a Co-Founder with a different skill set to you and how you can make the most of this relationship. - And the importance of diversity in the workplace, and what businesses need to do to get through to diverse candidates. It was such a pleasure talking to Alice. She talks so openly about the importance of learning from your mistakes and always moving forward. If you’re thinking about launching a startup from scratch or are looking to attract a more diverse talent pool, you won’t want to give this episode a miss. We’d love to hear your thoughts on this episode, so please do get in touch at james@jbmc.co.uk If you want to find out more about Alice, take a look at his LinkedIn profile - https://www.linkedin.com/in/alicebentinck/ If you want to find out more about Entrepreneur First, head over to – https://www.joinef.com/

As the CEO of Code First Girls, Anna has built one of the largest communities of female tech talent in the UK, with a focus of connecting women to economic opportunities and jobs in the tech industry. Prior to Code First, Anna co-founded her own EdTech startup and was the Commercial Director of Lynda.com, which was bought by LinkedIn for $1.5bn (4th largest acquisition in social media history) and is now known as LinkedIn Learning. In this episode - she talks about her transition to senior positions in male-dominated space, the power of -intentionally- going out of your comfort zone, and so much more!

Got a side project? Join the Out of Hours sprint here: https://www.outofhours.org/courses/sideprojectsprintMy guest today is Alice Bentinck - most well known as the founder of Entrepreneur First: the world's leading talent investor: building startups teams from scratch across the world.Today, we're here to talk about her side project - Code First Girls. Code First Girls are on a mission to help women rewrite their future. Their website reads: “Through the power of community, change can and will happen.” Their active community of coders, trainers and coaches is one of the largest in the UK, facilitating women to break into and excel within the industry. They have since taught over 20,000 girls to code, and connected them with over 50 top employers.We explore why scale matters, how to know if corporate sponsorship is the right revenue model for you, why non-profits need a business models and whether new ideas are best built under pressure. I hope you enjoy! See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

Toby speaks with Anna Brailsford, CEO of Code First Girls, an organisation dedicated to transforming tech. Code First Girls provide the skills, space and inspiration for women to become developers and future leaders in the tech industry.You can boost company productivity, avoid PR disasters, and build a thriving workplace that attracts the best talent by watching our webinar!

Melanie Boylan interviews Anna Brailsford, CEO of Code First Girls and Board Member for the Institute of Coding, about diversity and women in leadership. Anna Brailsford is the CEO of Code First Girls, a social enterprise that is increasing the number of women in tech by training women in coding skills and helping companies to develop more inclusive recruitment policies. Code First Girls has provided free coding education to over 20,000 women and each year they teach more women to code than the entire UK university sector. Anna is also a Board Member for the Institute of Coding. Before joining CF:G Anna was the CEO and co-founder of Founders Factory incubated EdTech startup Frisbee. Prior to that, Anna was the Commercial Director of Lynda.com and LinkedIn. Code First Girls is an award-winning social enterprise on a mission to provide the skills, space and inspiration for women to become developers and future leaders in the tech space. Code First Girls achieves this by working with companies and women to effect change. Made up of 20,000+ women in its community, with over 50% from BAME backgrounds, 58+ nationalities represented, Code First Girls is a community led organisation that provides courses dedicated to developing the next generation of tech leaders, through immersive teaching and coaching opportunities. More about Melanie twitter.com/STOMPSMTraining Over the years I have worked with SME, FMCG and State Bodies I'm delighted to say I now support and train all sizes of business and my business has grown with my clients. I provide Adult Education and support for people in Business. With my many years of experience in promoting services and charities in Ireland and the UK; I have been very fortunate to establish a strong network of contacts and over the years have learnt how best to promote a business online and improve their social media scoring. Creating a professional image and maintaining it is the crux of a great marketing plan and is instrumental in today's climate in making your business stand out, I can tailor my services to your requirements. Over the last few years I have started working in other areas I have a genuine passion in. I have been avid writer for a number years and started working as a Freelance Writer with Irish Tech News since 2016 and StartUp Mindset since October 2019.

My guest is Amali de Alwis. Amali is responsible for Microsoft’s strategic and commercial direction across Microsoft’s startup and scale-up activities in the UK. Prior to this she was CEO of Code First: Girls - a multi award-winning training company focused on increasing diversity in tech.“It’s never a fait-accomplis… you never get a badge saying you’ve reached your maximum level of good communication. Different things are needed at different times, you need to wear different hats for different conversations… just making sure you give yourself that time to self-reflect when things either do go well or they don’t go well, what are the kinds of things that could have happened differently.”She was a founding member at Tech Talent Charter, was named the ‘Most Influential Women in UK Technology’ and was awarded an MBE in 2019 for services to diversity and training in the technology industry. She is a board Member at the Raspberry PI Foundation, Ada, National College for Digital Skills; and D&I Board at the Institute of Coding.Click here for full show notes and more episodes of Better Conversations with Sehaam Cyrene.

