Speaker: SATELLITE Startup Pitch Workshop

Rafferty Jackson helps founders, leaders, and investors of the next industrial revolution tell complex tech stories to broader non-technical audiences through universal storytelling techniques modified for business pitch and communications formats. Her belief that space and autonomy startups will solve humanity’s hardest problems drove her to create the First Principles Pitch, a method for teaching the fundamentals of storytelling premised on purpose to ensure audiences always understand the startup's story and can retell it. This is how ideas get out into the world and how experts find and build upon the important ideas. On a project basis, she works with companies of all sizes and industries to find their "company why" and drive it into the enterprise as its foundation.

Recently awarded the Highly Commended acknowledgement for the 2023 Outstanding Woman in Tech from the Women in Tech Employers Award UK, Rafferty first joined technology startups in 1997 working with Microsoft’s WebTV Networks, a web access set-top box for the television. She then worked at Macromedia supporting the launch of revolutionary software products like Dreamweaver, Flash, and Shockwave. Next, she took Cardiff-based Ubiquity Software Corporation, maker of the SIP-application server, public on the junior market of the London Stock Exchange in 2005, and then sold the company to Avaya for a premium over its share price. In 2014, she made a name for herself on the executive leadership team at Beats by Dr. Dre, maker of iconic headphones, speakers and the Beats Music service, with its historic $3B sale to Apple.

Currently, she is the Non-Executive Director at Opteran Technologies, a University of Sheffield spinout building the software platform for autonomous machines based on biomimicry mapping. She is an advisor to Xona Space Systems, bringing position, navigation, and timing to support intelligent machines through a low earth orbit satellite constellation, and at New Vista Capital, delivering strategic advice and capital for aerospace and national security startup companies. Annually, she directs the industry-leading Startup Space Competition at the Satellite Show in Washington DC and presents and/or mentored hundreds of early stage space startups at the AWS Space Accelerator, TechStars Space, various US and UK universities and colleges, and at numerous US military startup event like the Hyperspace Challenge 2023.Rafferty also publishes "Once Upon a Pitch," a newsletter on substack focused on pitch problems and solutions.