Getting to Know You: Meet cred’s Summer Interns

Earlier this month, we introduced you to our summer intern Caraline Pham. Now, we’re excited to introduce you to the two interns who will also be spending their summer here with us at cred: Sheila Tabar and Vyvy Nguyen, both of whom are rising seniors at UC Santa Barbara. Sheila will be joining our speaker management team, and Vyvy will be working alongside our growing event management team. 

Get the scoop on these two new credians.

(Left: Sheila Tabar, Vyvy Nguyen)

cred: Where are you going to school and what are you studying? Why did you choose to study that subject?

Vyvy: I am currently a senior studying Psychology and Communication at UC Santa Barbara. My majors allow me to further my knowledge of interactions between others and myself. 

Sheila: In the fall, I will be starting my senior year at the University of California, Santa Barbara. I am a double major, studying Environmental Science and Political Science! I chose these majors because I love learning the different modes of environmental and political communications to effectively convey messages! 

cred: Can you tell us a bit about yourself?

VN: I was born and raised in the Bay Area and am happy to be home for the summer working with cred! Some of my hobbies include yoga, traveling, and trying new food joints. I love being on-the-go and spending time exploring or hanging with my friends and family.  

ST: I am originally from SF, born and raised! I am so stoked to be back in the city this summer. In my free time, I love powerlifting, going to the beach, and trying new types of food!

cred: What do you want to achieve while interning at cred?

VN: I look forward to pushing myself out of my comfort zone! I’m really excited to learn the ropes of what great event planning looks like. 

ST: I want to further develop my knowledge in the PR field. I am excited to dive deeper into speaker management and enhance client relations with new skills. I am looking forward to assisting with the relationship between speakers and events! 

cred: If you could only eat one food for the rest of your life what would it be?

VN: Pizza. Deep dish, pan crust, thin crust—you name it. 

ST: Garlic noodles! Fire.

cred: Can you give us one interesting fact about yourself?

VN:  In my high school yearbook, for senior superlatives, I was voted “Most Likely to Steal Your Lunch” (no theft involved though, just their way of saying “biggest appetite”). 

ST: I have visited all four major Hawaiian islands! 

cred: What is one thing you want to accomplish in the next five years?

VN: I hope to have a career in marketing/events and have a cute pet cat. 

ST: I would love to be working in the PR industry back home, have my own pet dachshund, and master’s degree in Business! 

Interested in building your career at cred? Learn more about our open positions on AngelList or email Gina King at work@credpr.com with your resume!

Wonder: CreativeMornings San Francisco

This morning, we had the pleasure of attending the Creative Mornings SF June event centered around the theme of “Wonder.” Nestled into the General Assembly SF, we listened to Lea Redmond share her stories and advice of finding positivity in disappointment and rejection. 

Redmond is the founder of The World’s Smallest Post Service. This morning she shared her journey of creating her business and how she combated the ups and downs along the way. Redmond uses prismatic thinking—reframing your thoughts and mindset to lead to a positive outcome–to see any ‘no’ as a huge ‘YES.’  She discussed how prismatic thinking is about finding the good in the bad, or the rainbow on a rainy day. This sort of thinking is what led Redmond to run The World’s Smallest Post Service, launch a sticker line, sell reusable tote bags and even release a book. 

As Redmond said, “If we are able to find delight in being wrong, we are well on our way to seeing new things.” It’s thoughts like these that have kept Redmond going and have pushed her to overcome the no’s. She has taken each no, each rejection, and spun it to make different versions of her goals. Redmond leveraged her creativity to find her own version of success. What Redmond shared with us this morning is that creativity is important, especially in the face of rejection. If we want to pursue what matters and what is meaningful to us, it is important not to settle at no. 

It is this mindset that has pushed Redmond to find joy and success in what she does, and what has inspired other entrepreneurs to advance their businesses. 

Here at cred, we see this sense of wonder from many of our clients and are thrilled to work with them as they continue to inspire the way we think. With a mission to “help people undo the knots in their head,” Muse Co-Founder Ariel Garten empowers the value of reshaping one’s thinking to build a richer life through meditation and “rewriting self-debilitating fake narratives that hold us back.”

Find out where the next CreativeMornings event is happening near you by visiting here and get inspired!