Anna Brailsford is the CEO of Code First: Girls, a social enterprise that looks to increase the amount of women in tech, by training women in IT skills and helping companies to develop more inclusive recruitment policies. Anna is also a Board Member for the Institute of Coding. Before joining CF:G Anna was the CEO and co-founder of Founders Factory incubated EdTech startup Frisbee. Prior to that, Anna was the Commercial Director of Lynda.com and LinkedIn.

Mária Solárová je mladá developerka so skúsenosťami zo softvérového vývoja aj biznis developmentu. Pracovala v londýnskom aj americkom Googli, po príchode späť na Slovensko jej učarovali roboty vo firme Photoneo. V IT ju najviac baví prepájať technické znalosti s mäkkými zručnosťami, čo sa snaží odovzdávať aj vo svojich vzdelávacích aktivitách. Už niekoľko rokov sa venuje vedeniu ženských komunít v programoch ako PyLadies, Django Girls a Code First Girls. A práve o nich bude naša najbližšia diskusia. V rozhovore s Máriou sa dozviete: -prečo sa oplatí dať šancu IT a programovaniu, -čo zvládne naprogramovať každá z nás, -kde sa môžete spoločne učiť programovať, -ako sa dajú získané zručnosti zúročiť v praxi, -čo sa v ženských IT komunitách naučila ona. Diskusiu moderuje Mirka Uhnak, CEO Mini Tech MBA for Women.

Code First Girls, the UK social enterprise working to close the gender gap in technology, has today announced it has surpassed its 2017 campaign goal to teach over 20,000 young women how to code in the UK and Ireland. Over the past three years, Code First Girls has become the largest provider of free coding courses for women, having delivered over £14million worth of free technology education. The announcement comes at a critical time to close the IT skills gap, only 19 percent of those pursuing Computer Science at higher education level are women. As part of Code First Girls’ ongoing commitment to increase the representation of women in technology, the social enterprise is launching its 2021 vision to give women a fair advantage. Code First Girls is pledging to double its community of women in technology in 2021, in an effort to close the growing skills gap in the UK. Early-stage employability In the last year, Code First Girls has taught over three times as many women to code than the entire UK university undergraduate system. The social enterprise has partnered up with over 50 UK universities, making it the largest university network in the UK, to bring free coding courses to young women. Through these classes, the social enterprise has provided students with the digital literacy skills they need to rewrite their future and connect them to technology career opportunities. As part of their new strategy, Code First Girls are working with UK employers, across a range of industries, to develop twelve-week nano degree programmes, which specifically train women for jobs including software developers. The social enterprise will also offer a breadth of short and accessible online courses designed to impart technical skills, confidence, or career discovery and classes to teach coding fundamentals in web development, Python, or data. The announcement comes on the heels of recent data from the Office of National Statistics, which highlights that women only make up 17 percent of IT professionals, a trend that has remained stagnant over the past ten years. There is an urgent need to diversity the industry, in order to achieve gender parity. Reskilling in the face of COVID-19 Code First Girls’ 2021 vision follows the latest research from The Centre of Economic Performance, which found women are more likely to lose their jobs than men in the COVID-19 crisis, as female-dominated sectors face devastation. Women need to reskill due to COVID-19 and with the Code First Girl programmes, including virtual coding classes and upskilling, women are able to develop their digital literacy and open the doors to a wide range of stable technical careers. The social enterprise is also committed to actively investing in developing the community network and access through its mentorship programme to build confidence and facilitate career paths, targeting imposter syndrome. This is fundamental to supporting women beyond the hiring stage, as it’s estimated 90 percent of women in the UK experience imposter syndrome at work. This is fundamental now more than ever in a remote workplace, to empower women and ensure their roles and ability to focus on them are protected. “We’re thrilled to have been able to deliver on our promise to help 20,000 women learn to code. But we are just getting started. We’re launching a new strategy and urging businesses to help close the gender gap further through investing in female talent that want a career in tech, and create additional possibilities for them.” said Anna Brailsford, CEO at Code First Girls. “COVID-19 accelerated appetite for coding education, as we saw an unprecedented growth, by 800 percent, in registrations for our virtual classes during lockdown. Coding education is important, now more than ever. Over the last few months, we have been working to help women who have been displaced by COVID-19 redundancies or entering a tough graduate market to reskill and find employm...

