Another day at Acorn Accelerator…
The week so far has been turbulent for all of us who had joined Acorn Accelerator. Some of us there had come from a tech background and astound me with their knowledge, and others who want to explore what the tech universe has to offer. I say universe and not world because that’s how big tech is. It is something which is growing so fast and so quickly and Acorn Aspirations have helped me see that so far.
The day started off with Cathy White who is the founder of CEW Communications. She talked about the importance of women in technology and how it has changed over the years. It made me realise that, women need to stand their ground and say ‘yes’ to things that they never thought they would. That was just a thought I had. Not only that but that men need to take a step up to support women and then together the larger things like a “degrading picture” can be overcome. She was extremely inspiring and is truly a role model for feminism in my eyes. She also helps to organise GeekGirl Meetups which empower women and also allow men to take part creating a tight knit community celebrating equality. I might want to hop along to one of those.
Then our groups got together and had a standing scrum meeting where we all decided on what we were going to do that day. While discussing what needed to be done Peter relentlessly showed us facts and figures on how our tweets with #AcornAccelerator2017 have quadrupled and began to introduce his twitter tune to what I call #tweetO’clock-this was practically every 15 minutes-needless to say it brought us all closer together (it was hilarious). Afterwards we all plundered on with what we were doing and received loads of advice from Elena and all the other mentors at this point EVERYONE was hyper-focused on what they were doing.
After lunch we were all (hopefully) rejuvenated and were welcomed by Magdalena Dybal who is a digital marketing and pitching expert. She helped us all to get our elevator pitches done and we all stood up to say our pitches: one by one, team by team. We were all nervous but got through it at the end. Not only that, we had a visit by Pete Trainor who dropped off gadgets for the team developing a VR mindfulness app. He was extremely helpful. He even helped out my team, Visionary, brainstorm for our app. We definitely won’t forget about Min Teo who brought a lead DevOps engineer from Yoyo Wallet and spoke about Techfugees. That talk was inspiring, using tech to help humanity by aiding refugees - that is a stroke of genius!
Last but not least Ibiaçu Caetano who knows his stuff when it comes to intellectual property. He gave us all a talk about patenting and copyrighting when it comes to our start-ups and was extremely enlightening. Personally I had no knowledge of the law aspect, so it really made me think. Next time I know not to sign anything without reading #notGonnaZuckerburgIt. But his talk really hit home as he was with us throughout our journey in the first week and filmed everything for us…God help us when Peter tries to film us.
That my friends, was the Friday of the first week of Acorn Accelerator. We can only wait to see how epic the next week will be.
Safa Mohamed
Also published on Medium.