21 Female Founders & CEOs to Watch — Women Building Products for Businesses

Software all day long with this group.

Get inspired by these 21 female founders and women CEOs who are bringing in the money with innovative business software solutions for businesses:

Amanda Kahlow, CEO & Founder, 6Sense

“I think we really need to instill that sense of confidence in women that they can do it too. It isn’t really about the venture capital process. I think it really comes back to more women knocking on the door — walking through not just with a good idea, but also with confidence.” [Source: VentureBeat]. Follow Amanda on Twitter at @AmandaKahlow.

At 6Sense, CEO Amanda brings powerful predictive marketing and sales intelligence to B2B enterprise and mid-market companies. Prior to 6sense, she spent 14 years as the CEO and founder of CI Insights, a big-data services company using multichannel analytics to help enterprise companies generate hundreds of millions in net-new business.

Bonnie Crater, CEO & Founder, Full Circle Insights

“Gender in leadership often reflects the composition of teams. At Full Circle, 46 percent of our employees are women.” Bonnie advocates a variation of the “Rooney Rule,” which requires the NFL to interview minority candidates for roles. “When a company has a senior position open, they should consider at least one or two female candidates. If it works for the NFL, it can work for Silicon Valley.” [Source: Bustle]. Follow Bonnie on Twitter @BonnieCrater.

A three-time CEO, four-time CMO, the youngest female executive at Oracle, and an early executive at Salesforce, Bonnie leads Full Circle Insights to addressing critical issues for VPs of marketing using Salesforce (getting accurate performance information about marketing campaigns to understand which programs are driving revenue, which are helping, and which are not performing at all).

Clara Shih, CEO & Founder, Hearsay Systems

“Once I got good at what was asked of me, I challenged myself to go further. I continually asked myself, ’What else can I do? How else can I make this better?’ This mindset led me early in my career to think bigger and proactively suggest new ideas to the team — certainly not all of them good or accepted, but almost always appreciated. Ultimately, going ’all in’ won me the respect of my manager and colleagues. I got to be a part of strategic conversations that allowed me to understand the bigger picture and play ever-bigger roles.” [Source: Fortune]. Follow Clara on Twitter at @ClaraShih.

Proving that engineers can be effective leaders, published authors and public board directors, Clara has grown her company Hearsay Systems into the leading enterprise social sales and marketing platform for Fortune 100 banks, insurance companies, and retail organizations including JPMorgan Chase, Goldman Sachs and Allstate. She is a published author and Starbucks board director.

Danielle Morrill, CEO & Founder, Mattermark

Team performance is critical in a startup’s success. A leader should always try to cultivate positive mindset among her/his team. But it doesn’t mean to be always happy about everything. In Danielle’s opinion, it is very important for team members to understand the vibe of the company and act accordingly; and, for leaders, to be “honest when things are hard, and celebrating when things are good.” [Source: FutureStartup]. Follow Danielle on Twitter at @DanielleMorrill

Mattermark CEO Danielle helps companies leverage data to find their next customer by collecting and organizing comprehensive information on the world’s fastest growing companies. Get actionable data to pinpoint the companies and people needed to do business with. Over 500 companies use Mattermark to discover high quality leads, prioritize prospects and increase conversion rates.

Dedra Chamberlain, CEO & Founder, Cirrus Identity

“My advice for a new entreprenuer is to believe in yourself. Take advantage of your energy but don’t let the Silicon Valley culture be an obstacle either — just go for it.” [Source: StartOut]. Follow Dedra on Twitter at @DedraChamberlain.

Cirrus Identity CEO Dedra brings easy-to-integrate identity solutions to educational institutions and companies. Prior to Cirrus Identity, she led identity and access management strategy at leading universities including UC Berkeley and UCSF, and chaired the UC Trust for the University of California system.

Deepa Subramanian, CEO & Founder, Wootric

“Joined Salesforce.com as 10th or 11th engineer. Wrote a strategic voting tool during 2000 Bush-Gore election which was shut down by the California Secretary of State. Prompted decision to study Law at Harvard. Worked at a law firm then went on to co-found Schmendricks, a San Francisco-based bagel company in 2011. Closed two years later and moved on to start Wootric.” [Source: Founder Stories]. Follow Deepa on Twitter at @JumpingDeeps.