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This credBlog post was written by Caraline Pham, our cred Summer Intern

Getting to Know You: Meet cred’s Summer Intern

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Here at cred, we've experienced a lot of growth, and our intern program is no different. This summer, we're welcoming three new interns to support our speaker and event management teams.

Up first is Caraline Pham, who will be interning with one of our speaker management teams. A native from Boston and rising senior at The University of Wisconsin-Madison, Caraline is excited to learn more about the PR industry and work with an array of clients.

Get to learn more about Caraline in the full interview below.

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cred: Where are you going to school and what are you studying? Why did you choose to study that subject?

Caraline Pham: I am a rising senior at The University of Wisconsin-Madison (go badgers!). I’m studying strategic communication, which is housed in the School of Journalism and Mass Communication. I am also earning certificates (UW Madison’s equivalent of minors) in business and digital studies.

I’ve always been interested in different forms of communication and how to use them effectively and everything I am studying has let me deep dive into that!  

cred: Can you tell us a bit about yourself?

CP: I am from Boston, so being on the other side of the country is definitely a big change, but I absolutely love it! I love doing hot yoga and a good charcuterie board. On the weekends you can find me trying new restaurants or spending time with my friends    

cred: What do you want to achieve while interning at cred?

CP: I am excited to gain more experience in the PR industry and work with an array of different clients. I am looking forward to learning more about speaker management and hope to learn the ins and outs of how to find an event that a speaker is excited to be involved in and the event is excited to have!

cred: If you could only eat one food for the rest of your life what would it be?

CP: Sushi (I know it doesn’t really seem like a breakfast food, but I wouldn’t rule it out)

cred: Can you give us one interesting fact about yourself?

CP: I used to pole vault!

cred: What is one thing you want to accomplish in the next five years?

CP: I would love to move to California and make San Francisco my home!   

Interested in building your career at cred? Learn more about our open position on AngelList or email your resume to work@credpr.com!

Women@DockerCon 2019: Issues and Opportunities Facing Professional Women Today

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This week, I attended the Women@DockerCon Summit, a private forum for women in tech to connect, discuss, and engage with each other, at Moscone West in San Francisco. This Summit preceded DockerCon, a 3-day technology conference organized by Docker, Inc., and brought together women (and a handful of curious men) in tech in a space where they could freely discuss the issues and opportunities facing professional women today. The event included a workshop and two panels complete with a stage full of lady bosses.  

Women@DockerCon allowed attendees to share their success stories, voice their concerns, and ask for help in a room of supportive strangers. Everyone—from pioneers in the modern women's movement, to the software development directors, to the participants in the audience—had something impactful to say about their experiences while working as a woman.

Communicating with Presence

“Half the people have Imposter Syndrome, the other half don’t know what they’re doing.”

Have you ever felt like a total fraud and that at any moment everyone around you was going to realize how little you know? Good news—you’re not alone! Francine Gordon, a professor at Santa Clara University has spent years working with women who consistently doubt their abilities, a sure sign of imposter syndrome. She explained that, like a duck swimming, you see the movement, but not the vigorous peddling underwater—everybody is working equally as hard, you just don’t see it!

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Francine’s workshop began three questions:

1. What situations trigger your feelings of being a fraud?

2. What have you held yourself back from because you felt like a fake?

3. What has been the most effective way of managing these circumstances?

One participant shared that she makes sure to speak up within the first 10 minutes of a meeting. She uses this tactic to hold herself accountable and ensure that she doesn’t succumb to self-doubt. Another shared that she was hesitant to ask the dumb questions in an important meeting, but she wished she had after Bill Gates came in confidently asking all the “dumb questions” she was thinking.

Investing in an Inclusive Future

Next were the panels where a wide range of fields were represented, such as venture capital, human resources, insurance, and more. They spoke on best networking practices, how to handle awkward situations in the workplace, and what they’re excited about going forward in their careers.

XFactor Ventures Investment Partner Erica Brescia focused on investing in companies with at least one female founder. She built her network by leveraging supportive communities like the Female Founders group on Facebook.

Angel investor Susan Kimerlin shared the best way to learn about your industry: finding somebody doing something interesting and seeing how you can help.

Backstage Capital Director Brittany Davis is excited about seeing a positive trend in female founders at the companies she’s investing in.

Working While Female

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CloudBees Senior Director of Global Human Resources Ellen Thorne explained that surrounding herself with a highly technical team allowed her to build important skills that wouldn’t have evolved otherwise.

