Before Patricia Keating built Tech Manchester into a valuable facilitator in the city’s digital ecosystem, her career included decades of professional services work in Northern Ireland before launching her own digital startup – an experience that “you simply can’t buy”.
At a crossroads in her life, she decided to leave Northern Ireland, and in doing so, she swapped her corporate comfort-zone working for the likes of Yellow Pages and Regus, for Manchester’s rapidly-expanding tech scene. After initial uncertainty, Patricia was tasked with helping to fulfil Sir Howards Bernstein’s vision of strengthening the city as a European tech hub.
Patricia Keating is on the steering panel for Manchester’s first-ever Digital City Festival in March – a gathering and celebration of the area’s innovative business minds operating across tech, eCommerce, marketing and more. To find out more about the festival, click here.
“I’m maybe not your average tech person because I’m 42 and I haven’t grown up with technology,” said Patricia. “I didn’t do any kind of digital qualifications at school or anything like that.”
Towards the end of her stint at Regus, Patricia and a colleague co-founded an executive concierge and destination company called WeDoo. She describes it as “an amazing experience”.
“We built an eCommerce platform and were bootstrapping the company, but I didn’t know they had those names then. I didn’t know I was building a digital company – I just thought of it as an attempt to transition from being an employee to a business owner.”
