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WTF Is Happening: Women Tech Founders on the Rise

Nov. 1, 2019
Your Next Big Investment Is Women-Led Tech — I wrote the book WTF Is Happening simply to shine a light on some amazing women tech founders. I want to raise […]

Your Next Big Investment Is Women-Led Tech —

I wrote the book WTF Is Happening simply to shine a light on some amazing women tech founders. I want to raise awareness and to encourage others to follow in their footsteps, because you can’t be what you can’t see. The good news for investors and students of STEM alike is that there were so many candidates for inclusion that I had a hard time narrowing it down.

From robotics and virtual reality to drone technology and autonomous flight, these women are receiving only a small fraction of the available funding, an inequity that harms both innovators and investors alike.

This is an invitation to young women who may not have thought about working in STEM fields, or starting their own tech companies. It’s an invitation to female entrepreneurs and investors to see themselves and their partners reflected in the stories. Most importantly, it is an invitation to investors who are seeking exciting companies, calling upon them to see the amazing world female technologists are creating.

In the book I profiled 13 female founders whose remarkable work today will make a profound difference in the way we all live tomorrow. These are powerful, evidence-based stories about young technologies and industries in their infancies led by women paving a path into our future — women who will very likely outperform for their investors. You can read excerpts from 2 of these profiles here.

Food for Thought from Our 2022 ICT Visionaries

DAWN SONG / OASIS LABS

Dawn Song is CEO and cofounder of startup oasis Labs, a privacy-first, cloud computing platform on blockchain. A professor in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at the University of California at Berkeley, she is an expert on security and privacy technologies for software, networking, distributed systems, applied cryptography, blockchains, smart contracts, and machine learning. Named a MacArthur Fellow in 2010 at age 35, she has also been awarded the Guggenheim Fellowship, the Alfred P. Sloan Research Fellowship, the NSF CAREER Award, the MIT Technology Review TR-35 Award, as well as the Faculty Research Award from IBM, Google, and other major tech companies. She is an accomplished entrepreneur responsible for multiple startups, including Ensighta Security (acquired by FireEye Inc.) and Menlo Security. She obtained her PhD from UC Berkeley.

Why did you start your company?
I’ve been doing research on blockchain for quite some time, and while we see that on one hand blockchain has the opportunity to really help and transform many industries, it is still at a very early stage. Right now, there are serious scalability issues and no real privacy protection.

… What Oasis Labs comes down to is recognizing that there is a serious need within real-world applications and that we have something that can help solve these issues and change the world.

… we all hear news every day of the internet’s significant and pressing privacy issues. The media talks about Cambridge Analytica, data leaks, Equifax, privacy breaches – it’s everywhere, and no one can escape it. All of these issues leave me with the sense that, unless we do something different, these problems will only become worse. As a research and leader in this field, I feel that I have a responsibility to build new technologies that can help solve these problems, and I am glad to see it coming together in the start of Oasis Labs.

What advice would you give to STEM students?
Learn basic science to have a solid foundation. When I was in school, I started as a physics major in undergrad but then switched to computer science in graduate school. Once you have a solid foundation, it’s much easier to move to other domains and be adaptive.

Also, keep a curious mind. Be brave and explore new and uncharted domains.

Why should younger women consider STEM and/or entrepreneurship as a career option?
It’s important to give people options. For women who want to go into STEM, we want to make it so that they have the option to dos. But that doesn’t mean that every woman has to pursue STEM. No one is a failure if they don’t go into STEM, and women shouldn’t feel pressured to have to go into STEM. If a woman wants to be a full-time mom, that’s great. If she wants to pursue a career in STEM, that’s great, too. At the end of the day, as a community, what is important is to provide the option and equal opportunity for women and minorities so that anyone can join STEM.

What do you predict will happen in your field in the next 5 years?
I am fortunate to work in several important and exciting fields: security and privacy, AI and machine learning, and blockchain. All of these fields are very fast moving. One trend I think we will continue to see is that technology advancement will keep getting faster and faster. And It’s happening across all different domains.  … it’s hard to predict where we will be even in 5 years. It’s analogous to the beginning of the internet: we couldn’t really imagine how people use the internet today.

ALLISON CLIFT-JENNINGS / FILAMENT

Allison Clift-Jennings was born in Reno and received a BS in computer science from the University of Nevada, Reno. She has been in the technology industry for more than 2 decades, and has worked in a variety of jobs, from junior database administrator up to CTO. She is currently the EO of Filament, a tech startup dedicated to a fully decentralized Internet of Things ecosystem that operates independently of central authority. Filament’s devices rely on a blockchain-based payment system and digital smart contracts and are, unlike the cloud, designed to operate independently of existing cellular and Wi-Fi networks.

