Last Night's Girl Geek Dinner with Malgosia Green

Thanks to everyone who braved the frigid temperatures and bitingly cold wind to come out to last night's Girl Geek Dinner! Our speaker, Malgosia Green, came prepared with a powerpoint presentation... which she couldn't show us, because we had neither projector nor screen. But she gamely soldiered on, and wittily and insightfully shared with us her 6 lessons on starting your own business, gleaned from her personal experiences founding a technology company and working at a San Francisco startup.

The best insight of all is that Savvica is hiring! So for anyone who couldn't make it out to last night's dinner to meet Malgosia in person, head on over to Savvica.com to learn about the opportunities there.

Also, Malgosia shared with us that her latest venture, learnhub, is in beta and they're looking for feedback -- so be sure to visit and sign up!

Please feel free to post your comments, and check the wiki for news about next month's dinner!

January Girl Geek Dinner tomorrow night!

It looks like our first dinner of the year will be a full house - we have a maximum of 48 seats available at our favourite location, the Hot House Cafe (full address and details at the bottom of the post), so if you're planning to attend, please get your name on the wiki to make sure we have a spot for you!

Tomorrow's speaker is Malgosia Green, co-founder of Savvica, an education technology company. Here's her full bio:

Malgosia graduated from Systems Design Engineering at the University of Waterloo and happily went onto a life-long career in digital hardware design. After a year of solitude in a cubicle inhaling soldering fumes, she realized her true calling lay elsewhere.

Malgosia founded Savvica with her husband John in October 2004, the same month they got married. In December 2005, Nuvvo was launched, the world’s first “web 2.0″ learning management system (LMS). In the summer of 2006, Malgosia and John elected to put Savvica on hold to pursue opportunities in San Francisco and learn from the masters of the consumer internet world.

Sadly parting ways with John, Malgosia joined a hot new startup, Affinity Labs, where she quickly got promoted to Director of Products. At Affinity Labs, Malgosia was in charge of designing the entire product, managing the creative groups, and working with the engineering team every step of the way from development to launch. Her daily developer schedules become truly loved by every developer on the team. Luckily, Malgosia and John weren’t apart for long, as Affinity Labs was in need of a Director of Engineering, so John decided to join Malgosia.

After many happy months in San Francisco creating the world’s best communities for professions such as police, nursing, teaching and many more, an opportunity knocked on their door. Although very happy in San Francisco, Malgosia couldn’t resist the chance to be an entrepreneur again, this time with an incredible partner, Educomp. In September 2007, Malgosia and John decided to return to Toronto to build Savvica, despite the cold winters and lack of a world-class wine growing region. Access to the brightest engineering talent in world has more than made up for the weather so far.

Malgosia will share her experiences as a female tech entrepreneur with our group, and there will be lots of time for Q&A afterwards.

Once again, our dinner will be held at our favourite location:

Wednesday, January 30th
6:30 pm
Hot House Grill (in the private room)
35 Church Street
(The entrance is right on the corner of Front & Church.)
Toronto, ON
416-366-7800

See you there!