00:00I'm Asim Bolajan. I'm a chapter director of Women in Tech Kazakhstan. When we started the Digital Kazakhstan program, I decided to be involved more in IT and from 2015, in all this community, I was only one woman in room.
00:29If you are in this minority, it is your personal story. So that's why I decided to, we need to do something to support and to involve in tech, in IT more women.
00:43My name is Renata Yulubaeva. I'm a CEO of Alfa Rabi Innovation Hub Dubai. At the same time, I'm an Astana city lead for Women in Tech Kazakhstan chapter, and I'm also supporting female founder street.
00:54Actually, I'm in the technology and IT sphere for more than eight years now, I believe. I came from the international relations sphere, and I've always been a lot of competing with all of the men, not just because of a woman, but I'm just, was a very newcomer in the industry.
01:10My name is Agirim Nurkaliyeva. I'm a mom of two, and I'm a surreal entrepreneur. For the last 12 years, I'm performing with small businesses like beauty salons.
01:23And for nowadays, I'm building my second startup. For the last five years, I'm dealing with this IT industry with no technical background, and it is a very awesome experience to develop and be the part of such a great industry.
01:38Because the industry is new, the ecosystem is new, and you have a chance to be the part of the big story.
01:48What I see during years in Kazakhstan, we do improve all of the business processes, and we do improve our technology development, and it's also improved for women.
01:59For women, it's a big challenge, because we are in a male-dominated country, in a male-dominated region in general. One year ago, we launched the chapter Women in Tech here in Kazakhstan, because we need to be part of some global community, because Women in Tech globally has 65 chapters over the world.
02:16The first obstacle that I met was actually in my mind. I was really disrupted and was thinking that if you don't have a technical background, there is nothing to do.
02:27This is the main mistake that most of girls are having right now.
02:31Ecosystems like Astana Hub and Women in Tech are helping the girls and people around to change this mindset, because if you have no technical background, even though you can do the startup, because you can have lots of experts in different acceleration programs, and you don't have to pay for that.
02:50In general, in STEM, in Kazakhstan, we have about 25-30% of presence of women in technologies, and it is quite good, yes, because it's in average, it is global statistics, and we are good at it.
03:05But we need to pay attention on female founders. We have not so many female co-founded and founded startups. We have not so many women in venture industry as a venture capitalist in general.
03:18So that's why recently we've announced our first female venture fund, and we would like to involve more women as investors.
03:28Because mostly in VCs, in the decision maker, there are also men on the other side who are making decisions.
03:33In Women in Tech, Kazakhstan, for the female founders, we are trying to build one more platform, one more space for negotiations, for fundraising, business development, to support those females, because it's not very easy.
03:44You come from work, you have a second shift, you have children, you have stuff to do, cleaning, cooking, a lot of things.
03:50And especially in Kazakhstan, we are a very traditional country. You have to have a lot of negotiations with your relatives, with your husband's relatives.
03:57At the same time, going back to work, you're a boss, you're a leader, you're a C-level decision maker, so it's very hard. It's even very hard to do mentally.
04:04My personal advice will be, start today, don't wait the ideal moment, whatever you want, just test your ideas, test your hypothesis.
04:13And this is my main point, to show the women that even with no technical background, even with children, even in Central Asia, you can build everything you want.
04:24Just, it is the problem of communication, of knowledge, and the ecosystem that we have.
04:29So, that's why it is very important to make this background and accelerate, not only the startups, but also the female venture capitalist community.
04:40In three years, we can build a more strong technological community of female startups, I'm sure.
04:48So, our VC and our platform from Kazakhstan will quickly develop into the central hub VC, I think.
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