Call it a coming out party or image rehab for the 36-year-old daughter of the president who gave the management of her company up to join her father’s tumultuous administration, Ivanka Trump’s solo trip this week to India for a U.S. sponsored conference is winning her new approval.
Her third, unaccompanied international voyage since her father took office, Trump left attendees of the eighth annual Global Entrepreneurship Summit mostly singing her praises.
‘She’s articulate,’ Karma Bhutia, founder and CEO of iShippo told DailyMail.com after the first daughter departed from India.
Aanchal Sood, a design strategist at DLbas, an incubator within the Indian School of Business in Hyderabad, said Ivanka ‘completely stole the show.’
Call it a coming out party or image rehab for the 36-year-old daughter of the president who gave the management of her company up to join her father’s tumultuous administration, Ivanka Trump’s solo trip this week to India for a U.S. sponsored conference is winning her new approval
‘She got a very warm reception as against what I had imagined,’ Sood said, commenting that Trump was better received at the conference than India’s prime minister.
Attendees of the summit, held this year in Hyderabad India, expressed disappointment, though, that they were not able to interact with Trump, a senior White House adviser, considering she was the U.S. delegation’s leader.
Summit organizers from the State Department did not hold a reception with Ivanka for the 350 U.S. attendees of the 1,500-person conference.
A VIP dinner of roughly 100 people that Indian PM Narendra Modi hosted Tuesday evening at Hyderabad’s Falaknuma Palace did not present an opportunity for guests to mingle with Ivanka, either.
Delegates said they would have liked to have their photo taken with Ivanka, however they were generally pleased with the handling of the application-required event.
‘There are 1,600 people, so she can’t talk to everybody,’ said Abhishek Singh, chief advisor to Entrepreneurs Association of India. ‘She did good. More than what was expected.’
Rohit Anabheri, founder of Silicon Valley-based cyber security firm Osprey Security, said of the first daughter’s appearance: ‘Ivanka Trump definitely stands as a role model for an independent woman, individual thinking and as a successful entrepreneur who can make and realize dreams of being an entrepreneur.’
A keynote Trump delivered on the opening evening of the two-and-a-half-day summit received especially high marks from young attendees, who said they were inspired by her reach and her poise.
‘She was really classy, graceful, and what the Internet has been feeding us is like a totally different picture,’ said Zeinorin Stephen, founder of Hill Wild, a company that produces chocolates and helps women become entrepreneurs.
Her third, unaccompanied international voyage since her father took office, Trump left attendees of the eighth annual Global Entrepreneurship Summit mostly singing her praises
Stephen said Ivanka truly connected with the audience when spoke about herself and why she joined President Donald Trump’s administration.
‘She is at a stage where she could be influencing the policies,’ the India-based businesswoman said.
In the speech, Trump cast a spotlight on three female entrepreneurs in the audience, including Dara Dotz, a 37-year-old who technically lives in San Francisco but spends her time traveling between disaster-stricken areas like the U.S. Virgin Islands, where she’s helping with storm recovery.
Dotz told DailyMail.com she ‘had no clue’ that Trump would name-check her non-profit, Field Ready, which provides life-saving supplies on site through the power of 3-D printing.
‘To be honest, I was shell-shocked at first,’ Dotz said. ‘I was so shell-shocked, because I was like, “Wow, she’s actually saying, me.” ‘
The Field Ready co-founder said Trump’s remarks ‘seemed really authentic.’
‘I was really blown away and surprised. I had no clue that was gonna happen.’
Dotz was happy to have the shout out – but she said she wished someone from the government had gotten in touch with her beforehand, because the organization that she co-founded is now impacting more than a million people, not the thousands that Ivanka talked about in her speech.
And while Dotz says she didn’t get a chance to speak with Ivanka after the remarks, that wasn’t summit organizers’ fault. She missed a message inviting her to a meeting with the White House adviser the following day when the Internet was down.
Other entrepreneurs said they would have wanted to meet Ivanka, too – but they’re weren’t invited to a meet-and-greet with the president’s daughter.
One said he would have liked to have seen the State Department hold a photo op with Ivanka, like the Indian government did for local attendees with the prime minister.
‘That would have been really cool, because how often does a person in North Carolina, or Indiana, or Texas or Florida go to DC,’ the person said.
Ivanka was the ‘brand ambassador’ for her country at the event, the attendee commented, at a summit in a foreign setting, where the State should have said, ‘”You know what these guys are awesome. We should have a photo opp moment.’
‘I’ts more branding for her. It’s a win-win situation,’ the person commented.
Trump did come to a pitching competition, where a U.S. official says she had an opportunity to see 3 or 4 entrepreneurs present their products.
She did not stick around to take selfies, though. She had a private tour of Hyderabad’s Goldconda Fort to get to before her evening flight departed.
‘She hung around for quite some time,’ said Bhutia, the iShippo owner. ‘She’s a good ambassador for Indo-U.S. kind of trust.’
Sood, an employee of India’s most esteemed MBA program, said she had mixed feelings about Ivanka when the conference started. By the time the U.S. official left Wednesday, Sood says she was a fan.
‘I loved her speech. She had my ears,’ Sood said. ‘I did underestimate Ivanka, but once she stared talking, she had my attention.’
The day before yesterday, when the conference began, ‘She was Donald Trump’s daughter. But today she is Ivanka Trump.
‘She is an influencer who holds her own stage, who holds her own self,’ Sood said.