You might have across the Chase Mission Main Street Grants program for Small Businesses. 20 businesses will be awarded $150K to help them grow, make it big. Applicants need to secure 250 votes by Oct 17th in order to be considered for the next round, after which they will be evaluated by Chase representatives and panelists. Cloud Don is one of the applicants and you can vote for Cloud Don here. Now, why should you vote for Cloud Don?
Gender Inequality in Tech
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Google Diversity Report[/caption]
Lack of Diversity and Gender Inequality in tech industry is a matter of grave concern. Big companies like Google (30%), Microsoft (29%) have published their diversity numbers and they don’t look very well. It is improving, but a lot more work needs to be done. Most of Cloud Don’s business is around the OpenStack ecosystem, and it is not a lot different with OpenStack community too. (As far as we know, diversity numbers for the OpenStack community is not out yet. Please let me know if we missed that).
With more buzz around this from the Grace Hopper Conference, it might be a good opportunity to explain how we want to help improve gender diversity.
Our Vision
As an OpenStack services company, Cloud Don cares about gender diversity and wants to do our best to improve gender diversity. How so? Simply, we want to be a women-majority OpenStack Services company and our vision is to become the largest women-majority OpenStack Services company in three years.
Chase Small Business Grant will help us set the stepping stone for this ambitious vision. Most of the grant will be spent in training female engineers in OpenStack. Our goal is to be able to train at least five in the first year. If you are interested in specifics of how this grant money will be spent, please leave a comment or contact us.
If you care about gender equity in tech industry/ OpenStack community and want to help improve it, please do so by voting for Cloud Don. We need at least 250 votes by Oct 17th, please gain good karma in improving gender equality by voting for us (not this one:).
Thanks!