Bobby, what is your goal for being on the show?
Um, as I think I said this earlier, but my goal overall is to help women get more comfortable
with public speaking, to understand that the visibility that public speaking drives
is important to their careers and their businesses, and to also help event managers understand
the power of diverse and inclusive speaking slates for the, basically the success of their events.
The more diverse speakers they have at an event, the more diverse and inclusive their entire audience is.
Thank you for sharing that.
If I were to go and ask you a little deeper about this topic,
do you have a story behind why?
So there are a lot of different events that I went to earlier in my career that did not have
women on stage. We actually have a word for this. We call it a manel. It's generally the all-male panel.
And as a woman sitting in the audience and looking on stage and seeing what we think of as, frankly,
the male, pale, and stale panels, the same four old white guys, it really speaks volume that,
you know, there's no expectation of thought leadership or expertise
from women when you see something like that. It really says to women, you're not expected to be here.
We don't want you here. That's another message that's given. So I've been to numerous events
over the years where I sat in the audience alongside amazing women who had considerably
more expertise than people who were on stage. And they would always ask me the same question,
oh my gosh, why did they pick him and not me or my friend or my colleague who knows so much more
about that topic? And having some of those conversations, it really did make me realize,
you know what, there needs to be education for women, for other underrepresented voices,
to let them know how they get there because it's an active thing. You need to raise your hand.
You need to say yes when people ask you. But sometimes it's just this tiny little understanding
gap. Oh, there's a thing called call for speakers that we're going to be able to get to. And so
that's called call for speakers that would allow me to just apply. Yeah, it's not that hard.
Right? So just my knowledge, my background, early on in my career, I had been the head of Global PR
to a couple of big enterprise software companies. And that role made me responsible for getting
the right perspectives on stage at conferences and events. So I knew the path. I was just sharing
what I know.
If I were to ask you, how did you get started?
So how I got started, it can be started in terms of the initial point in time, number of different
ways. I got started specifically with Innovation Women in 2014, where I just got fed up. I had been
to a couple of conferences, kind of one right on top of another, where there were no women.
Speakers or a very small number of women speakers. And I was starting to get annoyed and incensed
about it. And I said, you know what, I own the domain Innovation Women, I work with
founders, I work with technical women, I could just create a platform that allows event managers
and female speakers to directly connect. So in the summer of 2014, I sat down and kind of looked at
things like Kickstarter and said, I could crowdfund the money to hire a developer to create this
platform. And so I did in the fall of 2014, I kicked off a crowdfunding project, brought in I
think it was about $22,000 that enabled me to hire a development team to create the platform.
And we launched in 2015. And really talked at that point about the mission of getting more women
on stage at conferences and events, and how two thirds of all conference speakers are men.
And that kind of kicked off where we are today. Thank you for being here today. I'm really happy
that you tuned in to Vision Pros Live. I'm looking forward to seeing your reactions as these episodes
continue to move forward. This is going to get more and more fun. We'll have more and more
engagement as well. We'll invite people to participate in the show. And thank you for
giving us your time and attention. Have an excellent time building out your vision and
becoming a Vision Pro yourself.