The last 3 years were another rollercoaster to embrace.
This time around it was not an acquisition or an exit. Rather a pivot on everything and every aspect of life. We lived through a transformation of life and business. No stone was left unturned.
2020: everything moves online in three months
When the pandemic hit, our calendar was full of physical events: Coding Girls workshops, meetups, conference plans. Within weeks all of it was gone. Anna made the call early: we would not wait it out, we would go fully virtual. In June 2020 we ran the WomenTech Global Conference as an online event across US and European time zones, with the goal of bringing 100,000 women in tech together. I spent those months on the other side of it, making sure the platform, the streaming, and the networking actually held up when thousands of people showed up at once.
It worked. Not perfectly, but it worked. And it taught us something important: a global community does not need a venue. It needs a reason to show up and infrastructure that respects their time.
2021: compounding instead of recovering
While many event businesses spent 2021 waiting for the old world to come back, the virtual format kept compounding. More members, more ambassadors, more countries. The community that had been mostly European when I wrote my last post became genuinely global. My job stayed the same behind the scenes: build the platforms, keep them fast, and connect the systems so a small team can serve a very large network.
2022: Chief in Tech
This year we launched the Chief in Tech Summit as part of the Women in Tech Global Conference: a dedicated event for senior technology leaders, VPs, CTOs and CIOs. It is the most executive-focused thing we have built so far, and it points at where the next years are going for us.
The quiet workstream: building with AI
There is one more thing I have barely written about. Since 2020 I have been building with OpenAI's models in our production workflows, and since 2021 with Jasper on top. Content operations, summaries, drafts, repetitive work that used to eat evenings. It is not magic and it is not autonomous, but it is the most interesting shift in how I work since I discovered open source. I suspect in a few years this will be the main thing I write about here.
Three years, no exit, and somehow more built than in any three-year stretch before. More soon. I intend to keep this blog alive again.