Women in Enterprise Technology: Hilarie Koplow-McAdams, Venture Partner, NEA

The Women in Enterprise Technology series features profiles of some of the top women leaders in enterprise technology from the Salesforce Ventures portfolio and the larger Salesforce ecosystem. The goal is to showcase the fantastic work these women are doing at their respective organizations, and to encourage more women at all stages of their careers to consider enterprise software.

Hilarie has made a three-decade career out of enterprise tech. Despite her entry into the field being opportunistic versus deliberate, she’s made a significant impact on every company she’s touched. After 18 years at Oracle, she moved to Intuit to learn about consumer tech before joining Salesforce in 2008 where she eventually ran the global sales organization. During her tenure, the company experienced record-breaking growth in revenue.

Hilarie decided her last professional stop would be taking a smaller company public, which she did at New Relic in December of 2014. After that, she retired for all of five months before NEA lured her to venture capital with the promise of providing a platform in which to help entrepreneurs realize their dreams.

Recently, we chatted with Hilarie about her career, enterprise tech, and how to bring more women into the field.

What first drew you to enterprise technology?

That’s an unfair question! At 23, I don’t believe “enterprise technology” had a label, but I understood what it meant. What drew me to Oracle, honestly, was the need to pay my student loans. They made an offer before other offers came through. I tell that story very openly because it illustrates how life’s a little more random than we all like to believe.

That’s what drew me to Oracle, but what kept me in enterprise tech all those years is that I love this idea of being on a mission to disrupt an existing industry or category, to redefine a category in such a radically different way. It’s very appealing to bring a markedly better value proposition to the market.

In the case of Intuit, it was about us making it easy for small businesses to focus on running the business by handling their financial accounting, payroll services and payments for them. When I went to Salesforce, it was astounding to see that large sales forces could be running on a product that essentially leveraged a browser interface, yet brought a powerful platform to them. This was the beginning of the market realizing the power of the cloud value proposition. With New Relic, our mission was to provide companies a way to measure and understand their customers’ experiences with their digital properties. In a world where digital experiences are brand experiences, New Relic provides unprecedented visibility in a breakthrough way.

That’s what kept me in enterprise tech; the ability to innovate and make it so much easier for companies to leverage modern technologies.

What disruptions do you see coming down the line for enterprise tech?

It’s become very clear that leveraging data is the next big breakthrough area in the industry. Artificial intelligence and machine learning are going to be critical. My suspicion is that most organizations will rely on their solution providers to give them access to great AI approaches, so that puts a lot of pressure on both existing companies and new firms to think about how they leverage the data and parse the noise to get to the signal.

What have you learned about women in leadership in the context of your own career?

There are not enough women in enterprise tech. There was once a belief that to be in technology you needed a certain type of degree, and you needed to go to a specific type of school. And so, companies had these policies of only hiring from certain schools and only hiring across select degree sets. This approach created a barrier of entry for many people, but statistically more often for women. What people have now realized is that the most effective leaders and the most productive employees come in with a broad base of education, and they have the critical-thinking and analytical skills, but also soft skills. There are many women in the workforce who possess all of these skills and have the opportunity to excel in enterprise technology. However, they don’t have to feel that a lack of a specific education should keep them out of the industry.

It’s important for women like me — who have been in the industry for 30 years — to be a role model for younger women. There were not many female role models when I was navigating through the industry, and frankly, had there been more, it would have been easier. I have two daughters, one of whom will enter the workforce in two years, and I want it to be a different experience for her.

Along those lines, what advice would you give young women looking to get into careers in tech, and particularly enterprise tech?

What they should be cognizant of is what makes their heart beat fastest with regard to the different roles they can play. I started as a product manager — I was not an inspiring product manager, but I spent a lot of time with the sales organization, and I liked what they were doing. When I transferred to the sales organization at Oracle, I found my passion, and really excelled at what I was doing.

Finally, it’s worth repeating that in the long run, hard work is the greatest differentiator in one’s career. Over the course of five years, you aren’t that differentiated from your peers if you’re the hard-working leader. Over the course of 15 and 20 years, there’s a marked difference in outcomes.

What has stuck in your head as an issue that still needs to be resolved in tech?

There’s a consciousness in tech about the importance of diversity, of going out of one’s way to support women and people of different backgrounds. I think, frankly, that the social contract is changing. People are unwilling to tolerate certain types of behavior, which I think is good for all of us.

For the future, another thing to consider is how design and beauty in technology has become much more important. Design coupled with data and massive compute capabilities provide us all with an approach to designing the next generation of applications.

Join us on February 28th, 2018 at our Navigate 2018: Women in Enterprise Tech Summit in partnership with Work-Bench to hear more from Hilarie and other female leaders in enterprise technology.