In this talk, Rachel Katz shares her personal journey from a restless youth trying many pursuits to discovering her passion for social impact through technology. While working as a philanthropy consultant, she helped launch Gucci’s Chime for Change hackathon, which introduced her to the power of rapid, tech‑driven solutions for hard‑to‑solve social problems. Inspired, she joined AngelHack, a global hackathon organizer, and built programs that embed social impact into their events, including the Code for Impact challenge. Noticing that women consistently made up less than 20% of hackathon participants, she launched the "Lady Problems" series— a women‑focused hackathon brand— partnering with sponsors like Procter & Gamble, Amazon, HPE, and Women Who Code. The series dramatically increased female attendance (up to 60% overall, 20% in Delhi, 83% in Gaza) and generated dozens of projects across 50 cities. Throughout, she discusses the challenges of convincing corporate partners to support women‑centric events, the emotional resonance of seeing technology address issues like female genital mutilation, and a call to support the winning teams. She concludes with a takeaway that passion emerges when you keep pushing yourself to do more.
Chapters
Hello everyone. That was awesome. Can we get a round of applause for Shruti, please? Thank you. And because I'm going to forget at the end, thank you to Hustle Co. and to all of you guys for being here. So round of applause for yourselves. Thank you. I think it's really important to tell the stories of women in technology, to help women stay in technology, and also to encourage girls to be in technology as well. And there just aren't enough stories about women in this sector. Or if you see stories about women in this sector, it's mostly about how they're not there, how they're absent. So I admire all of you for coming to this event, and HustleCo for putting this event on. I think it's super important. So now I'm going to attempt to share my story in the hopes that it inspires you guys. It may, it may not. If you want to applaud at any moment to give me a little confidence boost, that would be great. I am— thank you. So typically when I'm speaking, I'm speaking publicly, it's to a lot of dudes in hoodies on computers with headphones on looking at their laptops. This is obviously a different crowd than that. I heard there are a lot of ladies in the house, which is great. So I'm gonna try and we'll see how it goes, but this is definitely like a cooler crowd than I'm used to. So I'll share my story with you guys. As a kid, yeah, I'm going all the way back to childhood, this one. As a kid, I was one of those kids who tried everything and quit everything. So piano, guitar, soccer, swimming, xylophone, which I hated, um, selling shoes. I sold shoes. I was actually really good at that, but I quit that too. Social media marketing. I think all of us have probably done that at some point in our careers. I've tried everything, but nothing really inspired me, and and I quit. Like, I was a quitter. I was a super lame person. Um, and honestly, it took me 26 years, uh, to discover what my passion was. I know that's shocking because I look like I'm 19 years old, but I'm not. Um, and honestly, when I did, it kind of came out of nowhere and was totally random. One sheet down. Yes. Okay, I feel like I'm one of those kids that's like I need a trophy for everything. So yeah, so it happened when I was working as a philanthropy consultant. I was working with high-profile and high-net-worth individuals and nonprofits and foundations, doing glamorous things such as filing IRS paperwork, which we're all about to do. That sucks. Yeah, I did that. Auctioning off gently used clothes to benefit kids with disabilities, you know, all kinds of really cool stuff like that. And I really loved it. I loved working with nonprofits and giving back and being in the philanthropy scene. But despite the fact that I was doing that, I still, you know, just, I didn't feel that like, oomph, like nothing was pushing me to continue. And I could see it in others around me. I was working with activists and people who had founded nonprofits and founded social enterprises and done all these campaigns, and I was inspired by them, and I wanted that. Like, I really wanted that, and I was happy to work with them and kind of fold clothes or do whatever I was doing for them, but I didn't feel it, and that's what I wanted. So that's what I'm going to talk to you guys about today, is how I found that thing. And it was sort of random and unexpected. It came when I had the opportunity to work on a global campaign called Chime for Change, which was founded by Gucci. This outfit is not sponsored by Gucci, but— I actually ran out and bought this today, The girl who runs our PR for our company said, "You need to wear long sleeves." And I was like, "Shit, okay, I gotta go buy something with long sleeves." So, yeah, so Chime for Change is this really awesome campaign founded by Gucci, the fashion house, focused on empowering girls and women through education, health, and justice. And they tasked us with finding a way to leverage technology to address tough issues including domestic violence, child marriage, universal access to primary education for girls, female genital mutilation, women's healthcare, and more. Obviously, there's not an app for that, and there never will be. But what we eventually put together was a hackathon. Yes, we convinced Gucci and worked with them to put together a hackathon. And that brought together hundreds of women and men, developers from both sides, to build technology solutions for nonprofits like UN Women, Vital Voices, UNICEF, and more. I honestly had no idea how to run a hackathon. I was just like, "This is gonna be really cool, and we're gonna do it." I spent a lot of time Googling, "What is a hackathon?" And I made a bunch of giant, complicated spreadsheets, which is, you know, as women do. And what resulted honestly blew my mind. It was a room full of people, men and women, who were creating really awesome technology for really hard problems. I mean, like, you know, female genital mutilation is not, not something that's easy to talk about or even build technology to solve. And they were building this technology that could have a real impact in just one weekend. And when I was working in philanthropy, I was working on these projects that would take months, if not years, to see any impact. Like, we're talking millions of dollars. Being funneled into things and not, you know, kind of hoping it was