Women Inventing What Doesn’t Exist Yet — An Evening with Tara Lemméy
Event Overview
Most startups fail not because the idea was wrong. Because nobody figured out what the invention actually needed to survive.
Tara Lemméy figures that out. She solved one of the hardest coordination problems in modern government — how do you get agencies that don’t trust each other to share what they know? The system she designed is still running. She’s on the board of Fareon, a biophysics company doing things that shouldn’t be possible yet. She hosts Invent, featured on Apple Podcasts this March.
On Earth Day she’s coming to Berkeley to talk about what it actually takes to get a hard invention from idea to market — what it needs, what kills it, and what you do when everything is wrong and you have to figure out what’s actually missing.
Join the Berkeley Gateway Accelerator and Berkeley Female Founders & Funders.
Fireside chat. Wine, cheese, and the kind of conversations that don’t end at 7pm.
Event Format (5:00 - 7:00 PM)
5:00 – 5:30 PM: Arrival + open networking
5:30 – 5:40 PM: Welcome remarks (BGA + partners)
5:40 – 6:15 PM: Fireside chat (Tara Lemméy × Alyssa Simpson Rochwerger)
6:15 – 6:30 PM: Audience Q&A
6:30 – 7:00 PM: Open networking
Speaker & Moderator
Alyssa Simpson Rochwerger (Moderator)
Alyssa builds and scales AI systems that solve hard, real-world problems. She most recently served as Interim VP of AI & Analytics at Blue Shield of California, where she led a 120-person team and helped reshape enterprise AI governance. Her work has driven large-scale adoption of AI across healthcare, improving efficiency, access, and member experience for thousands of employees and millions of users.
Previously, she held leadership roles at IBM Watson and Figure Eight (Appen), bringing emerging technologies from concept to real-world deployment. She also helped lead MyTurn, California’s COVID-19 vaccination platform, contributing to the prevention of an estimated 1.5 million cases and 20k deaths.
Alyssa is a recognized voice in applied AI and AI ethics, focused on one core question: how to make complex systems actually work in the real world.
Tara Lemméy (Featured Speaker)
Tara Lemméy invents things that don't exist.
She founded LENS, an invention firm. Her biggest inventions were never patentable - like architecting the intelligence sharing system still used across the US intelligence community.She holds patents in autonomous systems, internet protocols, and cloud infrastructure when the invention requires it.
She serves on the boards of Ditchley Foundation and Weil Foundation, joining boards of companies where her skill at complex invention at scale lifts the company.
Free — RSVP required.
Capacity limited to 120.