7th Year New Tech NW State of the Community & How Can We Help You More?

First off, What else would be helpful for New Tech to create for you? What pains you in your tech career or in growing your tech company? Please share with us what matters to you as the Seattle area tech ecosystem continues to rapidly evolve.

Since we're celebrating our 7th anniversary this month it seems like a good time to look back and ahead with you and our community. We're always looking to provide the best events and services that assist you with your current needs in the PNW tech community. It's a fun and broad mission since we serve the full community of engineers, founders, investors, recruiters, executives, startups, enterprise companies, and all employee positions at tech companies.

You can always count on us turning you on to great new tech innovations created by local companies, and connecting you to new friends, resources, job opportunities, mentors, and partners to further your tech career or company. In example, last month's job fair connected 500+ techies with 20 great companies from startups to local giants including Pokemon, REI and Amazon.

Currently we're focused on making all of our events provide you with easier and stronger opportunities to be human and develop deeper relationships with other quality folks in our community. That's shifted the event formats a little by using LinkedIn's Find Nearby feature to give you dozens of new connections at every event, having Andrew McMasters (founder of Jet City Improv and Improv Mindset) facilitate some improv exercises with you, and updating your name tags to include your job title, ask, offer or fun fact.

Some big moves have happened recently. After 4 years of having Briana May as our excellent remote Events & Operations Manager, she's moving on and we've added Kemi Adeyemi as our local Events & Operations Manager (say hi to her at events). This is going to open up many new opportunities and offerings to you.

In November Elizabeth Scallon joined us as a co-host and interviewer when we launched monthly Diversity & Women in Tech Seattle events after having them twice a year as themed events for the past 6 years. This is exciting because we're already building a strong consistent community for everyone interested in growing relationships with other people and organizations moving the needle on DEI issues.

This month we're very stoked to be partnering with UW to present you with our February 12th D&WiT event next week in the UW Intellectual House which is styled after the architecture of Native American longhouses. The panel will be off the hook with 6 leaders from Microsoft, Starbucks, Twitter and UW if you'd like to join us.

New Tech Tacoma moves into being a monthly happy hour event this month hosted by Jordan Hoover and Shadrach White. This will focus on more networking since Tacoma currently has over 150,000 tech workers, but only a handful of tech companies taking advantage of the inexpensive commercial real estate to open outposts or set up shop. #missedopportunity

And our latest move is to add special workshops for you that give software engineers inside information on interviewing in general and for specific companies like Google, Amazon and Microsoft to increase your chances of landing that dream job.

Thank you for taking this amazing ride with us whether you've been here since our first event at Impact Hub in February 2013, remember the 500 person monthly events at Cornish Playhouse (and Red and I being invited to the White House) in 2015, or you just joined us this month. Your New Tech Northwest community is vibrant and on its way to 50,000 members because you show up, share yourself, and have a give first attitude for your fellow New Techies. I, and our team, are truly, deeply grateful to you as we look forward to our next 7 years together.