Meet 2016’s Top Women in Tech – Part 1

Who's making waves in the world's most influential industry? Meet the female powerhouses changing the way you communicate, date, get around, and even do your laundry. 

MARCELA SAPONE
Cofounder and CEO – Hello Alfred

Marcela Sapone, 30, spent spring break of her first year at Harvard Business School in 2013 on "start-up lockdown," a project she'd thought up that involved her and four other students testing five business ideas over five days. The concept that seemed least feasible, conceived by her classmate Jessica Beck, was a subscription service that allowed busy professionals to outsource household tasks such as grocery shopping and cleaning. "We couldn't get the economics to work," Sapone says. But she and Beck knew there had to be a market, particularly after calling high-powered and discovering almost all had live-in nannies or housekeepers. "But if you're 26, how can you afford that?" Sapone says. "We wanted to solve the problem for us."

Hello Alfred—named after Bruce Wayne's valet—was their answer. At first, Sapone and Beck collected customers with old-school flyers tacked up around Boston and hired employees through Craigslist—or did the errands themselves. But after graduating, they raised $2 million, launched HelloAlfred.com at the 2014 Tech Crunch Disrupt conference, and became the first all-female team to win the event's start-up competition!

WHITNEY WOLFE
Founder and CEO – Bumble

"After I left Tinder," says Whitney Wolfe, the only female member of that game-changing dating app's founding team, "a lot of articles came out saying I knew nothing. What better way to prove the naysayers wrong than to do it again?" The result, Bumble, which she launched in December 2014, flips the gender script by allowing only female users to make the first move. It racked up 3 million users in its first 14 months.

Wolfe's entrepreneurial streak showed itself early. She started her first business while at Southern Methodist University in Dallas—eco-friendly totes sold that caught the eye of Nicole Richie and Kate Bosworth—and at 22 she joined the team that went on to create Tinder. In 2014, however, she famously resigned and filed a sexual harassment suit against the business (she can't discuss the outcome, but it was reportedly settled for $1 million). With Bumble, Wolfe's intention was to create a different kind of company—and company culture—so she moved to Austin, Texas, and hired mostly women.

Two years in, Wolfe, 26, has learned of "Bumble babies" and has heard from numerous women that the app helped them take the initiative in many areas of their lives, not just in love. "A lot of people create products that change how we live," Wolfe says. "But to create something with a positive message at the helm, that's what we're most proud of."

ANJULA ACHARIA-BATH
Partner – Trinity Ventures

It's the rare venture capitalist who says, "Everything I do is about women." But that's the self-described mission of Anjula Acharia-Bath, 43, who throughout her career has consistently found ways to be a connector: between women and tech, tech and Hollywood, and Hollywood and Bollywood.

Raised in England, Acharia-Bath was working at a Silicon Valley executive search firm in 2006 when she and her husband started a South Asian music podcast called DesiHits. Within weeks, it had been downloaded 250,000 times. When Acharia-Bath mentioned this to a venture capitalist she knew, he responded by sending her a term sheet. "I was flabbergasted," says Acharia-Bath, who went on to build DesiHits into a company dedicated to fusing pop culture around the world. With help from Interscope's Jimmy Iovine, who became an investor, she's introduced numerous celebrities to new markets—and she even brought Lady Gaga to India for the first time. In 2013, she became Priyanka Chopra's manager, helping the Bollywood queen chart her Hollywood rise. Along the way, Acharia-Bath made some prescient investments in female-founded start-ups, like boutique workout subscription app ClassPass. "Whenever I meet talented women, I just want to help them achieve their goals," she says. "It's my calling."

Last fall, Acharia-Bath joined respected venture capital firm Trinity Partners, where she works on bringing in investors and marketing its start-up investments. But her aims reach beyond building brands: "If you see a woman on TV who looks like you, doing amazing things," she says, "maybe that makes you believe you can do anything. Maybe it's the difference between writing that business plan or not."

JEN FITZPATRICK
VP – Google Maps

Jen Fitzpatrick was getting her master's in computer science at Stanford in 1999, just as Google was launching, and once she began using the search engine, she immediately recognized its potential. "So that summer I called up and got an internship," she says. "And then I was offered a job." She's been there ever since, and while she started by writing code, she now heads up Google Maps, the app used by 1 billion people globally. Not only does Google Maps provide directions, it can track deforestation in Indonesia, find the best Cambodian restaurant in London, and even explore Caribbean shipwrecks.

"The central problem we're trying to solve is how to help people explore the real world," says Fitzpatrick, 39. "And the level of detail people expect Google Maps to answer about the world is rising all the time. It's a huge challenge, but it's also an exciting moment because it means we're getting information to people that really matters to their lives."

Fitzpatrick's work with Google Maps is informed by data gleaned from Google searches as well as by the personal experiences of the Maps team. Fitzpatrick, for example, recently got stuck in a nasty traffic jam in India with a colleague whose phone couldn't locate a cellular signal. Unable to load Google Maps, they couldn't find an alternate route—a moment that underscored, for her, the importance of improving offline functionality, which is now a high priority for her team. Also sharpening her understanding of the urgent need for better traffic data: her experience as a mother of three. "If Google Maps can save me 10 minutes," she says, "that's 10 more minutes with my kids." 

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