In ELLE's second annual Women in Tech issue, we honor the brilliant founders, funders, execs, and engineers who are rocking the industry—and the world beyond it. Read about all of them in the July issue of ELLE—available digitally and in select cities on June 16, and on newsstands nationwide June 23.
Follow Julia Hartz @juliahartz
"We had a million reasons we shouldn't have done it," says Hartz, cofounder of Eventbrite, a company that lets anyone sell tickets for a live event. (Think Ticketmaster, democratized.) But to Hartz, 35, who trained as a ballerina and considered herself a lifelong rule follower, moving from Los Angeles to the Bay Area to start a company with her then fiancé, Kevin Hartz, seemed like insanity. Still, she moved out of her 42nd-floor windowed office in Century City—where she was a TV executive developing shows like The Shield, Rescue Me, and Nip/Tuck for FX—and set up shop in a windowless room in Potrero Hill, San Francisco. The idea was to use online payment processing (Kevin had been an early investor in PayPal) to sell tickets to in-person meet-ups and events: a perfect marriage of e-commerce and offine connection.
Ten years later, Hartz is known across Silicon Valley as an expert and sounding board on how to turn a good idea into a thriving company. Eventbrite has 500 employees (or "Britelings") in eight offces worldwide who enjoy a next-level, progressive corporate culture: unlimited vacation days, total fnancial transparency. "That seems to be my superpower—really understanding what motivates people," she says, referring to both employees and customers. Last year, 100 million Eventbrite users bought tickets to 1.2 million events in 187 countries. The company, which takes a cut of up to 5 percent of each sale, is currently valued at $1 billion. That's a billion reasons she should have done it.
Follow Elizabeth Iorns @elizabethiorns
As a breast-cancer researcher, Iorns thought her work would change the way we treat one disease. Instead, the 34-year-old reinvented the way scientists worldwide study hundreds of diseases and other scientific challenges. The company she cofounded, Science Exchange, is nothing short of a global game changer. While in her lab at the University of Miami, Iorns noticed that many scientists, who once conducted the bulk of their experiments themselves, were now outsourcing their research—but having difficulty finding labs with the right super-specialized equipment and expert collaborators. Her solution: What if there were an online marketplace where scientists could hire researchers from around the world to carry out their experiments?
In 2011, Iorns moved to the Bay Area and started Science Exchange. NASA has since used it to work with a lab in Australia to develop a new material for satellites; every major pharmaceutical company has used Science Exchange, too. "I definitely set out to be an academic researcher," says Iorns, who was raised in New Zealand and got her PhD at the Institute of Cancer Research in London. But, she says, "I realized there was a potential to make a way bigger impact."
Follow Jane Park @janeparkjulep
With her online beauty emporium Julep, Park is taking the old business cliché "the customer is always right" to cutting-edge heights. Through crowdsourcing and social media, Julep forges direct relationships with its customers and produces only the products the community green-lights. It's smart business—given that the customers who vote on a theoretical product are likely to buy the real thing— but Julep also embodies Silicon Valley's make-the-world-a-better-place ethos. "The bigger idea is beauty without judgment," Park, 44, says.
Growing up in Toronto, she had a cousin who lived in Princeton, New Jersey, and turned her on to the university. But Park showed up at the SATs without a check for the fee. "Somebody in line behind me paid for my SATs," she says. It awakened in her a lifelong desire to give back—especially to women. After Princeton undergrad (yes, with a 1530 out of 1600, she was accepted) and Yale Law School, Park eventually got a job launching locations and products for Starbucks, where she caught the bug to create a "supportive, fun, and collaborative" virtual space for women.
In 2007, she landed capital from investors including Will Smith and Jay Z's firm, and Julep was born. Now the company, which has raised $56 million, launches 300 customer-approved products—nail-nourishing polishes to antioxidant-packed eye brighteners— each year.
