By Nadia James

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Our takeaways from the 2015 Philly Women in Tech Summit.

More than 300 women gathered to learn, discuss and support one another in tech-related pursuits at the 2015 Women in Tech Summit. The keynote speech and workshops all pertained to the needs of technology entrepreneurs and professionals inside and outside of the office.

1. Never forget: people make dreams possible.

• “An idea without a network is just an idea.” — Kelly Hoey, @jkhoey

Despite having to rise early on a Saturday morning, the room where opening keynote speaker, Kelly Hoey, serial entrepreneur and investor, would deliver her speech was buzzing. It didn’t take long for Hoey to captivate the women and men in the audience. Hoey’s speech addressed a topic often neglected in the startup scene.

Most entrepreneurs have a deep love for their technical area of expertise. The topics of discussion at tech industry events, naturally, tend to focus on technical skills and techniques entrepreneurs should consider acquiring. The importance of developing a strong reputation within one’s community and building relationships with investors and other experienced community members is often neglected.

As entrepreneurs, we are doing ourselves a great disservice if we fail to build a reputation as being a trusted advisor within our specialty area with our greater community. Entrepreneurs who fail to build relationships with a network of people who can become the first or tenth to try, buy and invest in their product or service put themselves at great risk of stunting their business idea’s growth potential.

2. You can achieve anything you commit to learning.

As a marketing content writer, I write pieces that touch on subjects like big data and cybersecurity for tech startups. The workshop sessions I chose, as a result, reflected my need to deepen my understanding in this area. The majority of the women speaking who worked in big data and IT security, taught themselves how to use technical programs and software outside of the classroom setting.

Professional skill enrichment is necessary in order to advance one’s career, whether working for a large corporation or in a scrappy startup. Long after founding my company, I still spend immense amounts of time reading reports and articles released by marketing technology companies, research think tanks and marketing leaders from a variety of industries. I’m forever learning. To succeed running or leading within a business, you also must always be learning.

3. Regardless of the industry, those who are able to make sense of data will win big.

By 2020 the world will have 40 zetabytes of data. 50 percent of that data will have been created in the last 10 years. Businesses need smart people to think up innovative ways to tell stories that communicate potential businesses opportunities and risks through data.

Across every industry, increased access to data is forcing businesses large and small to completely reconfigure their business models. Ag giant Monsanto, for instance, is using sensors to gather large amounts of data and predict farmers’ outputs. Anyone passionate about data can find big datasets and potentially save large sums for their business. One of the big data workshop leaders, Mercy Beckham, uses public data sets from the White House to sharper her data analysis and visualization skills. Startup leaders must encourage members of their team to do the same.

How can data be used to better inform your business decisions or the decisions your target customers make? For many tech startups like RJMetrics, marketing content based on large datasets helped their startup develop a reputation as being expert knowledge holders. What insights could your employees gather to help your business operate more smoothly or enhance your value to customers?

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