Almost everyone accepts the importance of mentoring, but so few of us actually have a mentoring relationship. How do you find a mentor? What does that relationship look like? And what does the outcome of mentoring lead to?Selina Pavan, a long-time friend of Code First Girls and senior tech leader at Bank of America joins us to share her own story and her personal passion for mentoring. Produced by: Jonathan HewittEdited by: The MPowered Podcast Network

To kick off Season Two of Searching for Mana - Lloyd was delighted to be joined by Anna BrailsfordAnna is the CEO of Code First: Girls and a Board Member for the Institute of Coding.Before joining CF:G Anna was the CEO and co-founder of Founders Factory incubated EdTech startup Frisbee. Prior to that, Anna was the Commercial Director of Lynda.com and LinkedIn. When LinkedIn acquired Lynda for $1.5 Billion in April 2015, she became part of the fourth-largest acquisition in social media history and subsequently contributed to the creation of LinkedIn Learning.As always, please remember to like, share and subscribe to the show - it genuinely makes a huge difference!

Alice Bentinck is the co-founder of Entrepreneur First, the world's leading talent investor, and Code First: Girls. With these organisations, she is training the next generation of founders around the world. Challenging ideas about acceptable communication and behaviour in professional relationships, this week’s episode is a great insight into building partnerships that last, and improving diversity in startup culture.

Super Women is a documentary series from two modern creatives making kickass films about kickass women. This is the extended podcast channel featuring the full interviews in podcast form. In this episode we explore the world of tech interviewing Amali De Alwis MBE FRSA, former CEO of Code First Girls and now head of startups at Microsoft. Code First Girls has taught more women to code than the British University system and they are on track to smash their target of teaching 20,000 women to code for free by the end of 2020. The Super Women platform was launched in 2019 and co-founded by BBC broadcaster Georgie Rogers and documentary film director Alice Smith. The duo joined forces with a crew of aspiring female filmmakers to create real opportunities for women in the industry and address gender imbalance behind the camera.   From Elspeth Beard, the first British woman to motorcycle around the world in the 1980s (at the age of 23), to an award-winning record producer Catherine Marks and jewellery designer and independent business owner Tessa Metcalfe the films and podcasts in Series One highlight what it took for women to blaze the trail across business, music, motorsports, politics, tech and culture to realise their dreams in the most extraordinary ways. Watch the films and find out more at https://www.superwomenhq.com/ or over on Instagram https://www.instagram.com/superwomenhq/ or Facebook https://www.facebook.com/superwomentv/ This podcast was presented and edited by Georgie Rogers. Music very kindly gifted from Medium Love, Gus Harvey and Femme, who now goes by the alias Lau.ra.

Alice Bentinck and Beccy Speight join James Ashton to discuss campaigning conservation, fashioning leaders from founders and megalomaniac tendencies. Alice Bentinck is the co-founder of Entrepreneur First, a venture that turns talented individuals into entrepreneurs. Since it began in 2011, more than 1,200 people have been through the EF programme, creating 230 start-ups worth a collective $1.5bn. Bentinck began her career at the consulting firm McKinsey and chose founding EF over a job at Google. She also set up Code First: Girls, a charity that has taught 5,000 girls to computer code for free while at university. Beccy Speight became chief executive of the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds earlier this year. The RSPB is the largest conservation organisation in Europe, with more than 1.2m members, over 2,000 employees and around 12,000 volunteers. It maintains over 200 nature reserves which are home to 80pc of the UK’s rarest or most threatened bird species. Speight joined the 130-year old charity from the Woodland Trust where she had been chief executive since 2014. Prior to that she spent 14 years at the National Trust, rising to become director for the Midlands region. Find out more @leadingpod or www.leadingpod.com

Alice Bentinck MBE has helped catalyse over 75 start-up companies around the world via her incubator 'Entrepreneur First'. With investment from illustrious business leaders including Reid Hoffman of LinkedIn, who is now also a board member, Entrepreneur First focuses on funding ambitious individuals across Europe and Asia - and started from the so-called Silicon Roundabout in London's Old Street. Alice now also runs Code First: Girls, an organisation dedicated to helping female university students of arts subjects learn skills to allow them to work in the technology sector. And it all started with raising goats.In this episode of Women Tech Charge, Alice talks to Anne Marie Imafidon about her journey in the tech industry - including what she did when her peers told her she was crazy.Join the conversation: use the hashtag #WomenTechChargeSubscribe to the Evening Standard on YouTube for exclusive Women Tech Charge video clips as well as news, lifestyle and tech videoFind more tech news coverage at Standard.co.uk/techFollow Alice Bentinck on Twitter @Alicebentinck, Code First Girls @CodeFirstGirls and Entrepreneur First @join_efWant to join Entrepreneur First? Visit the website https://www.joinef.comTo find out more about Code First: Girls visit https://www.codefirstgirls.org.ukFollow Anne Marie Imafidon on Twitter @aimafidon, and instagram @notyouraverageAMIFollow the Evening Standard on Twitter @eveningstandard and Instagram @evening.standard, and join our Tech group on FacebookPlease subscribe, rate and review Women Tech Charge on Apple Podcasts, Acast, Spotify or wherever you listen. See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

