Meet 2016’s Top Women in Tech – Part 2

Let’s take a look at the next four top women in tech this year…

TRACY YOUNG
Cofounder and CEO – PlanGrid

Tracy Young, 32, is so focused on efficiency that she switched from contacts to glasses to streamline her morning routine (now down to five minutes). So it should come as no surprise that in 2010, while working as a construction engineer, she responded to a meeting that was slowed down by only having one up-to-date set of blueprints by personally ordering 15 extra sets. The bill? $27,000!

This was Young's introduction to a costly reality the industry has long grappled with: Construction companies spend $4 billion on blueprints annually. That night, Young bemoaned her bill to another engineer. "We should be able to load blueprints on my new device!" he said, referring to the just-released iPad. This could not only save costs, they realized, but also resolve another construction difficulty: Plans change so frequently that people often end up working off incorrect drawings. If everyone were using iPads, changes could immediately be conveyed to the entire team. They recruited a software designer, Antoine Hersen, and a Pixar rendering engineer, Ralph Gootee, Young's then boyfriend (now husband), and PlanGrid was born.

In 2011, the company was accepted into the prestigious start-up incubator Y Combinator, and with Young as CEO, it has since been used on 400,000 projects in 195 countries. Its benefits—logistical and economic—are so apparent that one project manager recently told Young that learning about it felt like being taught to use fire for the first time.

LEILA JANAH
Founder and CEO – Sama Group

"Like most entrepreneurs, I'm probably a little bit manic," says Leila Janah, who travels incessantly as part of her work running Samasource, a non-profit that aims to alleviate poverty by providing people living everywhere from the slums of Nairobi to Haiti with digital jobs that pay a living wage. In 2012, Janah also started Samahope, the first crowdfunding site to raise money for surgeries needed by people in underserved communities (it paid for 16,917 treatments before it was acquired by Johnson & Johnson last year).

Most recently, she launched Laxmi, an organic skin-care line, available soon at Sephora that employs low-income women to harvest the main ingredient, nilotica nuts from a variety of Shea tree found at the headstreams of the Nile, thus also incentivizing the conservation of the trees themselves. Her goal is to use the profits to support her other endeavours, now united under the Sama Group umbrella. "It's luxury that funds social impact," she says.

Raised in L.A. and educated at Harvard, Janah, 33, has worked for the World Bank and danced the samba in the Carnaval San Francisco; as a high school senior, she spent a semester working at a school for the blind in Ghana, an experience that was consciousness-altering. "It dawned on me that the charity model is destructive, since it often involves short-term stopgaps that create a hand-out mentality," she says. Eventually, this became a driving ethos. "Giving stuff away is always patronizing," says Janah. "It's much better to help people be able to buy things themselves."

DEL HARVEY
Head of Trust & Safety – Twitter

Before becoming head of Twitter's Trust & Safety team, Del Harvey lifeguarded at a state mental institution pool, administered psychological tests to reality TV contestants, and posed as a child for Perverted Justice, an organization that worked with law enforcement to conduct sting operations on adults attempting to solicit minors for sex online. "It's not the most standard career path," she admits. But in 2008, when Twitter began having trouble with spam, she became the company's twenty-fifth employee.

The 34-year-old's ability to visualize the worst-case scenario, a skill acquired through her encounters with the "dark side," as she calls it, has served Twitter well as it has grown to 320 million users. And while at first she was a team of one, she now leads an entire group that focuses not only on spam but also on abusive behaviour and user safety, and as such walks a tightrope between enabling freedom of speech and combating harassment and intimidation (and even terrorism—Twitter recently announced it had shut down 125,000 terror-related accounts, most linked to the Islamic State).

Due to Twitter's scale, though, sorting out what is abuse is profoundly complex. "Threats we don't allow," Harvey says. "But it's hard to draw the line. I spent the first years regularly startled to find Twitter being used in ways I never could have foreseen." "A lot of people are surprised I'm not super pessimistic," Harvey says. "But the negative interactions are significantly outweighed by the positive ones. And that makes me optimistic about the future."

APRIL UNDERWOOD
VP of Product – Slack

The first computer project April Underwood ever worked on as a kid was building a spread sheet of her baseball-card collection on Microsoft Works. She's now vice president of product at Slack, a messaging app on steroids that syncs e-mail, Twitter, Google Docs, and more than 100 other modes of work communication into one comprehensible interface. But going into tech wasn't a foregone conclusion: She arrived at the University of Texas at Austin in 1998 on a chemical engineering scholarship, but when she and the major didn't click, she left it, lost her scholarship, and took a job in Internet tech support. "That's when I got into coding," she says. "I realized if I could build Web pages to help other employees, I could spend less time talking to angry customers."

She's since worked at Google, Travelocity, and Twitter, where she rose to become director of product, then left in February of 2015 to form the all-female angel investing network #Angels. Five months later, she joined Slack, just as it passed the 1.1 million active-user mark. Today, Slack has 2.7 million active daily users and a valuation of $3.8 billion. Underwood, 36, who was promoted to VP of product last December, is in charge of figuring out which features to introduce next, and has an $80 million fund at her disposal to invest in third-party apps that complement Slack's technology. "I used to enjoy following an instruction set," she says. "But at Slack, there's no checklist. Now what I enjoy most is the creative process that comes with building things out of nothing."

The facts remain that women are often underrepresented across the tech industry, however we’re going to keep on shining a light on you, women in tech!

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