Why did you start your company?
I’ve always been a big believer that technology has the ability to solve many problems. Certainly not all problems, and it sometimes creates new ones – but fundamentally, technology as a tool can overcome significant barriers in many areas of our lives.

Initially, it was perhaps a bit naïve. (I felt that) if you want something done differently, just go build it yourself. While that ideal has led to quite a few sobering realizations, it also showed me that there is much less holding you back from realizing a future than you think. Almost all of the holdback comes from within yourself. If you get past that, the rest is manageable.

What advice would you give to STEM students?
STEM contains a large set of disciplines. If a student is interested in TEM, I would encourage them to explore all areas of science and engineering – even areas they may not be interested in initially. As an example, I started my engineering studies in mechanical, then moved to electrical, and then on to computer science, They all were interesting in their own ways, and I find some things I learned in one discipline actually helped me understand other disciplines better. Don’t forget bioscience and formal logic either — also a part of STEM!

What do  you predict will happen in your field in the next 5 years?
The well-known computer scientist Alan Kay is quoted as saying, "The best way to predict the future is to invent it." In that vein, I spend most of my time focusing on building the possible future that we envision. Will it be the future? I don’t know, but it’s a possibility. And that possible future includes machines, vehicles, and infrastructure we rely on today, but has the ability to become transactive in nature – where machines are economic, and can establish proof and value directly with each other, and with people. If you consider what e-commerce did for the early internet, consider what machine-commerce will do for the industries we rely upon today.

What was your big breakthrough?
Early in the history of Filament, we were in a stage as a company where we needed to find a new way to provide our capabilities to customers – often very large industrial companies. Unlike consumers, large corporations often prefer to purchase products as an operational expense, meaning they don’t actually own the devise; they simply pay for their use. But we had a problem where we needed to provide this operations expense — or OpEx — to them, but on physical hardware. This would be easy to do if our devices were always connected in the internet, but they often are not.

Our big breakthrough was going deep into our engineering roots to invent a way for a chine to be paid for per use, on physical hardware, online or offline. This, to our knowledge, had never been accomplished before, and helped us to build some larger customer relationships that we still have today. Sometimes, raw engineering is necessary to invent capabilities that simply didn’t exist prior. This, to me, is the beauty of STEM.

Why should younger women consider STEM and/or entrepreneurship as a career option?
Because women have so much to contribute to these fields!  I’m absolutely of the belief that if you have an interest in a field, you should pursue it as far as  you want. It’s an unfortunate truth that inherent bias prevents women from doing this as easily as other demographics. Yet we know of study after study that shows more diverse teams being more effective.* It’s important to note that diversity goes further than gender or race. It also includes worldviews, prior experiences, inclinations, interests, and the like. In my opinion, we should all strive to be as diverse as possible along as many axes as passible, as that will make us more effective in almost every way. Women can reclaim the ability to excel with as little inhibition as possible. Pursuing a career in these fields is one of the best ways to weaken that bias.

RESOURCES AND NOTES
Calvert Impact Capital. "Just Good Investing: Why gender batters to your portfolio and what you can do about it." December 2018, Edition 1. https://www.calvertimpactcapital.org/insights/gender-report

Harvard Business Review. https://hbr.org/

Veris Wealth Partners. https://www.veriswp.com/

David Rock, Heidi Grant, and Jacque Gey, "Diverse Teams Feel Less Comfortable – and That’s Why They Perform Better," Harvard Business Review, September 22, 2016, https://hbr.org/2016/09/diverse-teams-feel-less-comfortable-and-that-why-they-perform-better

Laura Huang, "Why Female Entrpreneurs Have a Harder Time Raising Venture Capital," Scientific American, June 5, 2018, https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/why-female-entrepreneaurs-have-a-harder-time-raising venture-capital/.

EDITOR’S NOTE: This article contains excerpts from Amoils’ book, WTF Is Happening: Women Tech Founders on the Rise. In her book, she covers extensively:
The Gender Funding Discrepancy: why female entrepreneurs only received 2% of VC funding in 2018.
Tech predictions for the next 5 years .
Insider tips for stages of funding.
12 reasons why women aren’t going anywhere in the future of tech .
Women Tech Founders offer the lessons they wish they knew to tomorrow’s STEM superstars.
5 key lessons for the future women leaders of tech from today’s female founders and innovators.
The dynamic women making blockchain more accessible.
How investors are leaving money on the table.

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About the Author: For the past decade Nisa Amoils has been a venture investor primarily focused on new technologies. She is a former securities lawyer and on the Boards of several companies and institutions including Wharton Entrepreneurship. She writes for Forbes and Blockchain Magazine and is a regular on CNBC, MSNBC, Fox, Cheddar, and others. She is the author of WTF Is Happening: Women Tech Founders on the Rise. For more information, please visit NisaAmoils.com, and connect with her on Twitter and LinkedIn.

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