The Guilty Feminist Presented by Deborah Frances-White and Athena Kugblenu Episode 156: Women in STEM with special guests Faith Uwadiaea and Amali de Alwis Recorded 19 November 2018 at Kings Place in London. Released 1 July 2019. The Guilty Feminist theme by Mark Hodge and produced by Nick Sheldon. More about Deborah Frances-White http://deborahfrances-white.com https://twitter.com/DeborahFW https://www.virago.co.uk/the-guilty-feminist-book More about Athena Kugblenu https://www.athenakugblenu.co.uk https://twitter.com/athenakugblenu  More about Faith Uwadiaea https://twitter.com/faith_uwadiae More about Amali de Alwis and Code First Girls https://twitter.com/amali_d https://twitter.com/CodeFirstGirls https://www.codefirstgirls.org.uk For more information about this and other episodes… visit guiltyfeminist.com tweet us twitter.com/guiltfempod like our Facebook page facebook.com/guiltyfeminist check out our Instagram instagram.com/theguiltyfeminist or join our mailing list eepurl.com/bRfSPT Big Speeches workshops in London 21 and 28 July in London. Book your place now. Guilty Feminist jewellery is now available https://www.road-from-damascus.co.uk The Negotiations special episode of the podcast is now available to purchase. http://guiltyfeminist.com/product/include-yourself-podcast/ Come to a live recording! Sunday 7 July, The Royal Albert Hall. Tickets on sale now. Wednesday 17 July, Kings Place in London. Tickets on sale now. 2, 3, 4 August, Pleasance Courtyard at the Edinburgh Fringe. Tickets on sale now. Saturday 10 August, Underbelly South Bank. Tickets on sale soon. Saturday 24 August, The Secret Policeman’s Tour, Edinburgh Playhouse. Tickets on sale now. Monday 7 September, The London Podcast Festival. Tickets on sale now. Monday 21 October, Kings Place in London. Tickets on sale now. Leave us a review and rate us on Apple Podcasts!

