Elle celebrated its third annual Women in Tech Power List, honoring eight tech industry leaders and innovators profiled in the magazine’s June issue, Tuesday night in San Francisco at a dinner hosted by editor in chief Roberta Myers at Mourad restaurant.
Honorees included: Anjula Acharia-Bath, partner, Trinity Partners; Jen Fitzpatrick, vice president of engineering, Google Maps; Del Harvey, vice president of trust and safety, Twitter; Leila Janah, founder, Sama Group; Marcela Sapone, chief executive officer, Hello Alfred; April Underwood, vice president of product, Slack; Whitney Wolfe, founder, Bumble, and Tracy Young, chief executive officer and founder, PlanGrid.
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Creativity, growing their companies and social entrepreneurship were on everyone’s mind. Sapone described Hello, Alfred — named for Bruce Wayne’s valet — as an app that connects online and off-line household services into a centralized management center. “I see Hello, Alfred being built into all homes and apartments, like a personal concierge service,” she said. The service is available by subscription in Boston and New York, with San Francisco and Los Angeles slated for next year. “We’ve already signed contracts with nine major residential and commercial developers to install Hello, Alfred as a permanent amenity,” said Sapone, who added that the service has a 30,000-person wait list.
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Fitzpatrick, who has worked at Google since 1999, said there are compelling reasons to get more women working in the tech world. “We are at the beginning of an era when mobile tech is changing every aspect of our everyday lives, far beyond ordering pizza or booking a hairstylist appointment,” Fitzpatrick said. ‘We must get more women involved in designing and writing apps.” Fitzpatrick is on the board of the Anita Borg Institute for Women in Technology, which puts on an annual gathering that attracts more than 40,000 women in tech. “A major thrust is to empower tech companies to put the design of everyday apps into the hands of women creators and technologists so that they will more ideally mirror the women who use them,” she said.
Harvey, head of Twitter’s Trust and Safety team, said that top tech companies are behind initiatives to prevent abuse and harassment online. Twitter consults with law enforcement, “but the reality is that out of billions of tweets every day or so, only an infinitesimal number are harassment,” she said.
Underwood noted that Slack, a messaging app that helps manage projects by syncing more than 100 modes of work communication into one interface, said that in two years Slack has attracted 3 million active users around the world. She’s now charged with growing the brand and has an $80 million fund to invest in third-party apps that enhance Slack’s technology. “What I enjoy most is the creative part of tech, building things that did not exist before,” she said.