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In this talk, you will hear the challenging but yet rewarding journey of a female entrepreneur of two successful companies in the area of enterprise software. One service company launched in Iran when she was 27 years old and the other one a deep tech B2B SaaS product company launched in 2016 in Canada right after when she finished her Ph.D. as a cloud computing researcher at Vienna University of Technology. Her company raised over $8M, passed the product-market fit in retail and smart city market segments globally, and has tier-1 strategic partners including Telefonica, IBM, SAP, Intel, Bosch, and customers like Under Armour, Zara, Circle K, and more.

She will talk about her challenges as a passionate outward-facing CTO who had to pivot twice, a young executive who led by influence and built a strong team, and a working mom who rightly made the decision of temporarily leaving her first child (her company) for a real child (Sara) in the middle of fundraising. She will also talk about the new chapter of her career path when she decided to leave her executive role at her own company and joined a software scale-up as the VP of Product in the HR Tech domain, where she is following her passion as a diversity and inclusion advocate. If you are hesitating to step into entrepreneurship as you don't know what it means to be an entrepreneur, join us to see behind the scene of an entrepreneur's life and judge if you can overcome such challenges!

About the speaker

Soodeh Farokhi, Ph.D., is a visionary technology entrepreneur and a proven strategic product executive with over a decade of exponential experience in the enterprise software space. She has a solid dual tech-business view with broad experience building innovative software products from the ground up to pass the product-market-fit and have large-scale customer deployments. She is currently the VP of Product at NAKISA, a global leader in enterprise cloud solutions for Organizational Design and Lease Management. She is the founder and former CTO of C2RO, a VC-backed enterprise SaaS startup in Canada, a leader in AI Video Analytics space, where she was recognized as the finalist of the Canadian Women Entrepreneurs National Award (RBC, 2020), the finalist of the Young Quebec Entrepreneurs Provisional Award (ARISTA, 2018), and was recognized as an innovator transforming the AI Video Analytics industry (SAP, 2021). She started her entrepreneurial journey by co-founding a software service company based in Iran that automates enterprise business processes. She is the co-founder and a former executive member of the Women of MENA in Technology Montreal chapter and serves as a business advisor and board member for several tech start-ups and organizations. She has a PhD. in computer science from Vienna University of Technology and an M.Sc., and a B.Sc. in SW engineering. She is a diversity and inclusion advocate as she believes a diverse world is an enabled world!

About the Founder & Investor Talks series

The Founder & Investor Talks organized by the Innovation Incubation Center (i²c) at TU Wien enable the audience to learn first-hand from experienced founders, investors, and innovators and get inspired by their success (and failure) stories. Our guest speakers share their international experiences, dos & don’ts and lessons learned during an inspiring talk. Afterwards, you will have the chance to ask all the burning questions during an interactive Q&A!

We are looking forward to meeting you!

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