GUEST BIO: My guest on today’s show is an aspiring tech polymath, a coder, a speaker and a teacher.  She joined Atos’s rotational graduate scheme in 2016 under the Technical Consultancy Stream and was awarded Graduate of the Year in 2018.  She is also a Course Instructor for Code First: Girls.   EPISODE DESCRIPTION: Phil’s guest on today’s podcast is Shaquilla Johnson. She is just starting out on her IT career, yet she has already been able to have a big impact. In 2016, she joined Atos’ graduate scheme. Shaquilla went on to win the 2018 Graduate of the Year award. She is already speaking at conferences and running courses at Code First: Girls. Shaquilla is an AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner and is currently taking more courses. For the past three years, she has been working on her own tech blog. KEY TAKEAWAYS: (1.06) – I wanted to start by asking you about Code First: Girls. So, I understand you got a bit of a background in there before you went into the instruction side of things? Around 2015, while at university, Shaquilla took an introductory coding course through Code First: Girls. It was quite basic. But, still covered beginner’s web development, simple HTML, CSS, Get and UX design. It gave her a good insight into the world of tech and careers within that industry. At that point, Shaquilla realized that a career in tech was for her. So, she cancelled her audit and tax related applications and looked around for something IT related. She applied for a technical graduate scheme at a tech company that provided IT services. In 2016, she secured a place on the Atos graduate scheme. She has taken more courses and is now at the stage where she is able to volunteer and help others. Something she really enjoys doing. For her, paying it forward is important. (3.44) - So, do you take time out to do that? Shaquilla explains that she mainly works as an instructor in the evenings. Usually for 8 weeks at a time. Code First: Girls runs courses throughout the year. So, the instructors are able to fit when they volunteer to run the courses around the rest of their lives. (4.30) - I presume you're going to be sticking to that and continuing for a while. Shaquilla confirms she has no plans to stop working as a volunteer instructor. (5.19) – Can you please share a unique career tip with the I.T. career audience? Her top career tip is to always remember that you are in control and act that way. Your managers, peers and mentors can all help you to progress. But, ultimately you are the one that is in control, the person that always has your best interests at heart. Occasionally, companies will lie to you to get you to work for them or things will not work out as expected for another reason. When that happens, you owe it to yourself to have a conversation to try to change things or move on. (6.55) – Can you tell us about your worst career moment? There have been times when the morale of the team she has been working with was very low. Something that happens a lot when things are not going to plan. (8.27) – So, did you learn about how to deal with that stress? Shaquilla said she has been able to use those situations to learn more about handling stress. She is now more resilient and now understands how to use her mind to deal with the situation effectively. It has taught her to pause and rationalize what she is feeling, so she can find her way through the problem. (9.12) – What was your best career moment? your greatest success, so far. That was winning Graduate of the Year in 2018. The award came at the end of a packed 18 months. A period during which she was involved in several large projects and became an instructor at Code First: Codes. Her work during that time and winning that award has really opened doors for her. It has also helped her to grow her network. (10.34) – What excites you about the future of the IT industry and careers? The fact that there is always something new on the horizon is something Shaquilla finds exciting and stimulating. There is always something new to learn and understand. The fact that in a few years we will be using tech we have not even thought of now is really exciting. Shaquilla cannot wait to see how these things shape the world. Unlike many of us, Shaquilla is not afraid of change. She is not fearful of automation. It will change things drastically, but, there will be other techs we can use to create new products and solutions, things that will likely blow our minds. (13.57) – What first attracted you to a career in IT? Shaquilla was drawn to IT in part because it is such a fast paced environment to work in. It is the industry that will lead us into the future. So, be authentic. (14.17) – What is the best career advice you have ever received? Be yourself, your best self. If you try to create a persona and become a caricature, a fake version of yourself, people will easily see through you. (14.43) - Conversely, what is the worst career advice you've ever received? To date, Shaquilla does not think she has received any bad advice. Just things that she has felt were not relevant, or appropriate, for her personally. (15.07) – If you were to begin your IT career again, right now, what would you do? When Shaquilla attended university, she decided to study physics. If she were to start again she would study computer science instead. (15.44) – What are you currently focusing on in your career? This year Shaquilla wants to do more technical speaking. To date, she has spoken mainly about career decision-related topics. She wants to start to deliver more technical speeches. To get there, she is broadening the work she is doing and actively looking for courses to take that will broaden her experience. (16.37) – What is the number one non-technical skill that has helped you the most in your IT career? Shaquilla says that is definitely empathy. Taking a caring approach is always best. Try to put yourself in that person’s shoes. Often, the reason you are not getting a positive response is nothing to do with what you are doing. Usually, there is something going on in the background of the other person’s life that you do not know about. Listening to and getting to know someone better helps you to build a better working relationship with them. It takes time but is well worth the effort. (17.33) - What do you do to keep your own IT career energized? Seeking out new challenges keeps Shaquilla engaged and enthusiastic. She still finds doing this nerve-wracking. But, she does not let that stop her. Fairly quickly, she gets excited about trying something new. at which point it starts to become enjoyable. (18.14) - What do you do in your spare time away from technology? Shaquilla loves to cook, in particular, baking. She also enjoys eating out, trying new foods and drinks. Fortunately, she lives in London, so has access to an amazing range of cultures and food to try.  (18.42) – Phil asks Shaquilla to share a final piece of career advice with the audience. Her advice is to never stop learning. The saying – we are all students of the school of life” is definitely true. BEST MOMENTS: (5.20) SHAQUILLA – "No one will look out for your career interests like you will." (6.00) SHAQUILLA – "At the end of the day, the best career decisions will come from you." (09.09) SHAQUILLA – "Once you get control of your mind, and learn to rationalize handling stressful situations becomes much easier.” (14.19) SHAQUILLA – “Be authentic, be yourself, be your best self." (18.07) SHAQUILLA – "You learn the most when you're kind of forced to make it work.” (18.49) SHAQUILLA – "Never stop learning." CONTACT SHAQUILLA: Twitter: https://twitter.com/shaquillaevelyn LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/shaquillaevelynjohnson/ Website: https://shaquillaevelyn.com/

My guest for this episode is Amali de Alwis MBE, CEO of Code First: Girls, a programme that works with businesses and individuals to encourage more women in into a career in tech. Amali explains her love of making everything from electronic circuits and toy costumes as a child to strategies for blue chip companies in her career. As Amali says, "the technology is just technology, it's just the tools. What we want to do is encourage people use their imagination to feel empowered and enabled, so if they see these problems if there are things they want to change, they have the skills and knowledge to do that."