The first female engineer at Salesforce, Deepa and co-founder Jessica Pfeifer are building Wootric, an enterprise customer feedback company that serves small customers like Entelo and 15Five as well as large enterprises like Time Inc, Hootsuite and New Relic. Wootric removes resource-intensive elements from Net Promoter implementation and tracking, freeing up your time to focus on your customer.

Edith Harbaugh, CEO & Founder, LaunchDarkly

“There’s a belief that software is just raw code. It’s not! It’s everything that connects to it: the documentation, marketing collateral and more. Focus on just the raw code is the equivalent of just paying attention to my bike, like checking the tires at a pit stop or adjusting my mirrors as I ride. If I don’t pay attention to the overall health of my system: my fatigue, signalling to cars at intersections or reading the weather, I’m in trouble. This isn’t just a metaphor for running a company, but building software. It’s all very connected.” [Source: First Round Review]. Follow Edith on Twitter at @edith_h

Edith founded LaunchDarkly, a a feature flag management platform helping engineering teams continuously deploy features at scale, as well as allowing business users to control code. Before LaunchDarkly, she rose through the engineering and product management ranks at companies and led software and hardware products from concept to launch at consumer and enterprise startups.

Elena Foukes Lucas, CEO & Founder, UtilityAPI

“One year ago, I was the lowest-level analyst at a Fortune 200 company. Now, I’m a co-founder and CEO. Two catalysts began my year-long path to entrepreneurship: Kate Purmal and Sheryl Sandberg… I decided to explore the tech world because any company has a tech component — a marketplace, some data component — but also because tech is where entrepreneurship is happening. I attended a Women 2.0 event where Janice Fraser shared her insights on being a startup founder and it lit a fire in me.” [Source: Women 2.0]. Follow Elena on Twitter at @elenaSCS.

UtilityAPI CEO Elena is building in Oakland a universal API for energy data enabling new energy technologies. Her mission is to create a secure and standardized data infrastructure for accelerating the shift to clean energy. UtilityAPI automates the process of requesting specific electric data from a utility account holder, and is the recipient of a U.S. Department of Energy SunShot grant award.

Helen Zhu, CEO & Founder, Creator Deck

“As much of a technology lover as I am, I’ve come to believe that the winner takes all when it comes to content. With the abundance of media creation tools and platforms out there, the demand of the young generation is pushing the envelope with media creation. More and more, we are seeing talented content creators like Mylifeaseva go from 100K to 1MM followers in less than 24 months. From collaborating on original series, to creating their own animation studio, the next generation of content creators are hungry to create, inspire, and network. Who will be the media company that will serve them well?” [Source: Medium]. Follow Helen on Twitter at @HelenZhu.

What began as a social network in 2007 has evolved into Creator Deck Media today with CEO Helen working with brands and retailers to manage their influencer marketing partnerships and campaigns. Her team ran over a dozen campaigns each month with hundreds of influencers, and from this experience, built a product to help others stay organized to save time and produce more.

Jennifer Tejada, CEO, PagerDuty

“Make sure that as a founder as you’re building your journey to find the right balance between storytelling and measurable fundamentals that make your business successful. Tracking to measurable targets (which is a good business practice) and telling a story is beautiful, brilliant, and smart. My advice is to find the right balance between storytelling and keeping the right metrics to use as a scorecard to improve performance and return value to different stakeholders.” [Source: Girls in Tech]. Follow Jennifer on Twitter at @JennTejada.

A SaaS industry veteran, Jennifer joined PagerDuty as CEO in 2016. Prior to PagerDuty, Jennifer served as president and CEO of Keynote Systems, a mobile and web cloud testing and monitoring company acquired by Dynatrace. Prior to that, she was EVP and CSO at Mincom, a $200M plus global enterprise application software company, and held senior positions with P&G and i2 Technologies.

Jessica Mah, CEO & Founder, InDinero

“Let’s face it, accounting and taxes; these words lack the sex appeal of virtual reality glasses or the latest Uber-for-whatever company popping up. However, if you want to run a successful business, you better be sure your accounting is on point or you won’t even know you’ve gone out of business; how sad would that be, but happens every day.” [Source: Going Against The Flow]. Follow Jessica on Twitter at @JessicaMah.

