Holiday Gift Guide Prep
Want to get your product featured in holiday gift guides this season? Join Amanda Leesburg of Leesburg PR for a special workshop designed exclusively for GT.FBA Accelerator and Incubator members. Amanda will share practical strategies for pitching your products to media outlets, building relationships with journalists and editors, and positioning your brand for holiday gift guide opportunities at the local and national level.
Whether you're a new brand or looking to increase your visibility during the busiest shopping season of the year, this session will help you prepare your outreach and make the most of holiday media opportunities. Don't miss this chance to learn from a seasoned public relations professional and get your brand holiday-ready.
Amanda Leesburg, President
Leesburg PR
A 27-year veteran of the public relations industry, Amanda Leesburg has deep experience in local, regional and national media relations, including consumer products, entertainment, environmental, wellness and restaurant/food publicity. Founded in 2002, Leesburg PR is a strategic public relations company, currently specializing in promoting consumer/food products, restaurants, wellness and sustainability. Capabilities and expertise include media relations and publicity, red and “green” carpet events, media training, branding and new product launches.
As an independent publicist, Amanda has partnered with television networks including Discovery Home, Discovery Health, Animal Planet and Discovery Digital Networks and has worked one-on-one with celebrity clients.
She has secured three front page stories in The New York Times as well as front page coverage in other major market publications including the L.A. Times, Washington Post, Atlanta Journal Constitution, Chicago Tribune, San Francisco Chronicle, Miami Herald, Seattle Times and Houston Chronicle. Her broadcast media successes include Oprah, Today Show, Good Morning America, CNN, FOX News, CBS, NBC, PBS, The Vie
Office Hours are unstructured discussions between Golden Seeds members and entrepreneurs. This opportunity is particularly relevant for companies that are likely to seek funding in the next 12 to 24 months.
Tech Square Game Day @ The Biltmore Innovation Center 📅 Thursday, Nov 5 🕛 12-1PM 📍 Biltmore Innovation Center- Imperial Ballroom About the Event We’re kicking off Game Day—a monthly gathering for the Tech Square community centered on food, play, and shared experience. Expect a catered lunch (while it lasts!), games/shared activity, and a lively midday atmosphere designed to bring Tech Square together in one place. What to Expect 🍽️ Catered lunch (while it lasts!) 🏈 Casual games & friendly competition 🤝 A cross-section of founders, builders, operators, students, and community leaders Who It’s For Anyone who works, meets, studies, networks, or plays in Tech Square. 📌 Game Day will take place monthly, with food + play!
What do we accept without questioning? The tools we build on. The standards someone else set. The career we chose because we knew we could handle it. This month, three speakers pull apart the defaults we rarely stop to examine, and the real cost of leaving them unexamined. It's a night about refactoring the things we've accepted: our tech stacks, our industry's assumptions, and our own definitions of success. Whether you write code, lead teams, or are rethinking where you're headed, there's something here for you. Jay Miller: Creating a Global Community Platform with Django Jay Miller, Founder of Black Python Devs In the last three years Black Python Devs has grown from trying to get more Black Pythonistas to conferences, to being a major sponsor of Python conferences across the globe. That scope creep has made us need to rethink our tech stack. Learn the why and how we migrated from a static site to and away from commercial tools to Django in order to serve our members, student ambassadors, and the events we support. Jasmine Blackston: The Cost of Being Capable: When the Life You Can Handle Isn't the Life You Want Jasmine Blackston, Program Management and Strategy Professional High-achieving people are often rewarded for being adaptable, dependable, and capable of making almost anything work. But capability can become a trap when we keep choosing careers and lives simply because we know we can handle them. This talk explores how to separate ability from desire, redefine success, and make more intentional decisions about the life and career you’re building. Kim Crayton: The Hidden Cost of Letting White Dudes Define "Good Enough" Strategic Advisor, Kim Crayton LLC The myth of white male supremacy has always decided what counts as true, complete, and good enough. Now it is coded into the tools. This talk names three specific failure patterns in working with LLMs: false and forced binaries that collapse complexity, gate skipping that rushes past the context that would