Since 2017, we’ve been putting people in tech in the same room.

Marina Petrenko

Marina got her start in Washington, DC, interning at a Ukrainian political nonprofit, where she ran a charity project with ties to Bill Clinton. While everyone around her was collecting political ties, she somehow ended up with his silk ones. When the internship wrapped, she packed for Silicon Valley and landed in video game PR, which led to marketing and a bit of everything: content, campaigns, partnerships, launches. Of all of it, events were always the most fun. She also squeezed in a second master’s, in media and broadcast communication technology, by studying at night in San Francisco while running recruiting events downtown by day. Over a decade in the Valley she launched plenty of projects, some that worked and some that taught her what not to do, and she kept noticing the same thing: networking events were packed with men, and the women she talked to kept skipping them. At first she blamed the beer and pizza. Then she watched them happily devour both and realized the carbs were never the problem. It was the room.

So she built something different. With two master’s degrees and a lot of enthusiasm, in 2017 she started running her first hiring nights: invite-only evenings where experienced tech people had five-minute one-on-ones with hiring teams. In 2021 she founded OutGeek. Since 2017, she has organized more than 500 events across the US, Canada, Central America, Europe and Asia, and she’s shown up in person in most of those cities. Along the way she has run recruiting programs for giants in every space, from Google and SpaceX in the States to TD in Canada and Adevinta in Europe, all the way down to two-person startups hiring their first CTO. A big part of that was sales: Marina spent years as a director of sales, so she speaks fluent money and fluent budget.

We set up the room. You make the move.

Four things we believe, and build every event around.