going to work. And so to see something built in one weekend was really inspiring to me. One example was, you know, a fully working solution that was a mobile health services delivery, kind of dumb phone thing for women in rural Africa, and lots of other cool things. And I actually found myself sobbing at the end of the hackathon, which actually is, you know, if anyone on my team is here, which I think they are somewhere, I can't see you guys, I typically cry at every hackathon now, just because I'm so moved by— Yeah, I do. I really do. Like, we actually just did a hackathon with Procter Gamble for Febreze, and I cried at the end, even though it was just about really awesome smells, because I just— But I am, like, I'm really inspired by the fact that people spend their time to build something cool that they're passionate about that could become the next big business or the next big nonprofit that could have an impact. And, you know, I'm always moved by when people have that passion and that dedication and they want to do more. So yeah, so here I am, I'm sobbing at the end of the hackathon, and needless to say, I was totally hooked. And I just, I didn't, you know, I knew the hackathon was gonna be cool. It was Gucci. Gucci's really awesome. You know, it was with Twitter, Women Who Code, bunch of cool organizations. But I felt that immediately at the end of the hackathon, I was like, "All right, I have to do more. I have to do more of this. I need more of this. Give me more of this." So fast forward 2 years, and I basically hunted down a company that ran hackathons, and that's when I started working at AngelHack. I just realized I forgot, I think I forgot to introduce myself. Oh, my name's up there. That's good. So I work for a company called AngelHack, and my job basically was my dream job, figuring out how to integrate social impact into every aspect of AngelHack's work. They run about 100 hackathons a year in 44 countries across the globe. So I was like, "Sweet! This is great!" You know, one of the cool things we did was we created a global Code for Impact challenge that garnered 53 projects in 50 different cities all over the world, and we did pro bono sponsorships for nonprofits, and it was awesome. But same thing, at the end of the ChimeHack hackathon, I was like, I kind of feel like I can do more. Like, I feel like I can do more. What else can I do? And that's, you know, that's how I knew I was on to something, on to my passion. Like, that feeling of, like, as soon as you accomplish something great, you're like, but wait, there's probably more. There's probably more I can do. So I started looking at everything else. I was like, what more can I do? You know, like, so one thing I noticed, and I talked about this a little bit earlier, was the average attendance at a hackathon for women is under 20%. So, you know, I knew we could improve that. I mean, for any of you who've been to a hackathon, it's basically a bro fest. And the irony is that AngelHack's a majority female-owned and operated company. So, I was like, yeah, yeah, that's cool, that's sweet. Alright, bye guys. So, so yeah. So we were like, how can we improve this? So, we did a bunch of stuff. One of them was, you know, having GIFs in our newsletters that weren't all white dudes. That was a pretty easy one. You know, another one was partnering with organizations like Girls in Tech. Their CEO is here, she's a badass. She's gonna talk shortly after me. And we improved our female attendance by 4% in just 4 months. Something that a lot of big tech companies take years to achieve. But for me, that's just, same thing. You know, it's like, yay, good job, you got more women. It's like, not enough. So, We decided to design an entire hackathon series around this called Lady Problems. Yeah. Yeah. So that was super awesome to try to sell that to sponsors and big nonprofits. That went really well. And honestly, I was doubting myself. I had a lot of people tell me no. I found myself on a phone call with a leading executive in a Fortune 500 company. Trying to avoid saying the word "period" to me, but explaining you couldn't call something "lady problems" because no one will attend an event that's around that time of the month. Yeah, and I'm on Slack and I'm like, "You mean periods?" After hearing "no" and that it was a bad idea so many times, I was honestly frustrated and confused and I doubted myself, and that little kid that like kind of quit everything was like crawling up inside being like, It's time to quit. But I was lucky when my internal voice was muted, I had champions around me pushing me to do more. So our CEO, who's female, whoop, she said, you know, I said, hey, I think we're going to do like 3 to 5 events. And I said, let's do 15 to 20. And she said, let's do 15 to 20 at least, we can do more. I was like, okay, fine. Of course my boss is making me do more than I want to do. Our VP of Sales said, "Hey, like, you know, screw these people who are saying you can't do it. I can sell it." And she went out and sold it. We had people like Procter Gamble, Amazon, HPE, Women Who Code, bunch of organizations jumped on board. The results, I thought this was gonna be like 1 or 2 women in tech hackathons. We did 17. We had 2,000 people sign up for an event that said "Lady Problems." Um, 60% of them were female. Our goal was 50%, so that was pretty cool. Um, we increased by 40% overall in terms of female attendance. Um, in Delhi, India, where we typically see just 3% women come to our hackathons— that's right, 3%— uh, we had 20% women turnout, and the team that won was a women in tech team. Um, and then in Gaza, actually, is where we had our highest female turnout of 80%. 83% women in Gaza. Yeah, so I'm kind of out of time, but I have 10 more pages. No, I'm just kidding. But yeah, so, you know, that was all great and good, and we got a lot of women to come to this event, but I still think that we can do more. And so we are gonna accelerate all the winning teams coming out of those hackathons from Gaza, Nairobi, London, Berlin, San Francisco, you you know, everywhere. And if— because I can't pass up this opportunity for shameless self-promotion, if you want to support any of those teams, come talk to me, please. Don't talk to me tomorrow because I'm going on strike. And that's it. So I have to give you my key takeaway. It's, you know, you discover your passion when you're constantly pushing yourself to do more. I know that's a Tiger Mom thing to say, but as a former quitter, You know you found it when you think you can do more. So that's it. Thank you.
