Alumni Talks at AUCA: TechWomen and GES Graduates on Startups, Silicon Valley, and What It Takes

In November 2016, AUCA’s campus in Bishkek hosted two alumni talks organized by KG Labs — events built around people who had participated in major US State Department programs and come back with something specific to share. The first, on November 10, brought together TechWomen alumni: graduates of the State Department program that connects emerging women leaders in STEM from Africa, Central and South Asia, and the Middle East with Silicon Valley mentors and companies. The second, on November 17, gathered alumni of the Global Entrepreneurship Summit (GES) — the world’s premier gathering of entrepreneurs and investors — to address a question the audience was bringing into the room: what do Kyrgyzstanis need to know to build a successful startup and get to Silicon Valley?

Both events were part of a longer November program. KG Labs was running four ideation sessions for the Travel and Tourism Hackathon through the same month, and the alumni talks were part of the surrounding community programming — events that built the audience and context for the December hackathon while standing independently as useful in their own right.

The TechWomen Talk: November 10

TechWomen is a State Department program that places women from STEM fields across Africa, Central and South Asia, and the Middle East into mentorship arrangements with technology companies in Silicon Valley — companies including Google, Twitter, Salesforce, and Cisco, among others. Alumni return with firsthand experience of how those organizations work, what technical cultures look like at scale, and what pathways exist for women in tech outside the traditional options available in their home countries.

The November 10 talk at AUCA brought Kyrgyz TechWomen alumni in front of an audience to share those experiences directly. The speakers included Diana Dursbekkizi and Meergul Karakozueva, both of whom also appeared as GES alumni a week later. What they described — the Silicon Valley companies they had worked with, the specific technical and professional challenges they had navigated, and what the experience had changed about their understanding of their own work — was the substance of a 48-minute recorded session. The shorter two-minute version on KG Labs’ YouTube channel provides a summary.

The GES Alumni Talk: November 17

The Global Entrepreneurship Summit is an annual US Government-hosted event that brings together entrepreneurs and investors from across the world — typically in a different country each year. Alumni of GES have been selected to attend as founders or ecosystem builders, and carry back direct exposure to the investors, ideas, and networks that circulate at that level. The November 17 talk at AUCA asked GES alumni to answer one of the most practical questions in Bishkek’s startup community: what specifically would it take for a Kyrgyz founder to get to Silicon Valley?

The November 17 event gathered five GES alumni — Mirbek Asangariev, Diana Dursbekkizi, Azis Abakirov, Meergul Karakozueva, and Maksat Rysaliev — all graduates of GES cohorts from 2014 to 2016. The program ran a structured Q&A in Russian and English: questions about entrepreneurship at a global level, about the GES application process, about what the experience actually looked like on the ground, and about books and startup advice the speakers found worth sharing. Diana closed the session by briefing the audience on the upcoming Travel and Tourism Hackathon — making the alumni talk also a preview of what KG Labs was planning for December. Their answers, over a 36-minute and a 21-minute recording, addressed both the practical logistics — visa paths, accelerator applications, investor warm introductions — and the less quantifiable factors: what it actually feels like to pitch in a room full of investors who have never heard of Kyrgyzstan, and how to position yourself in that context without either over-explaining the geography or pretending it doesn’t matter.

The Recording and the Room

Both events were recorded and are on the KG Labs YouTube channel. The 407 MB photo archive from November 17 (GES 17.11.16) documents the room — the audience, the panel setup, the AUCA venue — in detail. The 56+ high-resolution event photos from the IMG series show what these conversations looked like in practice: a room of people, in Bishkek, engaging seriously with questions about international entrepreneurship that would have had no local forum five years earlier.

What these events represented, within KG Labs’ programming logic, was a specific kind of knowledge transfer: not abstract instruction but observed experience, delivered by people from the same city to an audience from the same city. The TechWomen alumni had been to Silicon Valley. The GES alumni had been in the room with the investors. The talks were a way of making that experience accessible — not as inspiration but as information about what the path actually looked like, step by step.

Both recordings are available on the KG Labs YouTube channel: TechWomen Alumni Talk (48 min + 2 min), GES Alumni Talk (36 min + 21 min).

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