This post is a continuation of the first Women in Tech post we did in August, which showcases women leading in tech and business and the achievements they have made.
Susan Wojcicki – CEO, YouTube
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She attended Harvard and UCLA and after spending a short period doing marketing with Intel, Wojcicki became Google’s first marketing manager in 1999. At the beginning of Google, she worked on their initial viral marketing programs, as well as the first Google Doodles, Google Images, and Google Books. Eventually, she became Google’s Senior VP of Advertising and Commerce, during this time she was overseeing Google Video and saw that the small start-up YouTube was competing very well, her interest soon turned into a successful acquisition of YouTube by Google in 2006. She then helped facilitate the buy of Doubleclick in 2007. In 2014 she became the CEO of YouTube, and is considered one of the most influential women in advertising and was named one of Time’s 100 most influential people in 2015. Wojcicki works in advocacy for the expansion of paid family leave, countering gender discrimination within technology companies, and getting more girls interested in computer science. She has also worked towards getting more computer science taught in schools and bringing awareness to the ongoing struggles for Syrian refugees.
Safra Catz – Co-CEO, Oracle
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The beginning of her career was in investment banking before joining Oracle in 1999. She was named the co-CEO with Mark Hurd in 2010. Catz has also served as Oracles CFO since 2011 and briefly before from 2005-2008. She is credited for driving Oracle’s 2005 acquisition of software rival PeopleSoft. Catz also lectures for Stanford Graduate School of Business and serves on many boards of directors including Hyperion Solutions, Stellent Inc, PeopleSoft Inc, Oracle, and most recently The Walt Disney Company. She has also served as a member of the executive council of TechNet since 2013. Catz is considered one of the most powerful women in business and was the highest-paid female CEO of any U.S. company as of April 2017.
Marissa Mayer – Former CEO, Yahoo
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Marissa joined Google in 1999 after graduating from Stanford, she started out working in engineering and coding, but soon rose through the ranks taking on positions like director of consumer web products. Mayer also oversaw the design and creation of their home page and worked on the small team that created Google AdWords. Mayer started the Associate Product Manager (APM) program in 2002, which is a two year Google mentorship program to recruit new talents and cultivate them for leadership roles. She held other leadership positions including heading Local, Maps, and Location Services, and VP of Search Products and User Experience. Additionally, she played a key role in the creation of and had a key hand in the creation of many Google products including Google Search, Google Images, Google News, Google Maps, Google Books, and Gmail. In 2012 Mayer was announced as President and CEO of Yahoo, she served in this position until the spring of 2017 after a tenuous five years directing the company. In 2017 she started her own company Lumi Labs. Mayer has also won awards for her work teaching computer programming at Stanford and mentoring at the East Palo Alto Charter School.
Solina Chau – Co-Founder, Horizons Ventures
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Solina sprang into the Hong Kong business scene in 1993 after winning the bid to build the Oriental Square in downtown Beijing for Hong Kong Chief Executive Tung Chee-Hwa. In 1999, Chau created TOM, a Chinese language media company. Chau also invested in an interactive voice-recognition service provider, Beijing Leitingwuji Network Technology Company in 2002, and by September 2003, it was being bought and sold through Chau’s own companies before the company was even profitable, she sold it to TOM Group, It’s subsidiary TOM Online and was then separately listed on the Hong Kong Stock Exchange in early 2004. Besides having extremely good business acumen which has allowed her to become one of the richest women in Hong Kong, she also loves to invest in other companies and has put money into 80+ since co-founding Horizons Ventures in 2002. She loves working with western organizations and has contributed to notable companies like Slack, Facebook, and Spotify.