My Burger Manifesto | Lucky Peach – David Chang lays down his vision of the perfect burter. My favourite bit:
You know who fucks up burgers more than anyone else in the world? Australians. Australia has no idea what a burger is. They put a fried egg on their burger. They put canned beetroot on it, like a wedge of it. I am not joking you. This is how they eat their burger.
Ha! Sorry my Aussie countrymen, but he ain’t wrong.
It’s been a frustrating week. On Monday I got an email from SydStart announcing that pre-release tickets for “the biggest startup conference in Australia” were about to go on sale. Excited, I scrolled down to see the speakers list and was greeted with a list of all men. “Wait, really?!” I thought. I’m not naive; I certainly didn’t expect equal representation. But I thought they’d at least put a token woman on the list. I went to the website and saw the same wall of dudes. Frustrated, I sent them a tweet:
Hey @SydStart – if you want to actually include any women speakers in your event, I can recommend several (including ME)!
— Kris Howard (@web_goddess) July 13, 2015
I got a reply not long after saying: “Hi. We’re looking forward to announcing more speakers soon! Stay tuned!” Kind of a non-answer, right? Does it mean they have some amazing women speakers yet to be announced, or they’re currently scrambling trying to find someone? I shared the screenshot and my complaint in the Girl Geeks FB group and was heartened to see I wasn’t the only one annoyed by this. Other people were tweeting to them as well. It got picked up by StartupSmart, who reported that the organisers claimed they had invited a couple women but they wanted speaking fees and there was no budget for it. But they’re totally asking some others! (So yeah. Scrambling.) Today Women’s Agenda posted a list of female founders they could have asked. I also discovered that someone has actually set up an All Male Panels Tumblr to catalogue stuff like this (complete with hilarious photos of the Hoff added).
Frustrating, right? Look, I know that there aren’t as many female startup founders at the “Global Influencer” level, and the few that are probably turn down 90% of their speaker invitations. Totally get that. (In fact, I work for one of them.) The solution is not to throw your hands up and say, “Welp, we tried!” when you can’t find a female Elon Musk for your event. There are so many other options!
And of course, this all happens alongside the Reddit shitshow, which I can’t even discuss without launching into a rant. Now it looks like Pao wasn’t even involved in firing Taylor, and their female lead engineer just quit, and maybe it was all a long con anyway? Regardless, the haters are cheering. I have no idea whether Pao was good at her job or not. It’s impossible to tell when 99% of the criticism thrown at her is sexist ranting. But hey, at least I learned what the term “glass cliff” means.
Oh! And add “algorithmic bias” to this week’s vocabulary lesson. Seems that Google shows prestigious job ads to men but not women. Sorry, Ellen. Finding the next role just got that much harder.
Last night I gave at talk at the July meetup for Food Tech Australia. I met the organiser of the group – Liz from YouChews – at a Girl Geeks event a few months ago and ended up volunteering to speak. My first pitch was really geeky: I proposed to talk about the Recipe microdata schema and how it enables you to do some pretty cool stuff with recipe syndication. But then I realised the group skewed more “startup entrepreneur” than “techie geek,” so I scrapped it and came up with “Leveraging Content and Design to Grow Your Food Startup”. Much better!
Writing the talk was a great excuse to really research content marketing and learn from some of my colleagues at Canva. I talked about what content marketing is and what benefits it has for a growing startup. I drew heavily upon this blog post about how our Growth team tripled the traffic to our Design School blog, as well as a recent webinar we did with Buzzsumo about the importance of images in your content. I also mentioned a few tools that I recommend for making all this easier, like Canva (of course!), Buffer, and IFTTT. The slides are here if you’re interested.
The talk was held at Fishburners, and there were actually more people there than I’d expected. The other organiser Kevin told me that normally they get 20-25 RSVPs for their events, but this time they’d had 60! I was really floored. I reckon there were maybe 30-40 people actually there on the night. The talk was only 15 minutes or so, and it went really smoothly. (I remembered my Damian Conway training and was suitably attired in dark clothing with my very own clicker.) They had a lot of questions afterwards, and I fumbled and did my best to answer. I also give out Canva credits to the first three people who asked, which was fun.
Overall it was a really positive event. It was my first official talk representing Canva! I learned some new things in the course of putting it together, and I think I could spin it out into a longer presentation with a little more work. I could even pitch it at a more techie crowd by emphasising the automation part more. Several of my colleagues gave me feedback, which was really helpful. And it’s always fun to get to speak in front of a group of passionate, friendly geeks. Thank you to Liz and Kevin again for inviting me! (And thank you to my friend Maria for the photograph.)
(And if you’re a wine drinker, check out The Wine Gallery. The founder gave a short pitch for this new startup, and I was really impressed with the idea and the website.)
PHPBridge – Get Started – Just discovered this great intro PHP course courtesy of PHP Women!
PDF to Keynote | melissa – Very useful utility for presenters! @mobywhale @daphnechong @pyko @lucykbain
Former Google exec says this word can damage your credibility – Business Insider – I’m the worst at this. I do it ALL THE TIME and had never noticed til now!
Colorado’s Effort Against Teenage Pregnancies Is a Startling Success – The New York Times – Science works. Who’da thought?
Best Chicago fabric stores for sewing projects, patterns and more – Bookmarking for our next trip!
We need to talk about startups… – Medium – Food for thought.