A serial entrepreneur at 26, Jessica’s mission at InDinero is to provide the value of a CFO and COO to every business in the world. She shares five pieces of advice for fellow female entrepreneurs, talks about growing from 20 to 200 employees in 24 months. Jessica was recently named in SF Business Times “40 Under 40” and in her spare time has learned to fly.

Kate Heddleston, CEO & Founder, Opsolutely

“Knowing ratios of gender/race among current employees is a good start, but by no means a sufficient amount of data to truly improve diversity at a company. Data needs to be more robust — when it comes to hiring, companies should be tracking the candidates across gender and race at every point in the interview process. For companies that hire more than 100–300 people a year, those numbers should show that the % into the pipeline for a given group is roughly the same as the % hired.” [Source: Improving Diversity Does Not Mean Lowering the Bar]. Follow Kate on Twitter at @heddle317.

Kate is a full-stack Python engineer and CEO at Opsolutely, a Y Combinator company revolutionizing DevOps with automated deployments for software teams. With Opsolutely, development teams understand their infrastructure at a glance and control it with ease. Titles Kate has held in the past include Head Mugwump, Software Princess, Software Warrior Princess, Coach Kate.

Laura Bilazarian, CEO & Founder, Teamable

Laura graduated from Wharton but thinks rugby and travel taught her more about business than school. [Source: Teamable]

Teamable CEO Laura helps organizations solve hiring challenges and maintain a team building advantage by leveraging the information in their employees’ networks SaaS for smarter hiring by tapping into employees’ social networks. Previously, she investment banked on Wall Street and built hotels in Vietnam.

Laura Behrens Wu, CEO & Founder, Shippo

“Expectations of the founders change really quickly. You need to go from doing everything yourself to hiring experts and delegating responsibility to them. As the team is built, the frenetic pace wanes, we’re freed up to tackle larger challenges, but the pressures are still there. They just feel different.” [Source: TechCrunch]. Follow Laura on Twitter at @LauraBehrensWu

Shippo CEO Laura was recently recognized in Forbes’ “30 Under 30” Enterprise Tech list for bringing sophistication that was once only available to companies like Amazon, to small businesses everywhere. Shippo has created a simple API that helps e-commerce companies significantly lower their shipping costs while simplifying their logistics operations.

Mathilde Collin, CEO & Founder, Front App

“Pros and cons are just minor details. The hard part is to ship a product people love, meet growth goals and get money in the bank. We each get our own advantages and drawbacks, and we should all try to play the best out of the cards we’ve been dealt.” [Source: Female Founder Stories] Follow Mathilde on Twitter at @CollinMathilde.

Mathilde is CEO of Front, building an inbox for teams that allows for great external communication based on seamless internal collaboration. Never drop the ball with multi-player accounts like support@, sales@, etc. Front brings allcommunication channels into one place to easily triage, have internal conversations around them, and sync work across services (Salesforce, Github).

Neha Sampat, CEO & Founder, Built.io

“I’m not one to be driven by fear. Competition doesn’t make me nervous but instead pushes me and my team to be stronger and better. For me, boundaries are often blurred between work and play.” [Source: Verve]. Follow Neha on Twitter at @NehaSF.

With 15+ years experience in enterprise software, Built.io CEO Neha is a recognized industry leader and has led product marketing and online experiences for companies like Sun Microsystems and VMware. Built.io’s technology portfolio enables organizations to create, integrate, scale and manage applications and related content across mobile, web and IoT.

Promise Phelon, CEO, TapInfluence

“In Silicon Valley, there is a start-up common. Instead of grass, it consists of various ingredients — capital and skills like product development, managing teams, sales and marketing — needed for start-ups to get off the ground and grow. First-time entrepreneurs network to tap those ingredients and if they are successful, then they give back to the common to benefit the next generation of startups.” [Source: Forbes]. Follow Promise on Twitter at @PromisePhelon.

Promise was brought in as the Silicon Valley CEO for TapInfluence. Headquartered in Colorado, TapInfluence boasts a fully-integrated influencer marketing SaaS platform combining proven software, an engaged marketplace, and an informed strategy team. TapInfluence leverages artificial intelligence technology to help brands target audiences through influencers at scale.

Sandi Lin, CEO & Founder, Skilljar

“Creating something from scratch and adding value to the world through my team’s efforts is an incredible feeling. We have a lot of customers who really love using our product, and we’re powering a significant part of their business. The most difficult part is wearing so many different hats at the same time. I’ll respond to a complicated customer service issue, then pitch a really important customer, and then fix some code in our marketing website.” [Source: Women && Tech]. Follow her on Twitter at @SandisLin.

