Women 2.0 Conference 2013 "The Next Billion"

Closing keynote by Lynda Weinman, Co-founder and Executive Chair of Lynda.com

Women 2.0's 2013 San Francisco Conference "The Next Billion" took place on Valentine's Day at the Westin St. Francis. Hosted by Kara Swisher, Founder of AllThingsD, the conference brought together an incredible caliber of speakers, finalists and judges together, with a focus on addressing the next billion consumers, markets, and products. 

Opening remarks by host, Kara Swisher, Founder & Co-Executive Editor of AllThingsD (above), followed by an opening welcome by Women 2.0 Co-founder and CEO, Shaherose Charania (below on the left).

Rebecca Lipon from Women 2.0 organizing team (above right).

Sepideh Nasiri (above) speaks shares a few words about Women 2.0 events, which have expanded incredibly within just this past year. Founder Friday events are now taking place internationally in Latin American cities such as Madrid, Barcelona, Buenos Aires and Bogota, as well as in Vancouver. 

Women 2.0 Co-founder Angie Chang working hard behind the scenes (above). Fran Maier, Match.com and TRUSTe Co-founder speaks to the audience, made up of diverse female founders and women in technology, about the faceted role of women.

Michelle Zatlyn, Co-founder of Cloudflare, speaks about her own experience scaling her company from founding team to a billion views a day.

A fireside chat led by Kara Swisher with Selina Tobaccowala, Founder of Evite and SVP Product & Engineering at Survey Monkey. Kara chats with Selina about growing Evite.com from her Stanford dorm room (the company sold to Ticketmaster in 2001) and her strategy of growing to a billion users in emerging markets at Survey Monkey.

Morning coffee break and networking (above), followed by the first session of pitches in the 2013 PITCH SF Competition (below). Competition finalist Fiestah, an event services marketplace that takes the stress out of finding, booking, and managing your event vendors. 

Fiestah COO and co-founder Nurul Yahya on stage (above).

Lesley Marincola, CEO and Co-founder of Angaza Design, pitches next. Angaza Design offer a pay-as-you-go technology that makes clean energy alternatives like solar energy products accessible and affordable.

Cheryl Kellond, CEO and founder of Bia Sport (above) pitches her startup, the first GPS multi-sport watch.

Live judges included tech angel investor, Andrea Zurek, Founding Partner at XG Ventures, and Charles Hudson, Partner at early-stage seed venture capital firm, SoftTech VC (above).

Finalist Nanxi Liu, CEO and Co-founder of real-time interactive billboard network, Enplug (above). 

Finalist Tanya Menendez and Co-founder Matthew Burnett of Maker's Row pitching their startup, whose mission is to make manufacturing easier to understand and accessible (above).

Case study featuring two early Facebook employees, Julie Zhuo, Director of Product Design at Facebook, and Naomi Gleit, Senior Director of Product Management at Facebook, who shared what they learned from a design and product perspective to reach a billion users (above).

Attendees broke for a networking lunch with investors (angels and venture capitalists), including panelist, Christine Herron, Director of Intel Capital (below).

Attendees also took part in the networking lunch with experienced entrepreneurs and founders, including Jess Lee, Co-founder and CEO of Polyvore (below left).

Our Women's Initiative teacher, early-stage business advisor, coach, and investor, Jayne Hillman! (above) 

Speaker Selina Tobaccowala at the networking lunch (above).

More attendees during the networking lunch. Businessweek later featured this shot above in a Karen E. Klein article here.

Bay Area Girl Geek Dinners Co-organizer, Sukrutha Bhadouria (above). Bay Area Girl Geek Dinners founder and Women 2.0 Co-founder, Angie Chang (below left) and her sister, Hackbright Academy alum, Annie Chang (below center). 

Hetal Pandya, Co-founder of Easilydo, and Jessica Scorpio, Founder and Director of Marketing of Getaround, on stage for the disruption panel (above).

Slideshare Co-founder and CEO Rashmi Sinha (above center) and Monisha Perkash, Co-founder and CEO of LUMO BodyTech (above right).

Rashmi spoke about balancing entrepreneurship and motherhood: 

“Work/life balance is a myth. The enlightenment I gotten for myself is work/life convergence. I have two little kids and I am a passionate mom and a passionate entrepreneur. At every opportunity I have, I introduce my kids to my work. We recently moved office, they helped me build the furniture.  I had twins last year at the beginning of the year and I’d never imagine that in the same year, I’d have twins and get acquired. It worked out – I was dealing with the due diligence with having them around. If it works for you, you will make it work and you don’t need to be afraid of it.”

Read Angie's recap from the disruption panel. 

 Disruption panel led by Aileen Lee, Founder of seed-stage focused Cowboy Ventures (above right). Sukhinder Singh Cassidy, Founder and Chairman of Joyus, led the investor panel (below).

Investors panel featured Christine Herron, Director of Intel Capital (above left), Ann Miura-Ko, Co-Founding Partner at FLOODGATE (above center), Scott Kupor, Managing Director at Andreessen Horowitz (below left), and Freada Kapor Klein, Partner at Kapor Capital (below center). 

Paula Long, Co-founder and EVP Products/Strategy of EqualLogic, aquired by Dell, and Co-founder & CEO, DataGravity (above).

The second round of the PITCH Competition continues with pitches from Jill Sherman, Co-founder of wholesale fashion marketplace, Modalyst (above) and Wendy Nguyen, CEO and Co-founder of HealthyOut (below).

Co-founders of Virtual Mob, UK-based augmented reality (AR) app, Chaya Jadhav and Sanjay Jadhav present (below).

Thomas Korte, Founder and Managing Partner of AngelPad, on judges panel (below left).

Thuy Truong and Elliot Lee, Co-founders of Vietnam-based Greengar, behind useful iPhone apps Whiteboard and Brain Turner on stage (above).

Susan Akbarpour, Founder of Mavatar, a one cart smart comparison shopping platform (below).

Vivek Wadhwa, Fellow at Stanford Law School & VP of Research at Singularity University, gave a fantastic presentation sharing results from research he conducted through a survey of 500+ women in technology, in conjunction with Lesa Mitchell of the Kauffman Foundation, with Women 2.0's support.

Vivek also announced a crowdsourced book on women in tech that you can learn more about here.

Emerging markets panel led by Women 2.0 Co-founder and CEO, Shaherose Charania (above) featuring Linda Franco, Co-founder and CMO of Mexico-based Machina (above left), Alexandra Johnson, Managing Director of Russia and US-based investor, DFJ Aurora (second from left), and Sally Buberman, Co-founder of Argentina and US-based web conferencing and online education platform, Wormhole IT.

Closing keynote by the iconic Lynda Weinman, Co-founder and Executive Chair of online software training platform, Lynda.com (above) who reminded us, "Content is Queen."

Afterwards, there was a surprise visit by special guest, John Paul Farmer, Senior Advisor to the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (below).

Big congrats to Bia Sport, who won the People's Choice Award (above), as voted by the Women 2.0 community on Twitter, and to Angaza Design, who won the 2013 PITCH SF Competition (below).

Lesley Marincola of Angaza Design backstage winning the 2013 PITCH Competition (below).


Read the post-conference coverage on Women 2.0 here. 
The image above was later featured in a Businessweek article here. 

For additional images, view the Facebook album here and feel free to leave a comment below.