How to Scale Your Dream
Or, How We Ended Up Running a Global Campaign Called “Lady Problems”
About a year ago, right after moving from LA to the Bay Area, I called up my future boss at AngelHack. From my background in philanthropy consulting, I had the opportunity to work on some awesome hackathons with nonprofits supporting girls and women through tech. I saw that hackathons were a great model for rapid innovation in the social impact space. Sure, they’re insanely stressful to plan, but they’re also insanely fun and I pretty much weep with inspiration at the end of every single one I attend (ask my team, it’s true). Weeping from inspiration at work = career goals… right?
So, I decided to talk to this lady who had been deemed the “Mother of All Hackathons.” Long story short, I ended up joining her team within a week of that call. Fast forward to now, I’ve been a part of planning or executing about 100 hackathons. In a year. It was clear that hackathons have immense power, and I was brought on with the mandate of figuring out a way we could make real social impact. Naturally we started small. We increased our focus on marketing our events to diverse groups and organizations. We added a global Code 4 Impact challenge to all 63 hackathons in our Global Series. And then came my pride and joy, the Lady Problems Global Hackathon Series, which was designed to solve problems facing female entrepreneurs that brought together women in tech and male allies across the Americas, Latin America, Europe, Africa, India, Australia and beyond.
What began as a simple thought — to pursue work that made me happy — ended up becoming greater than I ever could have imagined. The same thing happened with Lady Problems itself. It started as a side project to try to host a hackathon that wasn’t a bro-fest, and might do some good in the world. I thought, “maybe this is possible?!”. That honestly was all I felt like I had time for. Probably one or two events in San Francisco. Maybe 50 people?
And now, looking back on Lady Problems — we’re at 17 hackathons with a community of 861 do-gooder hackers (60% female) from 17 cities from Nairobi to Delhi to New York, who’ve built more than 207 projects designed to break down barriers holding back female entrepreneurs. Quite honestly, I’m not sure how we did it, but I’ve made a couple guesses and have decided to share just in case you’ve got a dream that needs scaling:
- Get comfortable with being uncomfortable. I wrote more about this here — but a key part of making this event successful was getting comfortable with the fact that it was a risky move. The name was risky, expanding globally was risky, running a brazenly feminist event (while not excluding males) in male-dominated industry was risky.
- Embrace the haters. From women who felt that we were going about this the entirely wrong way, to men’s rights activists going after us on Twitter — Lady Problems had some haters. By learning the right balance of how to listen and when to respond — this feedback ended up enabling us to create a better event and garner some great organic engagement!
3. Call in favors. AngelHack and our insanely well-connected and world-traveling staff reached out to tons of nonprofit, corporate and startup partners to pull this thing off. From donating entire venues to providing free coding classes, to dropping off some cool swag — partnerships and providing flexible options to partners was a key component to pulling this off.
4. Make “no” more motivating than “yes”. For every favor we called in or partner that said “yes” there were at least 5 that said “no”. In fact, I’m pretty sure the first five responses from partners we got were some variation of “No”. If we had stopped there, the series never would have happened.
5. Surround yourself with pushy people. I really only wanted to do one, small but perfectly run event. That’s what I knew how to do. My boss said, “let’s try for 5–10.” Our head of sales said, “let’s do 15–20”. This totally freaked me out, but they pushed. And at 17 events, I’d say we achieved.
6. Let go and let… team. This never would have been possible without an army of advocates. From the AngelHack team, our amazing Advisory Board of powerful women in tech, our community and nonprofit partners, our awesome global army of Ambassadors, and last but not least the 1,000+ individuals that signed up for our Lady Problems events. A ton of things were out of my control, but for that reason, it was a way better series. That’s what diversity is all about — integrating as many differing perspectives as possible to ensure the best possible outcomes.
Alright that’s all I’ve got for now… Just kidding! If you’ve somehow made it this far and would like even more #inspiration — we’ll be featuring all of the winning teams in an upcoming post — stay tuned!
