Community Leader Spotlight with Pascale Hyboud-Peron
Pascale Hyboud-Peron, Co-founder and Director of Venture Centre, has an awesome Twitter bio: “Creating connections and exploring intersections between people and ideas by delivering meaningful opportunities to do good stuff together #entrepreneurship.”
Meaningful Opportunities to do Good Stuff Together
Pascale’s dedication to entrepreneurship goes far beyond digital self-presentation. Shortly after attending her own first Techstars Startup Weekend in 2013 in Tauranga, New Zealand, Pascale met her Venture Centre co-founders, and together they started this entrepreneurship hub and social enterprise designed to support and grow entrepreneurship in Tauranga:
“When not coordinating programmes or producing events in our coworking space, I spend time on exploring and strengthening generative relationships and partnerships to ensure our community of entrepreneurs can access the resources they need to take the next leg of their journey,” Pascale says. “We work with founders with ideas to solve social and environmental problems, from the very early stage, past ideation through proof of concept to their first drop sheet.”
Supporting People’s Empowerment
Pascale started her career as a teacher, before discovering her inner entrepreneur. “I was definitely not born an entrepreneur, nor did I call myself one until only very recently,” she says, “But the passion for supporting people’s empowerment has always been there.” She sees that as the through-line that connects her first career in education with her second in entrepreneurship.
Since 2014, Pascale has been organizing and then facilitating Techstars Startup Weekends all over New Zealand, although she likes to point out that she is constantly “playing an ever diminishing role :-)” That’s because she focuses on “enabling fresh energy and commitment, with a view to renew the crew incrementally and maintain the event firmly on our local ecosystem’s calendar.” Pascale knows that the best way to help others is to teach them, and encourage them to help themselves.
Pascale gets most passionate when talking about ventures that she has seen come out of Techstars Startup Weekend, or that she has been able to help through Venture Centre, such as SeeSpray and CLOser. These are both ventures that solve social problems—the founder of SeeSpray was concerned about the pesticides being sprayed on a neighboring orchard when her kids were playing outside, and CLOser tackles affordable housing and sustainable co-housing communities—and both, as Pascale notes, have “all female founders!”
Pascale’s big goal is to help “create new ventures that do good for our people and our planet. I want to help this change happen faster.”
What’s Your Twitter Bio?
Go look at your own Twitter bio. Go ahead, do it. And take a moment to ask yourself if you’re being who you want to be, living the life that you show the world on social media.
Pascale is. If you want to ask her how she does it, you can connect with her on Twitter @phpnz, or meet her at Startup Weekend Tauranga Wellbeing edition, coming up on 14-16 May 2021
