Queen of Silicon Valley Sandra Kurtzig on making it to the top and staying there

“YOU can always find discrimination if you want to,” Sandra Kurtzig says about Silicon Valley. But it didn’t stop her making $400 million in the tech industry.

Sandra Kurtzig

ASK one of Silicon Valley’s top female entrepreneurs about gender discrimination in the technology world and she’ll roll her eyes.

“You can always find discrimination if you want to find it,” Sandra Kurtzig told news.com.au

“If you’re tall, if you’re short, there’s always discrimination, and if you want to use it as an excuse, you can ... if you think that way, everyone else around you thinks that way.

“If you’re in a company where you realistically have discrimination, well, you leave and go somewhere else, if you’re smart and you’re competent and you have self-confidence.

“Especially today, with technology, it’s a great time for women to start companies. Technology levels the playing field.”

Despite being one of the first women to reach the top of this notoriously male-dominated landscape, that’s typical of Ms Kurtzig’s no-nonsense attitude to life and business.

After gaining a degree in maths from the University of California, Los Angeles, and a masters in aeronautical engineering from Stanford, she worked selling timeshares for General Electric before leaving to spend more time with her family.

If it doesn’t sound like a classically feminist move, that’s because it wasn’t. Ms Kurtzig marches to the beat of her own drum, a beat with such force and momentum that it wasn’t long before she took up a small side project that blossomed into a $US400 million business.

In 1972, the mother of two started ASK Computer Systems with $US2000 of her savings working part-time from her second bedroom. At the time, “people thought software was women’s underwear”.

But Ms Kurtzig had already recognised it would overtake hardware — and those early programs she created for the manufacturing industry still work today.

When Sandra started her second company in her sixties, she named it after her sons, Ken and Andy.

She never wanted to climb the corporate ladder, “I wanted a family”, but her drive and her enthusiasm for a challenge meant her company quickly snowballed into something far bigger than anything she could have imagined.

There were hard times. The company was down to its last payroll at one point, and “started over” three times, but ASK was destined to be one of the largest software companies in the world. In 1981, Ms Kurtzig became the first woman to take a tech company public, which was “very nice”, she conceded.

Her self-funded success is an unusual story in today’s tech sector, where the money is flowing, growth is lightning-fast and venture capitalists are seen as an essential. Yet some things don’t change.

Ms Kurtzig retired as CEO of ASK in 1985, to spend more time with her husband and sons, but was lured back a few years later, turning ASK into the seventh-largest software company in the world.

The mother of two sees “a real advantage for women to combine career and family”, admitting that she needed more than “baby talk” to fill her days.

She admits the balance was always difficult, especially when she was working 18-hour days, but “if you don’t have things to do, you tend to fill the time with things that are not as important.”

Her work later provided a bond with her sons Ken and Andy. When your children go to college, you “lose some connection”, she said, but she was able to play a part in their success, at one time helping them run the firm EBenefits.

Sandra, pictured with granddaughter Jamie, says combining career and family is an advantage.

She retired again in 1992, retaining an involvement in education and the entrepreneurial world, but focusing on family, writing her autobiography CEO: Building a $400 million Company from the Ground Up and overseeing the construction of her dream home in Hawaii.

Working with contractors on a physical construction was no different to interacting with developers on building software, from her point of view.

But she still hadn’t had enough of Silicon Valley. After a conversation in Hawaii with Marc Benioff from Salesforce about the cloud and “this whole new way of engaging with the world”, she saw a huge opportunity.

By 2010, already in her 60s and with the tech landscape undergoing a radical transformation, she returned with a new company named Kenandy (after her sons) and a fresh concept.

This time, everyone knew who she was and the investors were queuing up: a new source of pressure, as well as opportunity for Ms Kurtzig.

She wasn’t afraid. While she acknowledges feminine characteristics in her management style, which is empathetic and emotionally connected, she is fiercely competitive.

She isn’t afraid to make mistakes or to take risks. “That’s what entrepreneurship is all about. It’s not mistakes that are the issue, it’s not learning from them.”

The world had changed. Information was more easily available and everything moved at lightning speed. But in just five years, Ms Kurtzig’s cloud-based enterprise management software company has around 100 employees and is another success story.

“You have to believe in yourself. If you can’t believe in yourself, how can you expect somebody else to?

Originally published as Queen of Silicon Valley Sandra Kurtzig on making it to the top and staying there