Article: Business Development and Events Team
On Wednesday 04.04.20 the International Women's Day event took place in the context of entrepreneurship and start-up led by the association's business development and events team. Women's Day celebrations are already a tradition here at ProWoman.
There is nothing like stopping everything, appreciating what is there and talking about the amazing feminine power we have!
The event, attended by 130 amazing women (including 100 female champions!), took place at the Facebook Playground offices in collaboration with Taglit Excel and Facebook.
At the beginning of the evening, we were surprised by the presence of Adi Sofer Thani, CEO of Facebook Israel Ltd., who spoke to us about career, decision making and balance between family and career. Adi mainly mentioned the change she sees in our generation, which is less closed in gender patterns. She talked about her belief - promoting people who deserve it because of their exceptional skills and not because of their gender, despite her awareness of the desire to promote women to senior positions. Today - appointments with her are 50/50 for women and men! respect!!
In this fascinating and exciting evening, we hosted amazing and inspiring women, entrepreneurs at heart. Each of these amazing women told from a different angle the path she paved in the world of entrepreneurship!
Nitzan Cohen Arzi, co-founder and VP of Operations at Jolt, told us about the special path of her studies and career until she came to establish Jolt.il. She was never satisfied with "conventional" studies and was always in related frameworks and programs. Accordingly, she also quoted Mark Twain with the following sentence:
"I never let my schooling interfere with my education"!
Nitzan claims that when we choose not to deal with the "meat of the business" which is the *money* it will usually push us, the women, into the "soft" areas and worlds of the business. According to her, "Like most women, I didn't feel comfortable with numbers, so I also limited myself in my company." Despite the fear, she chose to specialize in everything related to money in her startup and discovered that the demon is not so bad. Today, she takes an important part in the fundraising process and in the salary management of her employees, with an emphasis on the salary negotiations with her employees, as we know this is a sensitive issue for us women. Nitzan said that as far as the world of high-tech startups is concerned, on the one hand there are clear "ground rules" and every entrepreneur will be happy to give all the tips in the world, but on the other hand it is important to remember that there are actually no rules. She breaks her own glass ceiling every day anew because no one has ever founded a startup like Jolt!
Ronit Cohen (#ROCO_RUNS), sports photographer and founder of ORRO Photography, began her career as an investigator and reporter for Kalbotek. Realizing that it wasn't really her passion, she started cultivating an Instagram page where she photographed her friends for fun. At some point, Ronit decided to take her photography one step further and opened a business Instagram page. She invited her good friend Anat Harel to the photos which led her to collaborate with the Nike company, a move that was her first "serious" work in the field of sports photography. Today Ronit has a content and creative agency and accompanies marathons with the most professional athletes around the world as well as lesser known people, such as Einat, a blind woman whose dream was to learn to surf. Ronit decided to record her lessons with the lens eye and thus Einat's story even reached the news and all the people of Israel! "I accompany people's stories - stories have always interested me." According to her, the most important conclusion she learned from her career path: "Be brave and dare! There are mistakes, but if your gut feeling is what you want - that's the only way you can achieve and conquer every goal and every dream!"
Rona Segev, managing partner and founder of the venture capital fund TLV Partners, began her lecture with an interesting and powerful history review of Malcolm X, black rights activist and African American leader. Although he was an extreme chauvinist, according to Rona, we women can learn a lot from his work on the way he convinced the blacks in the US to believe in themselves and their rights! Then she told about Olympe de Gogo who was a significant part of the French Revolution. She said that throughout history they made sure that the oppression of women was It is also supported by scientific studies, such as a Harvard study which claimed that "the more a woman learns, the bigger her brain and the smaller her uterus" and that women who demand rights are bad mothers! (Scientific or not, this is not true!!)
From her personal experience, she says that our generation is actually more open-minded and less likely to follow gender stereotypes, but it is the men who still insist on explaining to her why they are more successful than her - these are the men who have progressed to a certain level and got stuck, and they are simply frustrated by this. At the age of 24, Rona founded her first startup, and according to her, "no one took her seriously." Today, Rona has a venture capital fund that she founded, with a partner and two more partners - that is, 2 of both sexes. Rona has two pairs of twins (3 girls and boys) at home and she says that it is always important to find the combination between leisure activities such as yoga and trips alongside the career.
After the three inspiring lectures, we held an entrepreneurship panel led by the president of the association Esther Barak Lands with all our speakers at the event. The panel was also joined by Noa Danon, CEO and co-entrepreneur of EverAfter AI, a startup that focuses on creating a customer experience in technology companies and has extensive experience in characterizing user experience, product management and development in startup and enterprise companies.
During the event, there was a booth of 'Miramba', a social enterprise that works to empower women from underprivileged populations in Uganda, and at the end of the event, our women received stunning bracelets from them!
Along with these amazing bracelets, our ladies received an amazing care kit from L'OCCITANE.
It was an amazing event and we can't wait for next year already!