A former Amazon manager now startup entrepreneur, Sandi is growing Skilljar, a cloud learning management system (LMS) for customers. Skilljar makes it easy to create courses, distribute to web and mobile devices, and track results. The enterprise training platform in Seattle is disrupting the $130 billion corporate training market.

Sarah Nahm, CEO & Founder, Lever

“Before Lever, I worked as a designer and creative technologist. In 2009, I was at Google, working as a speechwriter for Marissa Mayer. Later, I worked on the marketing team responsible for launching the Chrome browser, as well as a few other projects.” [Source: Sarah Nahm]. Follow Sarah on Twitter at @srhnhm.

As Lever’s CEO, Sarah has lead the team through the rapid evolution of a high-growth startup. Any extra time is spent with customers and evolving the product. Learn how Lever got to 50–50 women and men in the company, with excellent examples of inclusive activities, like “built a Slackbot that assigned and circulated dishwashing responsibilities around the entire workforce.”

Stephanie Newby, CEO, Crimson Hexigon

“No company is perfect. No individual is perfect. Have the confidence to identify your weaknesses and make them work to your advantage.” [Source: Think Broad] Follow Stephanie on Twitter at @StephanieSNewby.

Stephanie at audience analytics company Crimson Hexagon examines and leverages a massive repository of social media posts with data science to mine consumer opinions for large global enterprises, marketers, brands and agencies. She was recently cited as the third most “effective” business person (meaning highest interaction rates) on Facebook.

Therese Tucker, CEO & Founder, BlackLine

There’s a reason for the term ‘serial entrepreneur. It’s a bug that once you catch it you really don’t want to rest until you’ve been successful at it.” For aspiring entrepreneurs, Theresa’s advice is blunt — “The best advice is ‘don’t do it’. Because if you listen to that advice, you’ll never make it. It’s the people that are crazy and are determined to work themselves to death and to fail and fail and fail until they don’t fail. It takes that kind of grit and determination. If I tell you not to do it, then that’s great advice for you.” [Source: Decoding The New Economy]

The first female-founded VC-backed company IPO in Los Angeles happened last year, rung in by BlackLine CEO Therese. She designed the first offerings of BlackLine’s products back in 2001, engineered its transition to the cloud in 2007, and led BlackLine in automating the financial close process. Prior to BlackLine, Therese was Chief Technology Officer at SunGard Treasury Systems.

Just business as usual.

In an age of overvalued VC-funded companies offering highly-subsidized services, having predictable revenue and focusing on business basics (ie. establishing recurring revenue) is a rare feat. Who wants to solve problems plaguing normal people and businesses trying to get work done? Slack is an example of a successful enterprise startup building awesome software for teams. There is a huge opportunity right now for women to build and create solutions, and build their own careers as powerful businesswomen. The market is massive for enterprise solutions and software that we all use.

There are many glaring problems in the working world, and potentially solutions for women entrepreneurs to create. Sallie Krawcheck, CEO and founder of Ellevest, explains:

“I worked on Wall Street for many years — it’s populated by men, and it does a better job for men. Women will be equal with men when we are financially equal with men - not until then. Women live longer and earn less than their male counterparts, their salaries peak earlier, and they’re less likely to invest their savings. I started Ellevest as a means to help women live better lives — and to close the retirement savings gap — by closing the ‘gender investing gap.” (Source: Forbes)

Women face highly subjective evaluations in life and work. Disrupt the norm and start your own enterprise company — Build your dream team with high-growth business ambition! Women are especially prime to start and lead enterprise companies, as a long-term outlook and domain expertise are required — This is not a twenty-year old’s game.

After you’ve learned about going from $o to $100 ARR on SaaStr, a media company headed by COO Gretchen DeKnikker, consider venture capital for your business. There are many women investors including Judy Loehr at Cloud Apps Capital Partners and Cindy Padnos at Illuminate Ventures to help get your enterprise business off the ground.

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Join us at a future Girl Geek Dinner in the San Francisco & Silicon Valley and meet hundreds of inspiring women in tech! The next event is Thursday, November 30 in San Mateo — join us! ❤