5 Women Entrepreneurs in Tech and What We Can Learn from Them
Women usually don’t start businesses. But when they do, their startups skyrocket to become multimillion-dollar ventures. These five women are perfect examples of entrepreneurs who are changing the business world forever.
No longer is entrepreneurship the sole devotion of men. Women are changing the face of business forever: female entrepreneurship thrives and women are creating more innovative businesses than ever. Technology, the niche exclusively belonging to men a few decades ago, is now a battlefield of both sexes, who fiercely compete with each other and just as passionately collaborate.
I’ve previously written a few pieces on women in technology, including women who pioneered all-inclusive coding education programs and schools, and women in web development, who have created community initiatives to support women and other minority groups working in technology.
In this article, we’ll look at another five women who have created multimillion-dollar businesses by bringing innovative ideas to the heavily male-dominated tech scene. These women do, in fact, deserve additional press coverage, and we’ll attempt to do them justice. Who are these women? And what lessons do they share with aspiring girls, mothers, and leaders who are growing into successful entrepreneurs?
Therese Tucker
Source: Inc
Therese Tucker is Founder & CEO of BlackLine, a fast-growing accounting software company with eleven global offices and annual revenue of more than $170 million. BlackLine provides software solutions for 2000+ companies, including Costco, Kraft Heiz, Coca-Cola, and Under Armour.
If you look at Therese, you’ll see a petite middle-aged woman with exquisite pink hair and floral patterned jeans. That image might seem contrary to the entrepreneur stereotype of a businesswoman heavily-clad in a black business suit, but that is what actually makes her so exciting to write about.
Therese graduated from the University of Illinois with a Computer Science degree, then worked at Hughes Aircraft as an engineer, and later as the CTO of SunGard Treasury System, before founding her own business in 2001. Now, the company is valued at more than one billion dollars. Mrs. Tucker has recently been featured among America’s TOP 50 Women in Tech. However, despite the great success she has achieved in life, she’s still perhaps the least known female founder and CEO on the tech scene.
In one of her interviews with CNBC, Therese shares her story on how it all happened: being a single mother, she maxed out all her credit cards, took a second mortgage on her house, asked for $30–40 thousand dollar loans from a couple of friends who believed in her, and built her business. She did have “impostor syndrome,” but she brushed it off and persevered. Theresa colored her hair pink as a social experiment: it worked, as one of her many stepping stones in breaking stereotypes. Therese’s advice is to be vocal, don’t be emotional, get dressed, and get to work. She also mentions that she often encounters women who, when being promoted, say “that’s okay, I’m making enough.” She urges women to change that mentality and learn how to negotiate a pay raise.
Amy Pressman
Source: Flickr
Amy Pressman is Co-Founder & President at Medallia, a customer experience management software. The company turned out to be a huge success and now has 15 offices globally, more than 1,000 employees, and more than 1,000 leading brands using their system. This March, the company filed to raise $70 million dollars in Series F Funding, with new shares priced at $15 — making its business valued at $2.4 billion dollars.
It was not always like this for Pressman. She knew she wanted to build a company early on, and before long, she joined the only Stanford entrepreneurship class she found, back when business degrees were not yet hot. She was not your “typical” entrepreneur: she was in her 30s and pregnant with her second child when she co-founded a company. Her example teaches us that if you are passionate and determined, not a single thing can hinder you from achieving success.
In one of her interviews, she says that an entrepreneur is someone who doesn’t drop out when things got tough but, instead, gets motivated by the word “no.” In her interview with TechCrunch, she also tells the story of how she motivates people and how important on-boarding is for the company: she urges us as women to continue learning, be smart about taking risks, and do things that scare us and push us past the comfort zone to achieve things that are truly meaningful to us.
Falon Fatemi
Source: CNBC
Falon Fatemi is the CEO and founder of Node, the first people-based intelligence platform, an AI-powered discovery engine that aims to connect people to business opportunities by leveraging Node’s database of one billion entities.
What’s interesting about Fatemi is that she was the youngest-ever employee at Google, joining the company at the age of 19, while still going to school. She spent six years at Google, working on global expansion and strategy for both the search engine and later YouTube. Her startup Node.io is backed up NEA, Avalon Ventures, Mark Cuban, and others. Moreover, Fatemi has been advising startups in the San Francisco Bay area for years, consulting on a number of issues from infrastructure, business strategy, to the inclusion of artificial intelligence into their businesses.
