How Darktrace and Novacoast sponsored CEEATTLE's Women in Cyber night at a WNBA Seattle Storm game

On a Thursday night in September, a short walk from the Space Needle, a group of women who spend their working lives defending corporate networks stood at the glass rail of a suite in Climate Pledge Arena and watched the Seattle Storm play the Las Vegas Aces. Many of them wore Storm green.

Evenings like this are rare in their line of work. Security leaders spend much of the year at conferences, moving between sessions and sales conversations. For women in the field, who are outnumbered at most industry events, time among peers is rarer still.

Darktrace, the AI cybersecurity company, and Novacoast, a cybersecurity services company, decided to give that community a night of its own. Working with CEEATTLE, the Seattle company that produced the event, they took a premium suite for the Storm's September 17 game and opened it to the women who lead security in the region.

The suite was private. The welcome was wide. Darktrace, Novacoast, and CEEATTLE each invited their own communities through the event's registration page.

The list was curated so that every woman in the room was among peers. It came to 16 security and technology leaders, from companies including Microsoft, F5, and Overlake Medical Center & Clinics.

Cee Ng, the founder of CEEATTLE, described the format the next morning as "pace x presence." "No conference floor, no rushing between sessions," she wrote on LinkedIn. "Instead, a private suite of executives who command budgets and boardrooms, with the business intelligence and heart to be in the business of people."

CEEATTLE took care of the rest. It arranged the suite, the food, the confirmations, and the calendar invitations, so that guests only had to arrive. Angie Gonsalez, a senior named account executive at Darktrace, and Vanessa Straus, a client executive at Novacoast, came as hosts, hands-free to enjoy the whole game with their guests.

Then the calendar delivered a coincidence. The game fell on the Storm's Believe in Women Night, so a suite of women who lead in cybersecurity spent the evening above a court of women who play at the top of their sport.

"You couldn't have scripted a better backdrop for a room full of women in cybersecurity coming together," Gonsalez wrote on LinkedIn after the game.

For many of the guests, it was a first WNBA game. Gonsalez called that the best part of the night. "There's nothing like seeing that spark when someone falls in love with live sports for the first time especially surrounded by peers who get exactly what you do every day," she wrote.

Straus posted her own account the next week: "As a cyber and tech community, we came together, shared great food, swapped stories in the field, laughed out loud, and cheered for women making an impact both on and off the court."

The Aces won the game. In the suite, the scoreboard was beside the point.

What the room took home was harder to count. Gonsalez described it as "genuine connection over something other than a conference agenda for once." Ng measured it in time. "Together, we voted with our wallets and, most importantly, with our time," she wrote.