Panel: What's it like to be a Female Founder in EdTech?

Research (http://www.businessweek.com/articles/2013-02-20/women-who-run-tech-startups-are-catching-up) shows that female-founded tech companies use resources more efficiently, yield higher ROI, and if VC-backed, make more revenue than male-founded companies. In edtech, women's influence is even greater given that 77% of the teaching workforce is female. So, why is that at pitch events, as conference speakers, and as household edtech names women are lesser known?

Join us for an exploration into these topics with an stellar lineup of Alex Meis of Kinvolved, Idit Harel of Globaloria, Ash Kaluarachchi of Kaplan Techstars, and Mikey Muhanna of Positive Space NOLA. This mixed gender panel will kick off a lively discussion on their own experiences and take questions from the audience. Afterwards, enjoy some time to mingle with others over wine and refreshments. As for all EdTechWomen events, we welcome both men and women.

Bios:

Alexandra Meis is Co-founder and Chief Product Officer for Kinvolved, an edtech startup, which aims to improve high school graduation rates by increasing student attendance through family and community engagement among high-risk youth. Kinvolved's app facilitates digitized communication across families, schools, and after school programs, specifically focused on attendance data, and also offers broader 2-way communication services. Prior to founding Kinvolved, she worked in the South Bronx, advocating for and educating families of children with special needs. Alexandra is a 2012 Education Pioneers Fellow, where she worked with Teach For America and Leadership for Educational Equity. She holds an MPA in Health Policy and Analysis from NYU's Wagner School of Public Service, and a BA in Psychology and minor in Anthropology and Sociology from Lafayette College. She was most recently named an Ashoka American Express Emerging Innovator. She and her Co-founder are 2014 Echoing Green Finalists.

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Idit Harel

Dr. Idit Harel is an Israeli-American entrepreneur known for her EdTech innovations. She is the CEO and Founder of Globaloria (http://globaloria.com/), an award-winning (http://globaloria.com/awards) learning platform that combines game mechanics and social networking with courses for teaching STEM and computing, game design and coding to thousands of students in schools throughout the US. Globaloria empowers kids to become gaming inventors, productive digital citizens, and creative leaders in the global knowledge economy. In the 1980s, she pursued pioneering R&D in computation and cognition at the Harvard Graduate School of Education & MIT Media Lab. In the 1990s, her MIT spinoff startup, MaMaMedia, was the first born-on-the-net brand for digital kids and won numerous partnerships, awards, and recognitions. In addition to being a Huffington Post blogger (http://www.huffingtonpost.com/idit-harel-caperton/), Idit is a published learning theorist, education activist and opinion leader on EdTech, award-winning author, mentor of young entrepreneurs, and serves on several prestigious higher-education, media and non-profit boards. Twitter: @idit (https://twitter.com/idit) & @globaloria (https://twitter.com/globaloria)

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Ash Kaluarachchi

Ash works with early-stage edtech startups to validate business models, secure capital, and reach customers. Currently, he does so at Techstars and used to do so at Socratic Labs. In previous startup lives he's failed to scale a food mobility service and a risky driving prevention platform, and successfully scaled a social learning platform for Fortune 500 executives and a global career conference for international workers and multinational companies. His first experience in the classroom was helping his mother teach 300 students at the school they ran out of their home in Sri Lanka for the first two of decades of his life.

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Mikey Muhanna

Mikey is a nerd. By day, he is works as a quant for the Morgan Stanley Alternative Investment Partners Portfolio Solutions Group. By night, he runs Positive Space NOLA (http://positivespacenola.org/), an education non-profit that teaches coding to low-opportunity students of color before they launch in college or careers. Additionally, he hosts the monthly ed-tech social, Little Bets (http://littlebets.org/), and co-founded of the start up, WillowEducation (http://www.willoweducation.com/), a reimagined education management consulting company. Previously, he has worked as an actuarial consultant in Chicago and was a Teach For America corps member in New Orleans. Mikey holds a Bachelor of Science in Economics from Duke University where he also minored in Music and Arabic.

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