Elissa Shevinsky | |
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| Born | Elissa Beth Shevinsky New York City, U.S. |
| Alma mater | Williams College, CUNY Baruch College School of Business, |
| Occupation(s) | Author, entrepreneur, cybersecurity expert |
| Years active | 1999–present |
Elissa Shevinsky is an American technology executive, entrepreneur, cybersecurity expert, public speaker, and author. [1] [2] [3] [4]
Shevinsky attended Benjamin Cardozo High School, before studying for a Political Theory major at Williams College, where she also took classes in Computer Science, [5] graduating in 2001. [6]
In 2010, Shevinsky defended her company against The New York Times , as co-owner of Neighborhoodies, over the use of the "New York Herald Tribune" logo on T-shirts. Shevinsky argued that the trademark had been abandoned. [7] [8] In 2012, she founded two NYC-focused dating sites, MakeOut Labs and JoinJspot. [9]
Shevinsky co-founded Glimpse, an encrypted photo and video-sharing app, [10] with Pax Dickinson in 2013. [11] At Glimpse, Shevinksy served as chief executive of the company. [6]
In 2015 Shevinsky was funded by MACH37 for Jekudo Privacy Company, [12] co-organized information security conference SecretCon, [13] [14] and edited Lean Out: The Struggle for Gender Equality in Tech and Start-up Culture . [14]
Shevinsky has spoken and written on enterprise security policy. [16] [17] She spoke on the potential for social media to influence election outcomes at HOPE XI. [18] Shevinsky continues to be an organizer of SecretCon. [19]
In 2018 Shevinsky spoke on information security at universities and infosec conferences. [20] [21] [22] She served as chief operating officer of SoHo Token Labs, building developer tools for smart contracts. [23]
In 2019 Shevinsky started serving as CEO at Faster Than Light. [24] [25] Shevinsky taught a course titled "Introduction to Tech Entrepreneurship" at the Computer Science Department of Williams College." [26]
Lean Out: The Struggle for Gender Equality in Tech and Start-up Culture was listed by Inc. Magazine as one of the 100 best business books of 2015. [27]
In 2018, Shevinsky was named "Woman of the Decade" by Williams College in a speech where she announced she wanted to lead the way for the development and protection of privacy for the following decade. [28]
Shevinsky advocates for niceness and inclusivity in the workplace, especially within the tech and security industries. [29] In a 2015 post on harassment and trolling in Silicon Valley, Shevinsky wrote: "I'd like to see less harassment. That's my position. Less harassment, for everyone. I do hope this isn't a controversial statement." [30] When James Damore was fired by Google, Shevinsky was widely quoted saying that speech "questioning the technical qualifications of people based on race or gender" was potentially within the purview of Title VII of the Civil Rights Act, which prohibits employment discrimination based on race, color, religion, sex, and national origin. [31] As a Press Lead for the 2018 HOPE conference in NYC, Shevinsky called for stronger enforcement of the Code of Conduct. [32]
Shevinsky appears in the documentary CODE: Debugging the Gender Gap . [33] She is also a cast member in the documentary Silenced. [34]
A startup or start-up is a company or project undertaken by an entrepreneur to seek, develop, and validate a scalable business model. While entrepreneurship includes all new businesses including self-employment and businesses that do not intend to go public, startups are new businesses that intend to grow large beyond the solo-founder. During the beginning, startups face high uncertainty and have high rates of failure, but a minority of them do go on to become successful and influential, such as unicorns.
Steve Blank is an American entrepreneur, educator, author and speaker. He created the customer development method that launched the lean startup movement. His work has influenced modern entrepreneurship through the creation of tools and processes for new ventures which differ from those used in large companies.
Lean startup is a methodology for developing businesses and products that aims to shorten product development cycles and rapidly discover if a proposed business model is viable; this is achieved by adopting a combination of business-hypothesis-driven experimentation, iterative product releases, and validated learning. Lean startup emphasizes customer feedback over intuition and flexibility over planning. This methodology enables recovery from failures more often than traditional ways of product development.
Richard William Costolo is an American businessman. He was the CEO of Twitter, Inc. from 2010 to 2015; he also served as the COO before becoming CEO.
Glenda Schroeder is an American software engineer noted for implementing the first command-line user interface shell and publishing one of the earliest research papers describing electronic mail systems while working as a member of the staff at the MIT Computation Center in 1965.
Lean In: Women, Work, and the Will to Lead is a 2013 book encouraging women to assert themselves at work and at home, co-written by business executive Sheryl Sandberg and media writer Nell Scovell.
Gamergate or GamerGate (GG) was a loosely organized misogynistic online harassment campaign and a right-wing backlash against feminism, diversity, and progressivism in video game culture. It was conducted using the hashtag "#Gamergate" primarily in 2014 and 2015. Gamergate targeted women in the video game industry, most notably feminist media critic Anita Sarkeesian and video game developers Zoë Quinn and Brianna Wu.
