Make Your Own Pay: Opening Your Own Engineering/Geoscience Startup

Starting your own company can let you choose the work you want to do, build something impactful, and create a workplace culture unique to you and your aspirations. However the challenges associated with being a founder are compounded for women, especially for female founders in technical fields. Callie will walk through her journey starting Wyvern and explain what has worked — and what hasn’t worked — for her since co-founding the company in 2018.

Bio

Callie Lissinna co-founded Wyvern, an Edmonton-based company with three satellites in space taking hyperspectral pictures of Earth every day. She graduated from the Y Combinator startup accelerator with her co-founders in 2022 and has helped the company raise over $20M in funding to date. Over her 7+ years as a co-founder at Wyvern she has held various roles in business operations, leadership, engineering, and sales. Previously she managed the AlbertaSat student satellite program at the University of Alberta. This included leading in-orbit operations of Ex-Alta 1, the first satellite to ever be made in the province of Alberta. Callie holds a BSc. Mechanical Engineering with a mathematics minor from the University of Alberta. In the evenings she teaches dance classes to kids and teens.