Three women sat at the front of the room, ready to take questions.

None had expected to be technology start-up founders in their early careers. Yet, there they sat Wednesday evening in Winnipeg, fielding questions about running a business and finding funding and keeping motivation.

Crawl, walk, run, said Catherine Metrycki, chief executive of Callia, a successful flower company.

She spoke to a room of eager entrepreneurs and people curious about start-ups at the North Forge Technology Exchange-hosted event, in partnership with the Information and Communications Technology Council. Both have a goal of bringing more women into the tech industry.

“The crawl is like the easiest, scrappiest, get it out the door in 48 hours,” Metrycki explained. “The walk is, like, you start to put some resources toward it.”

Run comes when you’ve “made it.”

She sat between Carly Schuler, co-founder of Hoot Reading, an online tutoring service, and Carine Bado, founder of business consulting firm My Little Tribe.

Bado recalled her 12-year journey: financial analyst, consultant, eventually entrepreneur.

“I didn’t even think that I was a tech founder,” she said. “I thought you needed to have a computer science degree to be a tech founder.”

Women consume just 22.5 per cent of Canada’s digital economy employment, but make up 47 per cent of the country’s total workforce, according to the ICTC.

Read the full article on the Winnipeg Free Press site here.