Follow Tracy Chou @triketora
The chic and charming Chou is both a lead engineer at Pinterest and a new kind of poster girl for what a lead engineer can get done. In 2013, she set up an online database on the code-sharing website GitHub where tech companies could submit info on how many women engineers they employed—thereby taking a problem that lurked beneath the surface and attaching hard facts to it. "With the data out there, the conversation has progressed a lot further and faster," says the 27-year-old. That move put her on the Valley's main stage: She scored the coveted role of judge at the TechCrunch Disrupt start-up funding competition; her Twitter feed (@triketora) has become a must-follow for tech news and riffs on industry culture; and in May, she landed on the cover of Wired.
When Chou joined Pinterest in 2011 as one of its first 15 employees and one of only five engineers, it was something of a reversal of fortune. She'd grown up in Silicon Valley, the daughter of two computer science PhDs, but shied away from learning to code, studying electrical engineering instead. Internships at Google and Facebook changed all that. Chou recalls, "The presumption that I wasn't an engineer made me question whether I should be an engineer." She went back to Stanford for a master's and has been coding ever since.
Follow Mary Grove @marygrove
Grove may have worked at Google for more than a decade, but she also understands what it's like to start fresh with a brand-new venture. Since 2011, her mandate has been to use the tech giant's resources to get start-ups off the ground the world over. To that end, she's already forged partnerships with local start-up communities in more than 140 countries and created six Google- powered Campus work spaces from Tel Aviv, Israel, to Seoul, South Korea, where entrepreneurs can gather to share ideas and work free of charge.
"My family history has played a huge role in informing the work I do today," says Grove, 33, whose parents emigrated from Thailand and settled in San Diego, where they ran a small chiropractic business. She graduated from Stanford in 2004 and took a job with Google right away, first on the legal team and later in business development in New York and then Zurich. While abroad, she began focusing on countries in the developing world and asked herself—and Google—"How do we support entrepreneurs to drive development?"
That goal is echoed in Grove's passion project, which she runs with her husband, Steve (he's the director of Google's News Lab), whom she met on a business trip to Iraq in 2010: Silicon North Stars, a program that hooks up ninth graders from Minnesota with engineers and start-up founders in Silicon Valley to encourage the next generation of American entrepreneurs.
Follow Sara Haider @pandemona
"I've been a software developer basically my whole life," says Haider. The programming superstar was eight years old when she and her sister began building Backstreet Boys fan sites. Now 29, she tackles high-stakes projects like translating Periscope—the livestreaming app that's revolutionizing the way people watch video, monitor police, connect with faraway friends, and much more—for Android's 76 million U.S. users. Haider's Android expertise is in high demand in Silicon Valley, where her competition tends to be Apple-centric. She began her career at Twitter in 2011, first as an engineer, then on its mobile development team, creating apps for the company's now 300 million users. She leapt to the anonymous note-posting app Secret, but was hired away by Periscope, which was soon acquired by Twitter for nearly $100 million, taking Haider back to her old stomping ground. Periscope picked up 1 million users in its first 10 days when it launched this past March. Off the clock, Haider is an adviser to the pro-STEM nonprofit Girls Who Code. In May, when the Backstreet Boys used Periscope to broadcast a live video feed of themselves chilling at the airport, Haider tweeted, "12-year-old sara is freakin out."
Follow Aileen Lee @aileenlee
If Silicon Valley is today's Wild West, Lee is one of its boldest wranglers. Her venture capital firm, Cowboy Ventures, funds brand-new companies that are changing the way we live, work, shop, and socialize. "I always thought it was such an interesting job: meet with entrepreneurs about their dreams, and figure out which would be the most successful businesses," she says.
Before Lee, 45, struck out on her own in 2012, she was a partner for 13 years at the powerhouse VC firm Kleiner Perkins Caulfield & Byers, where she funded successful e-commerce start-ups like One Kings Lane and Rent the Runway. Lee has a background in retail herself, from her high school job as a shop clerk at the Short Hills Mall in New Jersey in the late 1980s to a stint at Gap, where she helped grow the new e-commerce unit in the late 1990s after finishing Harvard Business School.
