Simple Steps 5th Anniversary Event Recap
Day 1 via Zoom on Friday, May 13th, 2022
Simple Steps’ 5th-anniversary event ended over two days, online on May 13 and offline on May 14. We had a blast with amazing community members and supporters. Thank you to everyone who participated in the event, talked as a guest speaker, and sent messages of congratulations and support! Here is a brief recap of the event.
Bo Young Lee’s keynote session was like a gem, sentence by sentence. I wish more people would have heard her genuine and powerful story. I am sharing quotes from the keynote.
"I was born with the biggest privilege of my life, and that was an incredible sense of self-confidence and self-awareness. I liked myself, and I never thought I was the problem. The rest of the world was problematic as they thought I wasn’t quiet enough, pretty enough, not American enough, or not Korean enough. I felt I was really fine about who I was. No one in this society sees women who look like us (Korean women) as authority figures. When you ask someone, “tell me what a typical leader would look like,” no one will ever say someone who looks like me. So, everything we do is groundbreaking. Every step we take is a noble one. Everything we achieve is new. Every authority and power we gain is for the first time. We are each a revolution."
Watch Bo Young’s keynote video clips below.
Part 1: https://youtu.be/kQriZ4rlGHc
Part 2: https://youtu.be/7qIaMPpOPhY
The talk between Ikkjin Ahn and Kyum Kim was also inspiring. It was the first time we had a session with Simple Steps partner companies leaders at the anniversary event. Above all, both of them were full of enthusiasm and energy when they talked about when they first started a startup. The sentence "I always tried to make every problem as simple as possible" is personally memorable. Scaling up what the company aims to build starts with a simple and small action that is easy to test and iterate quickly.
Day 2 in Sunnyvale, CA on Saturday, May 14th, 2022
We met offline first time since February 2020. Bay Area's Korean tech professionals community, BAKG, opened the event. From renovating the BAKG website to algorithm study groups and the Time to Shine conference for Korean female professionals, the collaboration between BAKG and Simple Steps unfolded. Jae Kwon Son and The Miilk's research team talked about how they work with full ownership globally. The final finale was led by five super-powerful women, Seonyoung Son, Haley Hyeyoung Seo, Jenny Park, Eunjung Cho, and Miyoung Han. They poured their energy into sharing ongoing challenges in balancing multiple responsibilities at work and home while advancing their career.
A community like Simple Steps led by Korean women was unprecedented as far as I know. As Bo Young said in her keynote, what we built for the past five years is groundbreaking. We did it for the first time. Simple Steps is a revolution. And you are a revolution. We are each a revolution.