The TechWomen Talk: November 10<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
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 \u2014 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
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<\/strong> and Meergul Karakozueva<\/strong>, both of whom also appeared as GES alumni a week later. What they described \u2014 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 \u2014 was the substance of a 48-minute recorded session. The shorter two-minute version on KG Labs’ YouTube channel provides a summary.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The Global Entrepreneurship Summit is an annual US Government-hosted event that brings together entrepreneurs and investors from across the world \u2014 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?<\/p>\n\n\n\n The November 17 event gathered five GES alumni \u2014 Mirbek Asangariev<\/strong>, Diana Dursbekkizi<\/strong>, Azis Abakirov<\/strong>, Meergul Karakozueva<\/strong>, and Maksat Rysaliev<\/strong> \u2014 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 \u2014 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 \u2014 visa paths, accelerator applications, investor warm introductions \u2014 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n 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 \u2014 the audience, the panel setup, the AUCA venue \u2014 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n 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 \u2014 not as inspiration but as information about what the path actually looked like, step by step.<\/p>\n\n\n\n\n
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The GES Alumni Talk: November 17<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
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The Recording and the Room<\/h2>\n\n\n\n