Cowboy Ventures has raised more than $100 million for start-ups such as stylist marketplace StyleSeat and razor-subscription company Dollar Shave Club. So what's with the outlaw title? Lee, whose young son is named Cowboy, thought of it as a placeholder at first. "But then we realized it stood for a spirit of the West, and cowboys are all about trust," she says.
Follow Selina Tobaccowala @selinato
Tobaccowala has been a big deal in Silicon Valley since the first dot-com boom—but unlike other early entrepreneurs, she's still a fearless risk taker. In 1998, Tobaccowala graduated with a computer science degree from Stanford and faced a dilemma: apply to a tech giant like Yahoo!, or keep slogging away on Evite, the start-up she'd just founded with a few classmates. "I called my dad in the alleyway outside our first office," the 38-year-old recalls. "I asked him, 'Should I go to the job fair?'" She stayed the course, and Evite now facilitates more than 200 million invitations a year. In 2001, it was acquired by media giant InterActiveCorp (Tinder, About.com, CollegeHumor); eventually, Tobaccowala moved to IAC's London office to helm the tech side of Ticketmaster's European division. But in 2009, she didn't hesitate to get her hands dirty again with another start-up: SurveyMonkey, then a small Bay Area company enabling people and organizations to create their own surveys and analyze their results. As president and CTO, she's helped grow the company from 40 to 525 employees.
Even as one of the most powerful women in the Valley, the mother of two manages to catch the 5:45 p.m. train home every day. "I tell my daughter my favorite day is Saturday," she says, "but I really enjoy Monday through Friday. I want them to know I enjoy my job."
Follow Grace Garey @gracegarey
What if you could help provide spinal-cord surgery for a newborn in Tanzania? Or bone realignment for a man in Kenya? A lot of entrepreneurs say they want to change the world. Garey, the 25-year-old cofounder of Watsi, is actually doing it: The nonprofit site enables all of us to fund health care for individuals in the developing world who can't afford it.
After graduating from the University of California, Santa Barbara in 2011, the Berkeley native landed an internship at Kiva, the nonprofit that facilitates microfinance loans to entrepreneurs in developing nations. Then Garey heard about a friend's older brother, Chase Adam, who wanted to start a site for direct health-care donations. Together they launched Watsi in 2012, and soon after, it became the first-ever nonprofit to be accepted into the prestigious start-up accelerator Y Combinator.
Watsi has since raised almost $4 million in donations, some in increments as little as $5, for more than 4,000 patients from Nepal to Haiti to Burma. So far, more than 11,000 people have donated through the site. Next, Garey and Adam will pursue another round of philanthropic funding to extend Watsi's reach. "What really draws me in to a particular patient is the personal details," Garey says. "Connecting people is going to change the world."
Follow Michelle Zatlyn @Zatyln
"There's definitely a sense that we're on to something really big," says Zatlyn of Internet performance and security company CloudFlare, which she cofounded six years ago with two friends from business school. "We can redefine how the Internet works." It's big talk for a company you've never heard of—and that's kind of the point. CloudFlare is like hiring a personal trainer who's also a bodyguard for your website: It makes sites run faster and smoother, all while keeping viruses and hackers at bay. "We're a company that runs behind the scenes," she explains. "If we do our job right, people surfing the Internet don't even know we exist."
Zatlyn grew up "in the wheat fields of Saskatchewan." She was working as a project manager at Toshiba in Toronto when she decided to go to Harvard Business School to pursue her dream "to join a company that was Google before it was Google, Starbucks before it was Starbucks." Now 35 and married with a two-year-old son, she may have found just that in CloudFlare, which is valued at more than $1 billion and serves more than 2 million websites—Reddit, eHarmony, and Cisco among them.
This article appears in the July 2015 issue of ELLE, on newsstands nationwide June 23.