Welcome to Le Wagon Live! This week, we’re talking to Alice Bentink. Alice started her career at McKinsey & Company and went on to co-found Entrepreneur First, an organisation that helps the world’s most ambitious technologists build their own tech startups from scratch. They have more investments in AI than any other fund in Europe!She also set up Code First Girls, a not - for - profit that has taught over 5,000 women to code for free whilst still at university. She’s a really inspirational woman, and has some amazing stories, so sit back and enjoy!Podcast and music production : yoann.saunier.me See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

Amali de Alwis, CEO of Code First: Girls, discusses providing free coding courses to support new waves of female tech talent, the need for greater diversity in tech, retaining a diverse workforce, newly emerging roles and specialisms, bringing together different generations of talent, work life balance, and creating the leaders of the future.

Ronan talks to Amali de Alwis the CEO of Code First: Girls. Amali talks about her background, how she got involved with Code First: Girls, what coding languages they teach, and what barriers she sees stopping more women going into tech and stem. Amali also talks about what we can do to get more women in tech and stem, and how the tech and stem environment has changed for women over the past 20 years.

In this special episode of Octal FM we're joined by two guests to talk about alternative approaches to getting into the technology industry and software development. Specifically, we discuss what the organisation Code First: Girls is doing to increase the number of women in tech. Code First: Girls is a not for profit social enterprise. Since 2013 they've delivered £4.2 million worth of free education to young women across the UK. Their purpose is to increase the number of women in tech. Amali de Alwis is CEO of Code First: Girls. You can find her on Twitter at @amali_d. Lizzie Cullen Davison is a full-stack developer at Pixie Labs and a volunteer Code First: Girls instructor. You can find her on Twitter at @emc_dav. FYI Jalada also works at Pixie Labs.

Panel: Charles Max Wood Guest: Nadia Odunayo This week on My Ruby Story, Charles talks to Nadia Odunayo. Nadia was previously on Ruby Rogues Episode 264 and she used to have her own podcast called Ruby Book Club. She first got into programming because when she was in college she launched a creative writing publication and she was frustrated that she had to keep asking others for help. This was when she started researching coding and how it all worked so that she could put her ideas into action. They talk about Ruby being the first programming language she learned, the importance of learning both the frontend and the backend, her desire to run her own thing, her need to find a company that would support her learning, and more! In particular, we dive pretty deep on: Ruby Rogues Episode 264 Ruby Book Club How did you first get into programming? Hated having to ask other for help Studied Philosophy, Politics, and Economics at University Code First: Girls Have you done much with your degree? Her first talk as a junior Ruby developer Economics is about how people behave Was Ruby your first programming language? Learning HTML, CSS and the Ruby and Rails Frontend VS backend How long was the program? Learning Ruby first and the pros to that Sinatra Do you feel like the boot camp prepared you to be a full-time Ruby developer? Wanting to run her own thing Doing these courses only scratches the surface How did you find a company that supported your learning? Pivotal Labs TDD and pairing When she joined Pivotal VS now What are you doing currently? And much, much more! Links: Ruby Rogues Episode 264 Ruby Book Club Code First: Girls Ruby Rails Sinatra Pivotal Labs @nodunayo nadiaodunayo.com Nadia’s GitHub Sponsors: FreshBooks Loot Crate Picks: Charles Being willing to get some help Kiwi Crate Nadia Nonviolent Communication by Marshall B. Rosenberg The Evolution of Trust Work Life Podcast

Panel: Charles Max Wood Guest: Nadia Odunayo This week on My Ruby Story, Charles talks to Nadia Odunayo. Nadia was previously on Ruby Rogues Episode 264 and she used to have her own podcast called Ruby Book Club. She first got into programming because when she was in college she launched a creative writing publication and she was frustrated that she had to keep asking others for help. This was when she started researching coding and how it all worked so that she could put her ideas into action. They talk about Ruby being the first programming language she learned, the importance of learning both the frontend and the backend, her desire to run her own thing, her need to find a company that would support her learning, and more! In particular, we dive pretty deep on: Ruby Rogues Episode 264 Ruby Book Club How did you first get into programming? Hated having to ask other for help Studied Philosophy, Politics, and Economics at University Code First: Girls Have you done much with your degree? Her first talk as a junior Ruby developer Economics is about how people behave Was Ruby your first programming language? Learning HTML, CSS and the Ruby and Rails Frontend VS backend How long was the program? Learning Ruby first and the pros to that Sinatra Do you feel like the boot camp prepared you to be a full-time Ruby developer? Wanting to run her own thing Doing these courses only scratches the surface How did you find a company that supported your learning? Pivotal Labs TDD and pairing When she joined Pivotal VS now What are you doing currently? And much, much more! Links: Ruby Rogues Episode 264 Ruby Book Club Code First: Girls Ruby Rails Sinatra Pivotal Labs @nodunayo nadiaodunayo.com Nadia’s GitHub Sponsors: FreshBooks Loot Crate Picks: Charles Being willing to get some help Kiwi Crate Nadia Nonviolent Communication by Marshall B. Rosenberg The Evolution of Trust Work Life Podcast

