Tech Inspired

Meet Sandra Tobler, the Co-Founder and CEO of Futurae Technologies AG an ETH Zurich spin-off that specializes in cyber security. Her company strives to set new standards in authentication security without compromising on user experience. She is convinced that IT is the most powerful and creative industry with all the positive and negative aspects known. She points out that IT security is not just a box to tick off on a check list. On the contrary, it must be treated as an integral design element of a framework, service or digital product. Sandra is also a passionate promoter of the different players in the IT security ecosystem as a board member of the initiative Swiss Cybersecurity Startup Map. Additionally, Sandra talks about the skills that are in high demand and too few people combine, yet. An absolute must episode to listen to for people thinking about a career in cyber security.

Meet Alex Sokolowska, who shares her experience about the empowerment of women in STEM while working in the academic environment and the start-up world. Follow her journey from a PhD in Computational Science at the University of Zurich, to a San Francisco start-up and her current position as a post-doc researcher at TU Delft. For her, technology is the tool to explore the world in a more scientific manner. And we talk about why there is a need for an equivalent of medicine’s Hippocratic oath in technology. During her PhD she founded the non-profit organization Women++. Here, she talks about the motivation behind Women++ and shares her thoughts about the importance of networks and why women need to network to be able to shape new and trending topics together with men. Through her networks, she met so many badass female scientists, founders, executives and managers that inspired her on her own journey.

Meet Dalith Steiger! Get to know her journey from Software Engineer at UBS to Co-Founder and Managing Partner of SwissCognitive, a network to discuss the opportunities, impacts and development of Artificial Intelligence. She chose to study Mathematics and Information Technology because numbers are easy to understand. Moreover, programming languages are international and spoken worldwide. That is one reason why Dalith is a big advocate of diversity in technology. Another one is the presence of bias. She explains why it is important to involve diverse teams in the process of translating information into algorithms and what she calls thoughtful coding. Dalith believes that nobody should be afraid to get in touch with technology and explains why this is an eye-opening experience. Listen to this episode to learn more about Dalith’s four key principles and what drives her as a mother of two teenage girls to make sure that the next generation has a perspective.

Meet Maja Schreiner! Maja has been in the Tech industry for a very long time and has recently decided to start her own venture. She grew up in Serbia and was already interested in programming since she was a kid. Although she wasn't looking for a job in Switzerland, she ended up in a Startup in Lausanne.  Later in her career she became aware of how important it is to be able to work part-time. This led her to found her own business, enabling companies to offer job-sharing opportunities.   Want to know why she believes job sharing will be of advantage for companies? Listen to this podcast and find out, how Maja led her career in tech until today!

Recently our partner community, Girls in Tech Switzerland, has recorded a podcast introducing themselves and sharing their advice, insights and tips about tech and the current situation. We are happy to share this podcast with you as well. Listen to their team members talking about their favorite apps, why they believe in tech for good and how they cope with the lockdown.

Meet Marisa Tschopp! She is a researcher at scip ag (www.scip.ch), a cybersecurity and tech company in Zurich. She is conducting research about AI and technology from a psychological perspective, with a wide range of questions related to psychological phenomena, governance and ethical implications. Her research areas are about trust (What does it take to trust AI?), behavioral performance measurement of conversational AI (How smart is Siri?), and lethal autonomous weapons system (killerrobots and how to ban them!). At one point in her career, she decided that it is time to spend her time in a job that is not just good enough. It took her one year of work to land her dream job at scip. Want to find out how she approached her job search? How can she connect her studies in psychology with cybersecurity and why is it so important that companies do research as well. Listen to this podcast and get some amazing advice on how everyone can find their dream job, why networks are so important and what small steps can lead to according to the best advice Marisa got in her life. Psst, Marisa will be a speaker at the #wetechtogether conference, we are really excited listening to her knowledge session on the 3rd of October 2020, don't miss her speech!

Meet Bettina Wolko! She is a software engineer at Namics with an interesting background! Having started out with an apprenticeship as a chemical lab assistant in Dusseldorf she soon realized that software engineering was a way cooler option - discover why she made that switch in this podcast episode. We also discuss how she must start mornings with coffee, what a typical day is like for her at work (hint: not typical at all), and Bettina helps us debunk the coder stereotype myth we see in movies. Although it took her some time to learn to code, Bettina believes everyone can learn to program - and she shares her recommendations for anyone who wants to become a software engineer. Listen to Bettina’s wise words for anyone thinking about switching careers and the best advice she was given - which definitely applies to work and life!

Alice studied Game Design at ZHdK, a degree she discovered at an introductory evening and straight away she was hooked as it combined everything she loved: programming, engineering, gaming, writing, narrative, art and design. Today she’s Game Developer at Air Console, and works on a cloud-based console which uses phones as controllers and in her spare time she runs The Mane Quest, where she reviews horse games! In this episode, Alice discusses the Swiss game industry, what the career opportunities are and what skills you need to get into this scene - whether you want to design and develop games or just want something game-related and to be part of a cool and growing industry.

Sara “slipped into the tech world” after studying a Master’s in multilingual text analysis and loves that she’s managed to combine her passion in linguistics with tech! ⁠⁠ Sara applied to jobs everywhere using advice she got from her role models, which led her to interesting interviews and possibilities until she scored a job at Turicode, a tech start-up that transforms unstructured data from PDF documents into valuable information. ⁠⁠ How did she end up there? Well, using one of her own little tricks!⁠ This and other tips are revealed in this podcast!

Arijana Walcott didn’t start off as a techie. She started out in a call centre before becoming Head of Trends and Technology at Swisscom and later becoming CEO and Co-Founder of Dart Labs - an incubator based in Silicon Valley and Zurich focused on early stage start-ups. This fascinating woman has had a couple of pivots in her career. In this episode, we discuss these changes, her fascination with gadgets, how emerging technologies can reach mass markets and why she feels so lucky about the career she’s been able to create for herself. Arijana also gives her advice to those wanting to get into tech and shares with us her favourite female role models. Awesome episode!