Summer 2018 Gallery

“Women should feel empowered and empower themselves in decision making in both work and life”, Cindy Cao, Founder and President of Silicon Valley Career Women (SVCW) said so at EDGE2018 Elite Women Conference on July 29, 2018. “It is our annual tradition to host a conference with the theme of women career life enhancement. This year we co-hosted EDGE2018 with LaiOffer and had more than 500 attendees from diverse culture, ethnicity, career backgrounds.” She said so during a live stream interview with Sina North America (home.sina.com). 

Several female leaders and exceptional speakers shared their stories and methodologies at the conference. Maria Zhang, VP of Engineering at LinkedIn, former CTO at Tinder, encouraged women to dream big, embrace obstacles and changes, and always be true to themselves. Lin Liu, CTO of LaiOffer, former engineer manager at Yahoo, explained the importance of women in technology in humorous manner. He said “Men will be replaced by AI. The future belongs to Women”. Vicky Xu, Engineer Manager at Google, a mother of 3 kids shared her best practices of managing her work and life. Some female founders from startups shared their experiences of career development, entrepreneurship, and the importance of diversity. 

The panels and workshops in AI and Blockchain also enhanced career women’s knowledge in the trending technology fields. Radhika  Iyengar-Emens, the Co-founder of DoubleNova Group and Founding Partner of StarChain Ventures strongly encouraged females to explore the blockchain area and contribute their effort in it. As she mentioned, blockchain can solve the problem of biased dataset and females will contribute great values to increase the diversity of training dataset. 

The speakers at Diversity panel in the afternoon are very diverse in ethnicity and work backgrounds. This panel discussion was live streamed to Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/svcareerwomen/videos/923394591180649/

500+ audiences enjoyed interactions with speakers, met new friends at the social lunch and submitted resumes at the career fair. Some found their mentors on that day, some became mentors. If you are interested in finding mentors or helping people, please contact us to join our free mentoring program: mentorintech.com

Silicon Valley Career Women hosted another successful conference on 8/27/2017 at Microsoft Mountain View. The subject was Silicon Valley Women Career Life Enhancement. It was an ethnically and gender diverse event. Four female leaders from top tech companies and more than 100 attendees had a great afternoon together. The four speakers each represents one way of achieve success. They gave awesome inspiring speeches to share their stories and best practices. The tips they shared are useful to every attendee. 

Keynote speaker, Shadi Rostami, VP of Engineering at Palo Alto Networks, grew up in Iran, a male dominated society. She dreamed to exceed what that society expected women to be and her dream came true through hardworking, focus and seizing good opportunities. She advocated "we are all the agents of change", work hard and be successful, be authentic and be yourself, be a role model for younger and your kids, be passionate about what you are doing, support other women. 

Sarah Kaplan, Director of Service Engineering at Microsoft, shared her dos and don'ts of thriving at a large company. She said relationship is very important. In large companies, most people need to work with people across teams and organizations. Building a good relationship is a key element to get work done. She summarized the behaviors that work: 

• take the time to meet people in person, 
• go to lunch with different people, 
• understand other people's priorities to gain alignment, 
• be flexible, adaptable and keep positive, 
• check your ego at the door, 
• take advantage  of trainings, social groups, and brown bags, 
• HR is a great source of information.

As well as the behaviors to avoid:

• do not do everything by yourself
• do not assume there is only one way to solve a problem
• do not assume the people in the room know what you know
• do not burn bridges - always take the high road
• do not go to your manager to solve every problem

Cindy Gao, Global AdX Biz Dev Lead at Google is a successful example of transitioning from software engineer to sales. Her first job was a software engineer at SAP China, but she knew her passion would not focus on engineering so she prepared herself for different roles and successfully got PM job at Microsoft China and then Sales job at Google China. With the growth of Google in global market, she worked for Singapore office and Sydney office to expand the sales channels for the company. Eventually she chose the job in Google's headquarter in Silicon Valley. Her suggestion to the attendees who are thinking about changing career path is: choose the suitable path for yourself, do self-reflection to find out what kind of person you want to be, make a decision when you are facing a lot of choices, then focus on your choice and spend all the time on it.

Xin Hu, Sr. Staff Engineer at LinkedIn shared her thoughts about staying as individual contributor or choosing managerial role. Her suggestion is to follow your true passion, expand and sharpen the key skill sets, and build your personal brand. She advocated everybody to "be the CEO of your own career", and focus on long term growth. Xin has a 7 years old daughter. As a career mom, not only the mother brings positive influence to her child, she also learnt a lot from her daughter's feedbacks and enjoys doing better for her child. 

During the social time, everybody proactively made new friends and expanded business social network. Many attendees showed strong interest in the free mentoring program provided by Silicon Valley Career Women. Good questions were asked by the audiences during panel discussion. Speakers enjoyed sharing their thoughts from different views. The style of the event matches the culture of this community -- learn from each other and help each other. 

Except learning the useful experience sharing from the speeches and panel discussion, many attendees showed strong interest in the free mentoring program and internal referral program. Our mentoring program uses data-driven approach to find the best match between mentors and mentees of soft skills enhancement, as well as track progress.