On her blog and her articles, which she contributes to Forbes and Entrepreneur, she often shares her vision for the future of AI and gives personal advice on how to succeed as a woman in a male-driven tech world. For example, in one of her blog posts, she relates a story of how a woman snapped a photo of two Python developers joking about dongles and making her feel uncomfortable. The result was all parties were fired. Fatemi’s advice is to be professional and direct. Instead of stealthily taking someone’s picture and publicly shaming them, approach the contending party and prevent unwanted or inappropriate behavior. Further, she advises companies to educate their employees about appropriate social behavior and the importance of developing a high degree of emotional intelligence inside teams.
In this article on fear, which Fatemi guest-wrote for Entrepreneur, she advises women to embrace the fear of the unknown, analyze it by breaking problems into separate parts, handle pressure in the way that truly works for you, and find support from people you love or who believe in you.
Jennifer Tejada
Source: TechVibes
Jennifer Tejada is the CEO of PagerDuty, a cloud computing company that produces SaaS incident responses for IT departments, alerting clients about possible disruptions and outages with machine learning. PagerDuty has been featured in Forbes in its Cloud 100 list, recognized in the Inc. 500 list, and chosen by USA Today as one of the best small- and mid-sized companies dedicated to diversity.
Jennifer Tejada has been an executive and a board member of several tech companies for nearly 20 years. Before joining PagerDuty in 2016, she also served as a CEO in Keynote Systems. That same year, Tejada received a silver Stevie Award for Female Executive of the Year in Computer Services and Software category.
Jennifer is a fierce and avid advocate of diversity and inclusion. She believes that diversity is not going to solve itself — she takes a very proactive stance on increasing a diverse workforce within her organization. Her advice: set yourself time-based quantifiable goals and track your progress. For example, at PagerDuty, Jennifer committed herself to make the company’s leadership half male and half female and close the gender pay gap; two goals which she has successfully accomplished in recent years. Now, she’s fully focused on including people from some of the most underrepresented groups on her team and in leadership.
In an interview to SalesForce, she remarks that PagerDuty is committed to exemplifying the future of the tech industry, as opposed to complacently building something that resembles the past.
In her conversation with Women Who Code, she concurs that it’s easy to slip into the mentality of being uncomfortable as the only female on the team; instead, she advises that we uncomfortableness as an opportunity:by focusing on how a difference can help you stand out, as well as speaking up, taking initiative, being bold, and leading. Another piece of advice she gives is about building connections, even if it’s on social media: you need to build a support system — a series of networks — that helps you in the future.
Laura Behrens Wu
Source: Inc
Laura Behrens Wu is co-founder and CEO of Shippo, a software company that helps e-commerce businesses and other online marketplaces integrate shipping with multiple carriers through their API and web app.
While she mainly attributes her success to being at the right place at the right time (having met a YC alumnus and a Silicon Valley investor, and then landing a job at a startup), she says that the most important decision a founder can make is the decision of getting started. For her start, she reached out to a friend, and they both decided to start their own business, an e-commerce store.
Behrens Wu sought advice from previous co-workers and received valuable feedback on her business model that made her change the whole perspective on how she saw the business: “work on painkillers, not vitamins.” Instead of boosting what was already working, she pivoted to concentrate on something people couldn’t live without and/or had severe problems addressing: shipping. Back then, shipping was a real pain in the neck for e-commerce sites.
Her story was not always smooth: she faced a lot of rejection during fundraising, pitching 125 angels and receiving 115 “no’s.” She accepts that she was not pitching the right investors at first, but her advice is: don’t regret, because practice makes perfect. When she parted ways with her co-founder, she immediately disclosed this information to her investors. The advice she gives is to be completely transparent and straightforward about any changes that are happening in your business.
She says her key takeaways from building a business (and pitching all those investors) is to be authentic, honest, and truly passionate about your idea and your business as a whole.
Conclusion
While some stories might be more inspiring than others, it’s clear that everyone’s story is unique, and nothing is truly impossible. If you have a passion for knowledge and success, then the doors are open — the only thing left to do is for you to step in and start doing your job — something you love. We think it’s important to learn from others and share their knowledge… it’s as inspiring as it is educational. The tech scene is changing, and these five women are contributing to that change.
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