“I was born in Kuwait. My mother had an arranged marriage and had to ask for permission to go outside. She didn’t go to college, women at that time never dreamt of that. My brother was born here and I went to college six credits at a time in the states.”
— Yasmine Mustafa, Founder of ROAR & Leader of GDI Philly
“When I started 123LinkIt, a referral marketing company, I was very naive and running a tech company for the first time didn’t quite work out as I planned.”
— Yasmine Mustafa, Founder of ROAR & Leader of GDI Philly
“I realized really quickly that I had to at least learn the basics of coding, so that I could communicate with my CTO at the time.”
— Yasmine Mustafa, Founder of ROAR & Leader of GDI Philly
“I started a learn ruby 101 code group, but I ended up getting overrun by my own group. I met two women who shared some similar experiences in tech groups and started traveling to New York to attend GirlDevelopIt.”
— Yasmine Mustafa, Founder of ROAR & Leader of GDI Philly
“I would take the Bolt Bus up to NYC to take a two hour class, which was took way too much time, so I decided to start a chapter of GirlDevelopit in Philly. We are now the largest tech group according to meetup.com”
— Yasmine Mustafa, Founder of ROAR & Leader of GDI Philly
“The name itself, GirlDevelopIt, is somewhat misleading. The group is geared towards teaching women how to code, 18 and up, not young girls. Our insurance restricts us from teaching minors.”
— Yasmine Mustafa, Founder of ROAR & Leader of GDI Philly
“There are a lot of Frat-like cultures in tech companies. In order for culture to shift, change has to start at the top. Leaders have to figure out how to get buy in from everyone and make everyone feel welcome.”
— Yasmine Mustafa, Founder of ROAR & Leader of GDI Philly
“iPad is a great example of a lack of awareness, leading too a gender-biased decision. There was a complete twitter storm about it when the iPad came out with its name. If there were women on that team, they might not of called it the ‘iPad’ because women think of the word ‘pad’ completely differently.”
— Yasmine Mustafa, Founder of ROAR & Leader of GDI Philly
“I traveled around South America for six months and it open my eyes about violence against women. I saw it over, and over, and over again. I was really taken aback by it, so I decided that I would do what I could to help change it.”
— Yasmine Mustafa, Founder of ROAR & Leader of GDI Philly
“They key to ROAR is the software. Its a crowdsourced safety app. The challenge is
taking that data and working with the city to make the area safer.”
— Yasmine Mustafa, Founder of ROAR & Leader of GDI Philly
