THE BEST MOMENTS OF TOP WOMEN IN CLOUD 2018

It was my honor to strategize and connect everyone together for the CloudNOW’s seventh annual Top Women Entrepreneurs in Cloud Innovation Awards event, which welcomed participants from the global founders, CXOs and the next generation of female scholars on 29 January 2019 at Facebook HQ, Silicon Valley. This year event is hosted by Facebook Production Engineering in partnerships with Cloud NOW and Office of the Cloud - Powered by Kaizen Technology Partners and Techstars.

??Download full event booklet: https://bit.ly/cloudnow-booklet

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??View full event photos: https://bit.ly/cloudnow-album

Let's bring back the great moments!

The gorgeous participants poured in the Museum Room, Facebook HQ to register, network, and learn from each other!

Syamla Bandla on behalf of Facebook came on stage to welcome the audience to the 7th TOP WOMEN IN CLOUD 2018 award and introduce the event agenda.

“To all the women in the event today, Together we are creating change and diversity in the world of technology!” Jocelyn DeGance Graham, Founder @CloudNOW_org remarked about the CloudNOW’s STEM scholarship.

Congratulations to all the representatives from HOLBERTON and SHANTI BHAVAN CHILDREN’S PROJECT sharing about their vision and expressing their appreciation to CloudNOW, Org for the CloudNOW STEM Scholarship - batch 2018/19!

Also, we would like to thank our STEM scholarship funders: Facebook, Google, and Intel.

“If you are in this industry, congratulations. I would never stop being amazed by how technology helps to support the humankind, the way we keep in touch with our loved ones, the way we build businesses regionally, to provide the best products and services for people around the world. And women are adding the diversity and the different perspectives to our technology evolution. At Facebook, we still have a long way to go but we are trying to increase our women ratio especially in the leadership team and technical team in every possible way. And strongly supporting this CloudNOW movement is one of our initiatives." On-stage was Sheryl Sandberg - COO of Facebook

Next, it was my honor to introduce to all the audience our honorary keynote speaker and lightning talk speakers!

I have been in the tech industry for over 20yrs and founded Kaizen Technology Partners LLC in 2013 as the first 100% female minority owned Born in the Cloud Focused VAR in the San Francisco Bay Area, helping Fortune 500 Enterprise clients optimize, strategize, and procure data centers and cloud environments.

Hadi Partovi - Code.org Founder, shared with the audience about how he got inspired with coding since childhood and later on became the fuel of his passion to found Code.org

Megan Holston-Alexander, Senior Associate at Unusual Ventures brought an interesting sharing onto the plates of the audience as she talked about began working in nonprofit to use her research background to help create better metrics to more efficiently measure outcomes and impact.

“I join here today because I am invited for who I am, and for my achievements, not only because “I am a woman in tech and it sounds cool.” And I would love to support other women out there to see that they can be who they really are, with their full potentials.” - Another lightning talk of the night from Jenny Lawton, Techstars COO.

To end the lightning talk session, Naitik Mehta, ex-Facebook, and ex-Google, now the CEO of NextBillion.org shared about his company vision of bringing inclusivity and accessibility to the tech industry for billions of people with disabilities around the world. 

VC Panel discussion - all revolves about #WomenInTech movements, and they all stress the importance of how female entrepreneurs, founders, and employees in tech industry should actively look out more for their supporting groups and communities, and share more about their success and failure stories for encouraging the future female leaders.

Moderated: Jenny Fielding - Techstars Managing Director & Kaufman Fellow

Panelists from left to right:

1. Jessica Lin - Work-Bench Co-Founder and General Partner

2. Kristina Shen - Partner at Bessemer

3. Jocelyn Goldfein - Zetta Venture Partner Managing Director

4. Trina Van Pelt - Intel Capital Senior Managing Director

The most awaited moment of the night - on stage were the Awardees of #TopWomenInCloud 2018

This year’s Top Women in Cloud Award winners are: 

- SUSAN WU, Cloud Native Apps Product Marketing, VMware

- RITA SCROGGIN, Practice Director, Triad Group

- KELLY IRELAND, Founder and CEO, CB Technologies, Inc

- SANDY CARTER, Vice President of Windows and Enterprise Workloads, Amazon Web Services

- BRYNNE KENNEDY, CEO and Founder, Topia

- CATHERINE KROW, Founder, Digitory Legal

- CHARU SHARMA, Co-founder and CEO, Next Play

- EDITH HARBAUGH, CEO and Co-founder, LaunchDarkly

- KATHERINE KOSTEREVA, CEO and Managing Partner, bpm’online

- IDIT LEVINE, Founder and CEO, solo.io

- MASHA SEDOVA, Co-founder, Elevate Security

- SARAH GERWECK, Co-founder and Chief Architect, AtScale

- SCE PIKE, CEO, IOTAS

- TONGTONG GONG, Co-founder and COO, Amberdata

To conclude, Syamla Bandla, Director of Production Engineering for Real Time Data Space Facebook, once again presented herself on the stage to give words of thanks to today’s speakers partners & sponsors and especially the all of attendees who made such a great event!

Kaizen Technology Partners Team would like to send our deepest appreciation for all your support to bring such a remarkable event! Let's keep in touch and please let us know how we can help to optimize your Cloud spending!

Keep in touch for upcoming activities from Kaizen Technology Partners!

Photos credit: to the amazing team of Cloud NOW

??Download full event booklet: https://bit.ly/cloudnow-booklet

??Join LinkedIn discussion group: https://www.dhirubhai.net/groups/7041199/

??View full event photos: https://bit.ly/cloudnow-album

#TopWomeninCloud #OfficeoftheCloud #CloudNOW #WomeninTech#KaizenTechnologyPartners