Sexism in the technology industry manifests in various forms—overt, subtle, and covert occupational sexism—creating a hostile and exclusionary environment for women. This not only diminishes the accessibility and profitability of the sector but also perpetuates a lack of diversity in the technology industry. Despite regional variations, women's representation in the tech field hovers between 4% and 20%, influenced by entrenched gender stereotypes, biased investment decisions, male-dominated work cultures, and a pervasive lack of awareness surrounding sexual harassment. Historical data paints a stark picture: while women earned 37.1% of U.S. computer science degrees in 1984, this figure plummeted to 17.6% by 2011 and has remained stagnant since. Silicon Valley, often lauded as the cradle of technological innovation, has been criticized for failing to address these disparities. Margaret O'Mara, a historian, notes that Silicon Valley's male-dominated oligopoly replicates traditional power structures, marginalizing women, people of color, and other minorities, ultimately reinforcing a homogenous tech culture. Moreover, systemic issues such as unequal pay, limited venture capital access, and pervasive workplace harassment contribute to the exodus of women from the industry. In response, various initiatives, like diversity-focused conferences and nonprofits, are striving to create more inclusive environments, yet the road to equity remains fraught with challenges, as demonstrated by the continued underrepresentation of women at executive levels and in technical roles across leading firms like Google and other tech giants.
Women in venture capital or VC are investors who provide venture capital funding to startups. Women make up a small fraction of the venture capital private equity workforce. A widely used source for tracking the number of women in venture capital is the Midas List which has been published by Forbes since 2001. Research from Women in VC, a global community of women venture investors, shows that the percentage of female VC partners is just shy of 5 percent.
Alice Yvonne Bentinck is a British entrepreneur. Along with Matt Clifford, she is the co-founder of Entrepreneur First, a London-based company builder and startup accelerator. Based in London and Singapore, EF funds ambitious individuals based across Europe and Asia to create startups. In 2017, it was announced that Reid Hoffman, co-founder of LinkedIn and Partner at Greylock, was leading a $12.4million investment into Entrepreneur First.
Lean Out: The Struggle for Gender Equality in Tech and Start-Up Culture is a 2015 book written by Elissa Shevinsky, an information security entrepreneur and feminist. Shevinsky wrote it in response to Sheryl Sandberg's Lean In, a book often criticized by feminists as being unrealistic in its expectations on women.
Tarah Marie Wheeler is an American technology and cybersecurity author, public speaker, computer security professional, and executive. She is currently CEO of Red Queen Dynamics and Senior Fellow of Global Cyber Policy at the Council on Foreign Relations, and she is the author of Women in Tech.
Sarah Jeong is an American journalist specializing in information technology law and other technology-related topics. A member of the editorial board of The New York Times from 2018 to 2019, she was formerly a senior writer for The Verge and a contributing editor for Vice Media's Motherboard website. She is the author of The Internet of Garbage, a non-fiction book about online harassment. In 2022, she rejoined The Verge as deputy features editor.
Cheryl Sew Hoy is an entrepreneur, speaker and angel investor, best known for being the founding CEO of the Malaysian Global Innovation and Creativity Centre (MaGIC), a government-funded agency to support entrepreneurship in Malaysia and ASEAN.
MACH37 is an American startup accelerator that was established in 2013 as a division of the Virginia-based Center for Innovative Technology (CIT) with funding from the Commonwealth of Virginia. In 2017 CIT partnered with VentureScope, a strategic innovation consultancy and venture firm, to revamp MACH37's operating model and curriculum. Following a successful partnership between CIT and VentureScope, MACH37 became fully owned and operated by VentureScope in 2020. MACH37 focuses primarily on honing and strengthening startups' product-market fit through extensive customer discovery and market research, expanding emerging companies' professional networks, fostering founder wellbeing, and providing emerging companies in the cybersecurity industry with access to investment capital and an immediate customer base. In an October 2020 article Forbes named MACH37 'the Granddaddy' of top cyber accelerators giving a nod to the fact that MACH37 was one of the first accelerators in the world dedicated to cyber and cyber adjacent technologies, and it has lasted far longer than many of its peer accelerators while strengthening over time. The name 'MACH37' is a reference to the escape velocity of Earth's atmosphere. VentureScope applies Lean Startup methodology at MACH37 as an efficient and successful approach to assist startups to rapidly adapt their search for a successful business model and test their hypotheses about customer needs and market demands.
Leanne Pittsford is an American entrepreneur. She is the founder of Lesbians Who Tech, a community of queer women and their allies in technology.
Erica Joy Baker is an engineer in the San Francisco Bay Area, Chief Technology Officer for the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, and known for her outspoken support of diversity and inclusion. She has worked at companies including GitHub, Google, Slack, Patreon, and Microsoft. She gained prominence in 2015 for starting an internal spreadsheet where Google employees reported their salary data to better understand pay disparities within the company. Kara Swisher of Recode called Baker the "woman to watch" in a profile in C Magazine.
Lisa Gelobter is a computer scientist, technologist and chief executive. She was the Chief Digital Service Officer for the United States Department of Education.
Dita Přikrylová is a Czech software engineer, a social entrepreneur, and the founder of Czechitas, a non-profit organization based upon Girls Who Code which provides technical education and networking possibilities for women and youth in information technologies.
Jonha Richman is a Filipino-born businesswoman. Rappler recognised her as one of the 'most inspiring Filipino entrepreneurs' and SunStar considered her as one of the most 'successful Filipino businesswomen'. Dubbed as the 'Most Connected Businesswoman from Asia', she is an advocate for startups, women empowerment and equality. She campaigned for educational reform in efforts to teach kids in embracing failure to succeed.
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