Pause Fest 2018 in #sketchnotes

Returning to Pause was like a coming of age story.

When we attended in 2017, Eban Escott and I were sharing our vision for Codebots and enjoying the collision of an incredibly creative and striving group of humans.

In 2018 we were back with a platform in beta, a live demo to present on stage and a 4-month old baby in tow — it turns out I was pregnant at Pause 2017!

Below are a series of my #sketchnotes from Pause 2018.

On Day 1 startup royalty and Canva Team evangelist, Guy Kawasaki shared the top 10 mistakes entrepreneurs are making. He suggests that while hustle and vision is important, a working prototype is the ultimate pitch.

Guy Kawasaki’s thoughts on hiring to complement with diversity were especially on point if you’re building a product for a global and diverse market. The last thing we want is to become an echo chamber of our own biases.

He also champions the power of evangelism to empower small niches of people on your cumulative journey to world domination.

Another highlight of Pause was meeting a true community evangelist, David Spinks — I had travelled to San Francisco in 2016 just to attend his CMX conference for community builders so geeking out in person was a real joy.

Having my son Lincoln join me at Pause, I realised there is no such thing as starting too early when it comes to immersing yourself in the tech scene to find solutions to the world’s biggest challenges.

This was reinforced when I met Yuma, a ridiculously talented and happy 10 year old who is encouraged to explore all his talents (and app ideas) by his supportive father.

Yuma stole the show on a business breakfast panel at Pause with Cameron Adams (Canva), Jan Owen (Foundation for Young Australians) and Tech Crunch editor Mike Butcher.

The story of how code-writing robots and humans are changing the future of work is a good one so I wanted to learn as much as I could from the PR experts.

I was lucky enough to score a 10 minute mentor session and brain dump from Kate Dinon at Of Character. I also found the PR panel super interesting and I’m now working on what our four pillars should be.

I found many parallells with Christie Whitehill, founder of Tech Ready Women who saw a gap when it comes to skills and education and is on a mission to break down barriers and enable women to confidently step into the tech space.

Following on in a similar vein, Kate Cornick from LaunchVic expressed her big vision and the small steps we can take to ensure everyone has the chance to chase their world changing ideas.

Thanks to the tech skills of Leo and the dad jokes of Eban, our demo went without a hitch and we recruited many curious beta participants who are keen to build software and apps in collaboration with a bot. Below is a slightly wobbly recording of the live demo.

I’ll finish with my big idea of the festival from founder of Canva. Cameron Adams implored that we need to create tools that can help the other 99%. Canva is a tool for people who aren’t professional designers but still value professionally styled collateral. They are an Australian startup that recently raised $50 million and are now valued at more than $1 billion.

If they can do it for design, why can’t Codebots be the Canva for Code?

But a conference is only as good as the actions you take after it right?

Goal 1: Help the other 99% use Codebots to get to MVP faster

You can signup for our beta at codebots.com

Goal 2: Empower niche evangelists to explore Codebots

If you’ve got a burning tech idea, hit me up! indi@codebots.com

Goal 3: Choose 4 storytelling pillars for our PR strategy

I’ll share my process to choose these in the next post.

I can’t wait to see what Pause 2019 looks like, when we are post-public launch and sharing stories of how our platform is helping ALL team members of software projects — not just the professional developers.

In the meantime check out pausefest.com.au as they already have a flash deal going for earlybird tickets for 2019.

Hope to see you there!

A big thank you to George Hedon and his event team for making life easier for a breastfeeding mother!

And shout outs to all my creatively quirky startup friends that I got to catch up with while in town: Sarah Moran David Swan rahul soans Kirsteene Phelan Adrian Stone Josh Lipscombe Kunal Kalro Mykel Dixon Tristonne Forbes Eike Zeller Suzanne Nguyen Hayley Johnson Joel Connolly QUT Creative Enterprise Australia — every one of you is chasing something bigger than yourself and is a truly amazing human in my eyes❤