Through my consulting practice, I was fortunate to serve this fall as Special Projects Manager at the Pipeline Fellowship and to collaborate with Founder and CEO Natalia Oberti Noguera, whose programs are changing the face of angel investing. I led speaker outreach for the 2013 Bay Area Pipeline Fellowship Conference and traveled to San Francisco to staff and photograph the day.
Natalia is dogged about highlighting #morevoices in everything she does and I was really proud of our engaging and diverse panels. I particularly loved hearing from Amaka Agbo of Transform Finance (“a committed community of investors, entrepreneurs and social leaders that seek to place communities back at the core of impact investing and that support community-led models of investment”) and Nicole Sanchez of the Kapor Center for Social Impact (which “relentlessly pursues creative strategies that will leverage information technology for positive social impact”), but all of our panelists had so much to share.
Here are just a few photographs I took at the conference.
To explore the world of angel investing, learn more about the Pipeline Fellowship.
P.S. About the venue: The conference took place at the SOMA offices of Wilson Sonsini Goodrich & Rosati. It was a terrific space and the team was very welcoming. WSGR is a law firm, but as attendees streamed in, I heard a lot of “So, is this place a startup?” Right after I arrived to start setting up, I went to a nifty little faucet to grab a glass of water…and realized that I was ignoring all context clues and was helping myself to a frothy cold beer. At eight in the morning.
juliacsmith 
Julia, this is impressive. We will take time to absorb later! Now to pick up and hide holiday stuff. Looking forward to seeing David Slack and your parents for dinner tonight. David flew into BWI on a delayed flight late last night and has meetings all day before coming here. And we thought he was to slow down.
And how about you two? We were so pleased to have you alone for the visit. Keep warm. Love from the old grannies
Thanks, Grannies! I just saw that Natalia is featured in an article in The Washington yesterday. You might check and see if it’s in the print version. Looks like it was in the Style section (these always are): http://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/style/tech-women-are-busy-building-their-own-networks/2014/01/08/60e356f2-7874-11e3-af7f-13bf0e9965f6_story.html
We had such a good time with you, too. I’ll give you a call soon to catch up. Love you both.
Haven’t had time to check out the links but want to compliment you on your photography. Having worked with photographers covering similar events for many years, I can tell you in all honesty you really captured something many other photographers just don’t get: a real sense of the action, good & tight shots, good composition … this is another marketable skill, if you need one.