Dee Poku-Spalding On The Women-Led Other Festival & The Importance Of Female Leadership

The idea came from two directions. One is I've been running an organization called WIE; I've been hosting educational talks designed to help women advance in their careers. But what I started to see was that there were more and more women who were much more interested entrepreneurship, who were sort of tired of waiting for the system to catch up with them, who were frustrated and who just wanted to do their own thing. So I wanted to support, particularly millennial women, who are so idea driven typically, and help them on their path to entrepreneurship.

While I was thinking of that, there was one year when I went to a few music festivals, and I remember looking around me and just seeing, the audience was probably 80% women. And yet when I looked at the stage, that audience demographic wasn't reflected, and so there were very few female led acts, and none, if any, female led headliners. That just struck me as something that was unfair, I wanted to address that. It was all these ideas floating around, and they merged into this festival that was about music and entrepreneurship and creativity and design, all in one.