New Relic Senior Director of Customer Marketing Cynthia Hester shared her best kept secret, “saying ‘thank you’ is the best way to say ‘no’ without pissing anybody off.”

Cisco Vice President of Global Marketing Aruna Ravichandran mastered the art of calculated risk, even if it meant taking a demotion and leading her family to think she was having a midlife crisis.

Liberty Mutual Insurance Director Honey Williams recounted how working at Subway and later dropping out of the AirForce sounded like failures, but those experiences taught her that you can’t be scared to make the decisions that are right for you, even when everyone around you tells you otherwise.

Being surrounded by so many powerful, bold women at Women@DockerCon reminded me of how much we can accomplish if we join forces and help each other take the next right step.

Interested in speaking at an event like Docker Con? Reach out to hear more about our speaker management services: speak@credpr.com

How’s Your Data Game? An Inside Look at Strata Data Conference

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If you are in an industry that touches data and engineering (who doesn’t these days?), there’s no doubt you’ve heard about O’Reilly events and specifically Strata Data Conference (@strataconf). If you didn’t have a chance to attend this year, we’re giving you an inside look at what went down this week when the cred team attended Strata Data at Moscone Center in San Francisco.

Who was speaking on stage?

Only the best and the brightest in the data space, including amazing fierce women leaders.

Amy O’Connor (@ImAmyO) kicked off the main stage content on Wednesday with her keynote on “The journey to the data-driven enterprise from the edge to AI.” As Chief Data and Information Officer at Cloudera, she talked about how the company “drinks its own champagne” by running Cloudera on Cloudera and what they’ve learned on their journey from the edge to AI.

On Thursday, former data scientist and product manager at Airbnb Theresa Johnson (@missjohnson) talked about how she organized uncertainty at Airbnb and why black box models are not helpful. She talked about the internal tools they built to drive an end-to-end metrics forecasting platform, leveraging machine learning, Bayesian inference, TensorFlow, Hadoop, and web technology.

Did it get technical? You bet it did!

On Wednesday, Sonal Gupta, Research Scientist at Facebook, taught us about natural language understanding in task-oriented conversational AI. She outlined a way to do more advanced compositional understanding, which can understand cross-domain queries, using hierarchical representations.

We love seeing our cred clients on stage, especially Manifold.ai CTO Sourav Dey (@resdntalien), who always brings his personality to very technical topics. He did two talks this week, I caught his second on Thursday where he talked about how to attack clustered data with Mixed Effects Randomized Forests (MERF).

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Who wants some swag? Let’s check out the Expo Floor.

From professional headshots and massages to “techtris” and skee ball, the fun never stopped at the expo.

We were excited to stop by the Okera booth and congratulate them for their win for Most Disruptive Startup. Their platform tackles the hardest issues behind data access and governance across distributed environments.

Sippy cups are no longer just for babies—this one is for WINE! The team at Alteryx must have known cred was coming, this was winner of favorite swag grab of the day. We also learned a bit about the company, which offers an end-to-end self-service platform for data science and analytics.

We also snagged some cool socks and stickers from Talend, a recognized leader in cloud data integration and data integrity.

Last, but certainly not least, we chatted with our good friend Jonathan Symonds, CMO at Minio, about the company’s open source, enterprise-grade, Amazon S3 compatible object storage. Also got some pretty cool T-shirts to boot.

Should you attend Strata Data?

If you fall into one of the three categories below, we definitely recommend you check out the next Strata Data Conference or one of the other great upcoming O’Reilly events.

• Work in data & engineering? This is a great opportunity to learn the latest and greatest tools in the industry, network with your peers, and potentially snag that next great job.

• Company with a data science & engineering team? If you’re trying to recruit top talent in the data science & engineering space, Strata Data is the place to connect with prospective candidates.

• Company looking to better incorporate data into your business? Attend sessions to see the many cutting edge ways data is being applied within companies across industries and visit the expo floor to meet some amazing companies who may be able to help with your data game.

Want to speak at an event like Strata Data? Get in touch and we’ll see if cred can help you get on stage. Also follow us on Twitter for more great event news and recaps.