Panel: Charles Max Wood Guest: Nadia Odunayo This week on My Ruby Story, Charles talks to Nadia Odunayo. Nadia was previously on Ruby Rogues Episode 264 and she used to have her own podcast called Ruby Book Club. She first got into programming because when she was in college she launched a creative writing publication and she was frustrated that she had to keep asking others for help. This was when she started researching coding and how it all worked so that she could put her ideas into action. They talk about Ruby being the first programming language she learned, the importance of learning both the frontend and the backend, her desire to run her own thing, her need to find a company that would support her learning, and more! In particular, we dive pretty deep on: Ruby Rogues Episode 264 Ruby Book Club How did you first get into programming? Hated having to ask other for help Studied Philosophy, Politics, and Economics at University Code First: Girls Have you done much with your degree? Her first talk as a junior Ruby developer Economics is about how people behave Was Ruby your first programming language? Learning HTML, CSS and the Ruby and Rails Frontend VS backend How long was the program? Learning Ruby first and the pros to that Sinatra Do you feel like the boot camp prepared you to be a full-time Ruby developer? Wanting to run her own thing Doing these courses only scratches the surface How did you find a company that supported your learning? Pivotal Labs TDD and pairing When she joined Pivotal VS now What are you doing currently? And much, much more! Links: Ruby Rogues Episode 264 Ruby Book Club Code First: Girls Ruby Rails Sinatra Pivotal Labs @nodunayo nadiaodunayo.com Nadia’s GitHub Sponsors: FreshBooks Loot Crate Picks: Charles Being willing to get some help Kiwi Crate Nadia Nonviolent Communication by Marshall B. Rosenberg The Evolution of Trust Work Life Podcast

Diversity is widely celebrated in contemporary society. Big employers have adopted elaborate strategies to recruit more diverse workforces. On the world stage, diversity is posited as a progressive antidote to ‘backward forces’ clinging to outdated national cultures. But has diversity become an illiberal orthodoxy? When Google engineer James Damore notoriously inquired whether diversity was an incontestable virtue, he lost his job. Do diversity policies invite a permanent war of cultures, resulting in a society increasingly segmented along the lines of identity? Can we achieve fair treatment and equal access to jobs without creating discriminatory and divisive hiring practices? SPEAKERS JOSIE APPLETONdirector, civil liberties group, Manifesto Club; author, Officious: rise of the busybody state; blogs at notesonfreedom.com AMALI DE ALWISCEO, Code First: Girls; chair, BIMA Diversity panel; fellow, RSA DREDA SAY MITCHELLauthor, journalist, broadcaster and campaigner; winner, CWA’s John Creasey Dagger for debut novel, Running Hot; latestnovel, Blood Daughter CATHY YOUNGUS journalist and commentator; weekly columnist, Newsday; author, Ceasefire!

Matt Clifford is the co-founder and CEO of Entrepreneur First, the world's leading technology company builder. EF invests in top technical individuals to help them build world-class deep tech startups in London and Singapore. Since 2011, they’ve created over 100 startups, including Magic Pony, an AI company acquired by Twitter in 2016, and Cleo, a chat app for banking.   Matt is also the co-founder of Code First: Girls, a free part-time course for high-potential female university students who want to be part of the digital revolution.   In 2016, Matt received an MBE from the Queen of England for recognition of his work.   As always, connect with us on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn or on our website at bankingthefuture.com.   If you like today's show, please subscribe on iTunes, or your podcast platform of choice, and leave us a review.   Thank you very much for joining us today. Please welcome, Matt Clifford.

This episode we chatted to Alice Bentinck Co-Founder of Code First Girls and Entrepreneur First about the importance of upskilling, flipping the perception of PhD utility, and the rise of domain specialist founders.

After a small break, GeekGirl is back interviewing another amazing lady in tech. This time, GeekGirl sat down with Amali de Alwis, an amazing woman with another non-linear career, now leading an organisation to help women learn to code. If you want to feel inspired (and possibly learn something new) head to www.codefirstgirls.org.uk. From initially wanting to be an Astronaut, to now empowering women in many ways, Amali is a personal GeekGirl heroine. Have a listen to the podcast and enjoy! Amali de Alwis is CEO of Code First: Girls, a social enterprise who work with companies and women to increase the proportions of women in tech and entrepreneurship. They do this by running free and paid coding courses for women and for companies, by advising companies on tech talent processes and policy, and by running a community of 3500+ women who are interested in tech. Over the past 3 years they’ve provided £1.5 million worth of free tech education, and taught 2500+ women how to code. They are the largest provider of free in person coding courses for women in the UK. ​​Amali previously worked as a consultant at PwC, which included a secondment to the World Economic Forum. Prior to this she was a senior research and strategy consultant at TNS Global. Outside of the day job, she is a Commissioner on the Doncaster Skills and Education Commission, a small business mentor through Start-up direct and CommonwealthFirst, a Tech London Advocate, and a fellow at the RSA.​ Follow Amali at @amali_d on Twitter and @codefirstgirls.

