Planning Your Girl Geek Dinner As A Startup Host
Ignite your startup’s potential: Unleash the power of hosting a Girl Geek Dinner for unrivaled recruitment and talent branding. Discover the extraordinary reasons and indispensable roadmap for planning a triumphant soirée that will revolutionize your startup’s trajectory.
Startups are squarely positioned to benefit from hosting a Girl Geek Dinner for recruiting and talent brand purposes. Here’s why and how startups can plan a successful Girl Geek Dinner.
Driving the partnership: MosaicML Girl Geek Dinner executive sponsor Julie Choi (Chief Community & Marketing Officer) wanted to build her startup’s employer brand for recruiting diverse engineers and research scientists.
From champion to speaker: She had helped plan and spoke at multiple Girl Geek X events while she was heading up AI Product & Research Marketing at Intel Corporation, where she saw first-hand the excitement among speakers and employees who attended the events, and the positive impacts of the partnership on retention and recruitment of high-quality, diverse female candidates.
Challenge: Naturally, when Julie joined MosaicML, she reached out to partner with Girl Geek X again. Despite being small by employee count (the 62-person MosaicML was acquired by Databricks for $1.3 billion this week), startups can establish their talent brand by leveraging and recruiting a diverse speaker roster from leading companies in the field (e.g. Meta AI, Salesforce Research, OpenAI, AWS AI).
Results: Over 120 girl geeks enjoyed networking and AI talks at the sold-out MosaicML Girl Geek Dinner featuring women speaking about AI/ML at leading companies.
Pro-tip: Recruit expert speakers from other companies! Julie and her speakers discussed topics including efficient machine learning training with MosaicML, reinforcement learning, ML-based drug discovery with AtomNet, evaluating recommendation robustness with RGRecSys, turning generative models into products at OpenAI, and much more.
Here’s what MosaicML Girl Geek Dinner 2022 announced for an incredible speaker roster:
#1 — Julie Choi, MosaicML Chief of Growth
Executive welcome — watch or read
#2 — Laura Florescu, MosaicML AI Researcher
“Making ML Training Faster, Algorithmically” — watch or read
#3 — Amy Zhang, Meta AI Research Scientist
“Reinforcement Learning: A Career Journey” — watch or read
#4 — Tiffany Williams, Atomwise Staff Software Engineer
“Addressing Challenges in Drug Discovery” — watch or read
#5 — Shelby Heinecke, Salesforce Research Senior Research Scientist
“Evaluating Recommendation System Robustness” — watch or read
#6 — Angela Jiang, OpenAI Product Manager
“Turning Generative Models From Research Into Products” — watch or read
#7 — Banu Nagasundaram, AWS Machine Learning Product Leader
“Seeking the Bigger Picture” — watch or read
#8 — Lamya Alaoui, Hala Systems Chief People Officer
“10 Lessons Learned Building High Performance Diverse Teams ” — watch or read
By investing the time and effort, together we can create an inclusive environment that fosters diversity and enriches our events. It takes commitment to values and mindfulness to embrace this challenge and commit ourselves to doing the necessary work to recruit a diverse range of speakers. Between the networks of the executive sponsor Julie Choi and the Girl Geek X team, we invited speakers who are industry experts and provided thank you gifts to the speakers. The speakers found it to be a good event for them professionally, from sharing their expertise onstage (recorded for YouTube) to networking with fellow industry experts.
Recruiting set up tables, swag, and signage for the sponsoring company to talk to interested attendees. Most Girl Geek Dinners feature a slew of talks and speakers who inspire and motivate attendees to talk to recruiting afterward. At a recent OpenAI Girl Geek Dinner, OpenAI Member of Technical Staff Alethea Power spoke about how:
“10 years ago, my dream was to get into artificial intelligence, but I didn’t know how to do it. I was a software engineer and site reliability engineer, so attending OpenAI Girl Geek Dinner in 2019 and meeting a recruiter introduced me to Residency Program. I ended up applying full-time and I got three offers [to work at OpenAI]. I wasn’t trying to brag, but thank you. This is more to encourage you.
The AI specialist is the new “it” girl in tech, writes a Vox reporter on the AI boom.
At 2021 Girl Geek X event, a speaker from OpenAI talked about prompt design and engineering for GPT-3 — years before ChatGPT became commonly mentioned in New York Times articles about the raise of AI.
By partnering with Girl Geek X, startups like OpenAI and MosaicML bring pioneering AI/ML technology and diverse women technologists closer together, highlighting how their technologies may become the next invaluable skill set — and perhaps even employ more girl geeks in AI/ML tech!
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