International Women’s Day brings out entrepreneurial spirit in Regina

There seemed to be a common theme in Regina in the week leading up to International Women’s Day - young female entrepreneurs.

One of whom was Kyla Guru, a keynote speaker at the University of Regina’s Inspiring Leadership Forum, and Founder and CEO of Bits N’ Bytes Cybersecurity Education.

“It’s not often that you get to bring people physically together into spaces that feel safe and feel warm and welcoming in technology, specifically for women. So, it’s a very unique opportunity for women in Saskatchewan and professional women to gather and to talk about really frontier ideas, things like accessibility and education, technology and AI,” said Guru.

The 21-year-old Stanford student says she started putting the pieces together for her company at just 14 years old.

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Guru saw the prevalence of cyber attacks going on around her and wanted to come up with a solution to protect people.

“So, I started educating in schools, K-12 schools to talk about cyber. It actually just started with my former elementary school. I went in and I did a like 30-minute session to talk about my top ten tips on staying safe, and it snowballed from there. Teachers love to talk to other teachers, so I was invited to a bunch of different sorts of teacher seminars, and then that led to a bunch of different schools requesting curriculum,” she said.

“So, we started developing more content and curriculum to teach kids about digital safety. And we now sort of support the whole gamut of K-12 education as well as mentorship opportunities for young women. We run an annual conference, which I’m pretty proud of. It’s our annual Girl Con conference, which brings together thousands of young women to talk about technology and the applications of technology in various settings, including fashion and design and athletics and education.”

Sticking with the subject of young female entrepreneurs, on Sunday it was the inaugural ‘She Means Business’ Build a Business Workshop.

There were plenty of female industry leaders on hand to lend their expertise to the next generation of female entrepreneurs.

“We’ve had this idea for quite a while, but it really was wanting to start the entrepreneurship journey as early as we could and show them kind of apart from the community and other women business leaders in the community about what’s possible,” said Haus of Ops founder and CEO Karissa Peterson.

Peterson says the biggest aim of the workshop is the passing down of knowledge and to show the young girls in attendance what is possible for their future.

“Biggest thing is we’re going to take them all for little workshops, but we have full confidence builders in between. So, there’s going to be some high fives, there’s going to be some icebreakers, they’re going to talk about their superpowers and just really trying to keep it fun and light for the girls,” she said.

“I’ve seen everything from a slime business to a kid’s spa. So, it sounds like they’re having fun.”