Full Mind and Full Belly at Girl Geek Dinner
Great food and conversation at a women empowering social event? Yes, please! Girl Geek Dinner #149 hosted by BuildingConnected delivered a stimulating night at rustic chic Tank18 Wine Bar.
The evening started with great swag — I’m a sucker for a well designed pencil bag, some EOS chapstick and a hefty dot grid notebook — and was followed by h’orderves! Sometimes, it’s nice to feel a little fancy with finger food, even if you’re wearing sneakers, denim shorts and a tank top. Hello, San Francisco heat wave.
Once the diverse crowd of guests had their fill of mingling and networking — oh yes, the room was full of recruiters, hiring teams, and business cards — Girl Geek Dinner organizers Angie Chang and Sukrutha Raman Bhadouria presented the hosts of the evening, BuildingConnected. BuildingConnected creates preconstruction software for the construction industry to help save time and money in an environment that still relies heavily on faxes and handwritten order forms. Jesse Pedersen, BuildingConnected’s CTO, gave a short introduction before handing the floor over to the main speakers of the night — BuildingConnected’s Jenny Ji (Head of Design), Karen Rose (Software Engineer), Chelsea Hodge (Product Manager), and Chloe Pak (Account Executive).
Jenny Ji was sassy. She had the crowd laughing at her design jokes, admitted she once avoided being a web designer due to the internet’s early “ugly” stage, and then encouraged everyone to “look beneath the boring” because ultimately, medium doesn’t matter as long as you get to design and “design is problem solving.”
Karen Rose inspired bravery with her talk on how to turn opinion into influence. She opened by asking the audience to raise their hand if they’d ever felt afraid to suggest an idea at work. The room was overwhelming full of open palms in the air. Rose insisted “your opinion matters” and encouraged the room to bring attention to problems with a detailed solution.
Chelsea Hodge felt familiar, in a way where you want to be buds over a glass of wine. She was also hilarious and talked about the “magic attributes” to any successful product: 1) Financial No-Brainer, 2) Little to No Set-Up, 3) Makes Work Feel Effortless. By finding the best path for users, the product will produce a win for customers and also the software providers.
Chloe Pak is a natural public speaker and kept the audience engaged with ways to ease the “natural friction” between a business’s sales team and the product team. She emphasized how beneficial it was to occasionally have product and executive leadership jump on sales calls. With these interactions and other forms of communication, the company built trust and empathy.
The talk wrapped up with a Q&A, which provided some comic relief when microphones were passed back and forth, and gave me my favorite line of the night “fall in love with the problem, not the solution.” While traveling home, I felt content with my full belly, inspired mind, and a pocket full of new LinkedIn connections.
