Silicon Sessions Female Founder (Roundtable) x Leeds Digital
Silicon Mingle Manchester is crossing the Pennines! This time, it’s for the women building Leeds’ tech scene 💜
On Wednesday, 23rd September, 10 am – 1 pm, we’re taking the Silicon Sessions Founder Problem-Solving Roundtable to West Village, Bruntwood, as part of Leeds Digital Festival, and we’re bringing together a room of female tech founders.
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:
Katherine Megson - 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.
Sara Parker - Sara is a fractional COO and founder of Teal Compass, working with founder-led, tech-enabled businesses that have momentum but have stalled on execution. Her focus is cutting through the noise, aligning teams, and sharpening the metrics that actually drive decisions — helping founders move from firefighting to scaling. Based in the North of England and working across the UK, she's passionate about supporting women scaling businesses and bringing practical, no-fluff operational thinking to founders navigating the messy middle of growth.
Lewis Sayes - 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.
Stuart Clarke MBE - The 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.
Rachel Swann - Rachel is an experienced commercial leader who has helped technology and SaaS businesses achieve sustainable growth. Through her work, she supports founders and leadership teams on strategy, scaling, commercial development and business transformation.
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 serve lunch, as well as tea and coffee, throughout the event.
Getting Here:
West Village
Bruntwood Sci-Tech
Wellington St, Leeds
LS1 1BA
Exact details will be updated shortly.
Parking
Exact parking details will be updated shortly.
We can't wait to bring Silicon Sessions to Leeds and create a room full of ambitious women building some seriously exciting tech businesses. See you there!
📸 Disclaimer: Photos will be taken for marketing purposes; let us know if you’d prefer not to be included.
💬 Questions? Reach out to Fernando:
📧 fernando@siliconmingle.com
🌐 www.siliconmingle.com
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