Silicon Mingle Manchester is crossing the Pennines! This time, it’s for the women building Leeds’ tech scene 💜
Building a business can be lonely. The big decisions around fundraising, hiring, growth, sales and strategy often land on your shoulders, and finding people who genuinely understand what you’re navigating isn’t always easy.
Silicon Sessions is designed to change that.
This will be a focused, supportive and honest problem-solving session where female tech founders can bring a real challenge to the table and get perspectives from other founders and experienced industry experts.
Each founder will have 15 minutes to introduce their business, talk through a challenge they’re currently facing, and open it up to the room for discussion, questions and ideas.
It’s not about pitching.
It’s not about pretending you’ve got everything figured out.
And it’s definitely not about sitting through a panel of people telling you how to build your business.
It’s about getting the right women around the table and working through real problems together.
Introducing the Experts:
- Founder of Duck Talk Marketing and co-organiser of Silicon Mingle Manchester, Lewis is an expert in tech marketing and sales, specialising in turning complex technical solutions into market-ready products and services that people can actually understand.
- With experience spanning early-stage start-ups to international organisations such as Sharp UK & EU, he’s spent his career helping tech companies take their products to market, raise private investment, and grow.
- Founder and chair of Leeds Digital, Yorkshire’s largest tech community, as well as the founder of the annual UK Tech Week which brings together regional tech ecosystems, alongside national advocacy organisations, to celebrate tech across the whole of the UK.
- The annual Tech Nation report saw him named by startups as the most influential person in Leeds; he was also named as one of the top three digital leaders in the UK in the Digital Leaders DL100, as well as the City Region Leader: Leeds in the Northern Leadership Awards, and regularly features in the Yorkshire Business Insider Powerlist 100.
- Head of Innovation & Growth specialising in supporting startups, scale-ups, and global companies through strategic ecosystem development.
- Katherine has curated and delivered Female Founder Incubators across the North: three in Leeds, one in Manchester, and one in Alderley Park, supporting over 60 women-led businesses with the resources, networks, and guidance they need to scale successfully.
- Katherine excels at spotting opportunities, building strategic partnerships, and making the connections that accelerate growth at every stage of company development.
Whether it’s growth, fundraising, hiring, strategy, sales, partnerships, marketing, or simply figuring out your next move, this session is all about helping founders move forward.
There’ll also be plenty of time to network before and after the session, giving you the chance to continue conversations, meet other female founders, and build connections with people who understand the journey.
To keep everyone fuelled, we’ll be serving lunch as well as tea and coffee throughout the event.
Tech founders. This event is sector agnostic.