Matt Clifford is co-founder and CEO of Entrepreneur First, Europe's leading pre-seed investment programme for founders of deep technology startups. Founded in 2011, EF backs the world's top technical talent pre-company. EF's startups have raised over $100m in funding and are breaking ground in artificial intelligence, robotics and infrastructure, among other fields. Outside EF, he is co-founder and non-executive director of Code First Girls and non-executive director of Techfortrade. Before starting EF, Matt worked at McKinsey & Co. as a strategy consultant, and studied at the University of Cambridge and at MIT.    In Today’s Episode You Will Learn: 1.) How did Matt come to found the world's top technical talent pre-company programme? 2.)  Should everyone be an entrepreneur? How can a founder determine whether this is the right path for them? Can entrepreneurialism be taught or is it an innate skill within? 3.) What does Matt think of the idea and fear of many founders that they are simply not ready? How do we know when one is ready? What are the signs? 4.) How important is mindset for founders? Matt has previously stated the importance of a growth mindset? What does he mean by this and how does he advise founders to approach this? 5.) What is the most common mistake Matt sees entrepreneurs in EF make? How does he help to combat this? 6.) What does the future of work look like? Where will jobs be at this century? Items Mentioned In Today’s Episode:  Matt's Fave Book: Sapiens (Same as Parker Thompson @ AngelList) Matt's Fave Blog: Marginal Revolution Matt's Most Recent Investment: Cloud NC, Third Eye As always you can follow The Twenty Minute VC, Harry and Matt on Twitter here! If you would like to see a more colourful side to Harry with many a mojito session, you can follow him on Instagram here!   The Twenty Minute VC is brought to you by Leesa, the Warby Parker or TOMS shoes of the mattress industry. Lees have done away with the terrible mattress showroom buying experience by creating a luxury premium foam mattress that is order completely online and ships for free to your doorstep. The 10 inch mattress comes in all sizes and is engineered with 3 unique foam layers for a universal, adaptive feel, including 2 inches of memory foam and 2 inches of a really cool latex foam called Avena, design to keep you cool. All Leesa mattresses are 100% US or UK made and for every 10 mattresses they sell, they donate one to a shelter. Go to Leesa.com/VC and enter the promo code VC75 to get $75 off!  

In our second GeekGirl Meets podcast, we had the pleasure of being joined by Sarah Drinkwater, Head of Campus London. Sarah heads up Google’s first physical startup hub, providing early stage founders with work and event space, mentorship and educational programs as well as access to a vibrant startup community. Since launch in 2012, Campus has built a community of over 50,000. Passionate about entrepreneurship and communities, Sarah’s previous role at Google was leading a global team of community managers around Google Maps, while also volunteering at Campus helping to run Campus for Mums. Before Google, she worked in content and community for startups, advised brands on their social media, and was a journalist. Sarah’s on the board of Code First: Girls which provides classes and a support network for young women keen to work in tech and combines her enthusiasms for education and diversity. Outside of work, Sarah loves travelling, cycling, cities and stories, and lives in East London with her soon-to-be husband. Links mentioned in the podcast: Code First Girls - http://www.codefirstgirls.org.uk/ Dot Everyone - https://dot-everyone.workable.com/jobs/180436 Twitter - https://twitter.com/sarahdrinkwater

WATCH: http://londonrealacademy.com/episodes/alice-bentinck-entrepreneur-first/ Alice Bentinck is the co-founder of Entrepreneur First, the leading pre-seed investment programme for Europe’s best technical founders. After McKinsey & Co, Alice turned down an offer from Google to found Entrepreneur First. Alice taught herself to code, and founded Code First: Girls in 2013 to help more women get into tech. Alice sits on the board of Sherry Coutu‘s Founders4Schools, is on Imperial College London’s Department of Computing Industrial Liaison Board, and acted as the Prime Minister’s expert on startups at the Northern Future Forum. Alice has been recognised in Management Today’s 35 under 35 and the Evening Standard’s Top 1000 most influential Londoners. Alice Bentinck on Twitter: http://twitter.com/AliceBentinck Entrepreneur First on Twitter: http://twitter.com/efLDN WATCH MORE SILICON REAL EPISODES: http://londonrealacademy.com/silicon-real/