Texas Forever: Celebrating Ideas and Innovation at SXSW 2019

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As cred’s resident Texan, my home state is known for many great things—cowboys, the Alamo, and one of the best conferences in the world (in my humble, Austin unicorn opinion): South By, aka South by Southwest (SXSW)! An annual festival happening every spring in Austin, SXSW is part conference and part film and music festival, with the goal of bringing together leaders and thought provokers across all industries to share their knowledge.

Along with listening to talks from the likes of Stacey Abrams, Brené Brown, Kimberly Bryant, David Byrne, and Tim Ferriss, I was able to see cred speakers like Elizabeth Giorgi, Founder & CEO of Mighteor, Edith Yeung, Partner at 500 Startups, David Schwartz, CTO at Ripple, and Omar Tawakol, CEO & Founder at Voicea, take the stage and share their thoughts on the future of health, tech, politics, entertainment, and much more.

Here were some of my top three favorite talks:

Featured Session: Blockchain Beyond the Hype: The Ripple Effect

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In front of more than 600 attendees, Ripple CTO David Schwartz spoke candidly about cryptography and the future of blockchain. Joined by Business Insider Editor-at-Large Sara Silverstein, David discussed his interest in bitcoin, the difference between XRP and Ripple, SEC regulation laws, and why XRP is not a security.

Keynote: A Cultural Crystal Ball

In front of a packed house, Bozoma Saint John, CMO at William Morris Endeavor, and Ashley Graham, model and host of the Pretty Big Deal podcast, discussed how to spot trends that will be the next big thing. The session dove into how being authentic has helped them navigate trends and how they have each developed or impacted the culture in their industries.

Filled with golden nuggets of wisdom throughout their talk, Bozoma’s message of “staying quiet and really paying attention to the world around you,” for new ideas and inspiration is something that I’ll be practicing.

Keynote: Shirley Manson & Lauren Mayberry with Puja Patel

Lead by alternative music powerhouses, Shirley Manson, Garbage frontwoman, and CHVRCHES vocalist Lauren Mayberry, this panel, moderated by Pitchfork Editor-in-Chief Puja Patel, discussed their experiences as women in the music industry, how growing up in Scotland helped shape them into the people they are today, how they stay creative, and how social media impacts them in both positive and negative ways.

Curious about where else cred has been so far? Check out our other event spotlights here!

Meet cred’s Spring Intern

The cred team is excited to welcome another intern for the spring semester! Our intern program is as unique as cred, offering newcomers a chance to take a deep dive into the world of communications and events—from pitching clients for conferences to supporting speaking opportunities and researching industry events.

We sat down with Sonali Gupta, a senior graduating in May from the University of San Francisco, to chat through her experience. From interning at Chirps Chips, a startup featured on Shark Tank and backed by Mark Cuban, to joining us for the spring, we loved hearing about Sonali’s path to cred.

Check out our full interview below!

cred: Where are you going to school and what are you studying?

Sonali Gupta: I’m currently at the University of San Francisco and I’m studying Business Marketing!

cred: Why did you choose to study marketing?

SG: I chose to pursue marketing because there’s so many different aspects to it (digital, social media, product, etc) and over the course of my studies and classes I realized I was passionate about digital marketing.

cred: Can you tell us a bit about yourself?

SG: I’m originally from Sacramento so it was a big change for me to move to San Francisco, which is such a populous and a busy city. I love brunching on the weekends and spending time at Dolores Park with friends. I am obsessed with Game of Thrones and I love binge watching random shows on Netflix!

cred: What do you want to achieve while interning at cred?

SG: My past experiences have been heavily focused on digital marketing and a little bit on events, so I really want to get more experience in the PR/communications industry and learn more about the backend work of running events. It is nice to see that cred focuses on events, because not a lot of companies do that. Being able to tap into that niche market and help run events seamlessly is very useful for people who want to have an audience to talk to. I’m super excited for all the new things I’m going to learn!

cred: If you could only eat one food for the rest of your life, what would it be?

SG: Taco Bell Chalupas 24/7.

cred: Can you give us one interesting fact about yourself?

SG: I interned at a startup (Chirps Chips) that was featured on Shark Tank and invested in by Mark Cuban!

cred: What is one thing you want to accomplish in the next five years?

SG: My dad and I have a few new entrepreneurial ideas for products and companies, so I really want to work with him to start a company of my own!

Curious to learn more about what we do here at cred? Learn more about our open positions, including internships, on AngelList, or email Gina King at gina@credpr.com with your resume!