Women in Enterprise: Clare Gollnick at Terbium Labs
This series features profiles of some of the top women leaders within our enterprise technology community here in NYC. We hope by highlighting the terrific work, stories, and career trajectories of these women at top venture-backed startups and operating roles will continue to encourage more women to consider careers in enterprise software.
As a follow up to our sold-out Navigate 2018: Women in Enterprise Tech Summit here at Work-Bench with Salesforce Ventures, we are continuing to recognize and amplify these impressive women in NYC enterprise tech.
Clare Gollnick is the Chief Technology Officer at Terbium Labs.
What were you doing before this current role in enterprise tech, and how did you get to your current role?
Enterprise tech is a second career for me. I was an experimental and computational neuroscientist. I researched information processing and sensory perception in neural networks (real neural networks, not artificial ones!). Though I love science, I left academia.
I met Terbium’s CEO, Danny Rogers, through a mutual friend. It was probably the only time that ranting about statistics at a party really did make friends. I started as the chief data scientist at Terbium, and eventually was promoted to run the entire technology team.
What pain point is your company solving, and what gets you excited to go to work every day?
In today’s digital world, exposure of sensitive data is inevitable. We rely on vulnerable digital networks and other humans for communication, so we need a way to measure and track where our data ends up. Tracking exposure of your organization’s proprietary data allows us to quantify and measure exposure and associated business risk.
Terbium’s Matchlight product uses data fingerprinting to monitor for leaks of sensitive data on the shady parts of internet, including the Dark Web. The best part: Matchlight monitors for, and alerts on, sensitive or proprietary data without knowing what the data is (or storing it on Terbium’s servers). If we did, we’d be making the problem we are trying to solve even worse.
As a Dark Web company, our company epitomizes the dual-use problem in technology. New tools like Tor’s web anonymization are designed with the best of intentions. When exposed to actual human society, however, these tools are often exploited. Part of our duty as technologists is to think critically
about how our tools could be misused. This is central to Terbium’s mission, and a major reason I am excited to go to work every day.
Well, that and the amazing people I get to work with!
What do you wish you had known earlier in your career?
Technology is 20% innovation and 80% communication. To be effective, most of your time will be spent selling your ideas to other people with a different world view and collecting feedback. Whether it’s co- workers, industry peers, potential customers, or the rest of the world, effective communication takes active thought work. Technical creation is only a small part.
Give us one piece of tactical advice (small or large), as a page from your enterprise tech playbook — that you would give to another woman considering a career in enterprise tech?
Start with an answer — any answer (even a wrong one). It is impossible to get anywhere without starting somewhere. Call it a working hypothesis, initial strategy or null hypothesis. I sometimes refer to particularly terrible starting answers as ‘brain vomit’. It’s not a thing of beauty, but it starts the iterative process of improvement.
What do you love about enterprise tech?
I love watching people self-organize to create impact. As a B2B company, Terbium wins as our customers win — whether it is success of a customer’s organization, or a customer’s success within an organization.
Terbium’s Matchlight product engages with many different roles and people within an organization. I see so much passion wrapped in every role, and how they fit and work together.
What do you wish would change?
I’m looking for ideas on how to lower the barrier to entry. For tactical and practical reasons, power and influence tend to concentrate in enterprise tech. It creates hurdles in the path to innovation. I’m constantly keeping my eyes open for ways to change this dynamic.
Is there anything else you’d like to share?
Terbium is hiring. We are a diverse and welcoming team. Many positions are remote-friendly. If you love a self-motivated and high-autonomy working environment, join Team Terbz!
Connect with Clare on LinkedIn and Twitter.
Our inspiration for this series comes from Digital Currency Group’s terrific profiles of Women in Blockchain — thank you!
Know a woman leader in enterprise technology whose story we should feature?We’d love to hear from you.
