Womens Entrepreneur Festival Re-Cap

What an event.  If you go to Twitter, and put in the hash tag #wefestival you can actually read some of the highlights from the Womens Entrepreneur Festival.  The real highlight was the conversations that were had among all the attendees.  Of course those conversations were not taped but I heard from so many women who were there about the people they met, the businesses they heard about, the relationships they made, the ideas that started....I could go on and on and on.  It was quite a unique event.

What made it so unique was a mixture of things.  The panels were not only inspiring but educational.  Five women on each panel that connected horizontally but not vertically.  That makes for interesting conversation.  They might all be taste makers, community makers or knowledge makers but they are each in very different businesses.  What is of interest is that each entrepreneur has had many of the same experiences from raising money, to growing their businesses, to hiring the right people.  Hearing that from your peers confirms your experience.  It is really helpful because sometimes as an entrepreneur, even though you have investors and employees, you can feel very lonely. 

The audience was the key.  The beauty of having this event at ITP/NYU is that we can afford to charge only $250 a ticket.  That enabled us to have an audience where the ages range from 19-65 and that makes for some serious cross-mentoring and a lot of really interesting conversations.  Having only women there also creates a very different dynamic.  Everyone can put their guard down and talk about issues that are not all relegated to business.  That is healthy and helpful. 

All and all, it was just a fantastic event.  Round 2 is not always so easy to pull off but I bet if you polled everyone there they would say that Round 2 was pretty damn good.