Alta stopped being an idea.
Earlier this year I had lunch with a friend. She runs HR at a big tech company. I run People at a startup. I expected to spend the meal comparing how different our worlds are.
I was wrong. Same initiatives. Same problems. Same things we were both trying to figure out. Our companies look nothing alike on paper, and the work at our level looked almost identical.
I left that lunch with more energy and more new ideas than any conference has ever given me. And one question I couldn't put down: why was that conversation so hard to come by?
The problem was never the talent
The Phoenix metro is one of the top 10 US cities for tech industry growth, and Silicon Oasis is leading the push to make it top 5 by 2035. The women are here. Directors, VPs, founders, senior ICs, across Product, Engineering, People, Marketing, GTM.
But many of us are remote for companies headquartered somewhere else. Bay Area. New York. Boston. Others are one of very few senior women at the companies we work for. More than half of women in tech say they lack strong female relationships at work. The loneliness senior women describe isn't anecdotal. It's structural.
The woman ten miles away doing your job at a different company? You've probably never met her.
So we built it
Kaity and I both come from people and talent. Between us we've spent close to two decades inside venture-backed tech companies building teams, advising on comp, and helping people through transitions. We kept meeting women who needed exactly one thing: a local peer group that matched where they actually are.
Alta is that room. A curated community for the women leading tech across the Phoenix and Scottsdale corridor. Every member applies and interviews with a founder before joining. Capped, vetted, and built for trust from day one.
I wrote about the full vision before we launched in Why I'm building Alta. In June, it stopped being a plan.
Launch night
A few months ago, Alta was just an idea. At our launch in Old Town Scottsdale, we watched a room full of senior women in tech find each other.
The conversations were exactly what we hoped for: honest, thoughtful, ambitious, and refreshingly real. Women swapping experiences about leadership, hiring, startups, career growth, and what it's like being the only one in the room.
The best part was watching introductions turn into genuine conversations. By the end of the evening, it already felt like a community.
To every founding member who joined us: thank you for believing in what Alta could become.
This is just the beginning
Founding members are settling in. The strategy sessions are underway. The group threads are already doing what we hoped they would: vendor questions, offer evaluations, the occasional "has anyone dealt with this before" that gets three replies within the hour.
If you're a senior woman in tech in Arizona who's looking for more than networking, we'd love to meet you.
Ready to be in the room?
Apply at join-alta.com