As my second Baruch activity, I attended a forum which featured Pam Dillon, the CEO of WineRing. As I have a great interest in tech startups, I really didn’t want to miss this opportunity to meet an experienced veteran who was in the early grounds of Wall Street, and now in the vast ocean of Tech Startups.

As I had entered the forum a bit tardy, I walked into the room that was already filled with tech startup aficionados and professionals. Pam Dillon spoke  about the early stages of engendering her baby, and what is so special about it. WineRing, a wine review/search/log app, is a multifunctional app for any wine lovers, or wine strangers. With its complex algorithm, WineRing is capable of recognizing and detecting your preference in wine, even if you don’t even know what you like. The app has an immense archive of data base on endless wines, and accordingly to your profile and your “likes,” “so sos,” and “no nos,” it filters and puts the wine that may suit your taste upon the surface.

Dillon was an art student, who was accepted to an internship at Goldman Sachs, and later she was soaked into it. I loved that unexpectedness of her. She was an anomaly and an alien. She strived against the eyes that didn’t expect much from her and put her best effort and work into every single project she had. She was a woman in the finance industry, and my favorite answer she gave us among the many of her answers that followed the audience questions, was the answer to the question, “how did you overcome the anxiety and struggle of gender difference?” Dillon answered by saying, “I focused on how other guys were also anxious and struggling because they focused on how different they were from the other men in the conference room; he might’ve been a non-caucasian, non-ivy, non-American, and he was all anxious for how he was different; so I saw the similarity between him and me.”