Innovators: ‘A woman in tech needs to have a bit of grit’
Women are leading the charge at Amazon Australia. Meet three of the online retailing behemoth’s best and brightest who are steering the ship on our shores.
When Kate Burleigh first took the reins as head of Alexa in 2017, just months before Amazon was set to launch the digital voice assistant in Australia, the first thing she asked was for the device to pronounce Woolloomooloo.
“To me that’s like, you know, the ultimate Sydneysider’s test as to whether you can say and spell Woolloomooloo,” she says, referring to the waterfront suburb wedged between Potts Point and the CBD.
In the lead up to the launch, the US tech giant had sent a crew of Americans to Sydney to source a local accent and ensure Alexa could communicate with locals, reference Australian culture and provide accurate directions. And while the team were confident in the digital voice assistant’s abilities, they were unsure whether they had nailed one of the most important parts: her accent.
That was Burleigh’s welcome to Amazon, to give the soon-to-launch voice assistant a whirl while a group of American technologists sat around nervously waiting for her response.
“She said it perfectly. And so the next thing I did was ask her, ‘Alexa, spell Woolloomooloo’, and she spelled it perfectly as well. So I turned to them and I said, ‘I think you’ve got it pretty right’,” she says.
Burleigh will mark six years at Amazon come November, a role she took after 20 years with Intel where she held several roles, including Australia and New Zealand managing director between 2012 and 2017.
While she’s held senior roles in tech in Australia for more than a decade, her entry into the industry was anything but intentional, which is an experience she shares with a couple of her company’s leading women.
“It does almost seem a little serendipitous because how I got into tech was actually in one of my first jobs after university working at Dick Smith electronics, where I managed a VIP computer club,” Burleigh says.
The club was for customers who had purchased a computer, with Burleigh, who had studied business and marketing at university, in charge of sending regular newsletters and updates.
Burleigh was also the PR manager, dealing with technology journalists and handling returns during the era of Intel’s infamous Pentium FDIV bug – a hardware bug affecting Intel Pentium processors that saw the company recall computers worldwide and incur a $475m charge.
Do not miss The List: 100 Innovators 2023 which launches online and in The Australian on Friday, September 15.
“As a result of that, I got to know about Intel and, lo and behold, they were interviewing for PR manager and I ended up getting the job where I proceeded to stay for 20 years working my way up the company,” she says.
Janet Menzies started her career with a similar background in communications, having led marketing at McDonald’s for nine years in her birth country of Canada. Today Menzies is Amazon’s Australian country manager, which, she says, “means that I look after anything that is related to getting a package to your door”.
Menzies’ career at McDonald’s began when she was in high school, which included a period where she dropped out to work full-time before her parents convinced her to return and complete her studies.
“I actually credit McDonald’s a lot for my development,” she says. “You know, when you’re a young person, micro advances make a big difference. At McDonald’s, if you were a crew person, you could become a crew trainer and then a crew chief. And that was the kind of stuff that motivated me.”
Those lessons learned during her teens have stuck with her, she says, and ultimately led her towards her gravitation to tech and innovative roles.
“One thing I’ve always done, I will say, is follow opportunity. That was the case everywhere I worked, and was certainly the case when I was at McDonald’s,” she says.
Menzies says she sees tech as the sector where people will have the opportunity to lead, where people can have an impact and where they will be highly paid. “I think that when you look out to the next 20 years, we are going to have so many great tech jobs in Australia.”
She and her husband, who is from New Zealand, moved to Australia 15 years ago following a nine-year stint as a management consultant at McKinsey & Company in the US. The Amazon executive held roles with Performance Matters, Cochlear and Champions of Change prior to taking charge of Amazon Australia.
Rianne Van Veldhuizen, who today holds the role of managing director of Amazon Web Services in Australia and New Zealand, says her entry into tech happened by chance.
“I landed in tech by accident; I wasn’t meant to be here,” she says. “For me I think it was just a means to fund my university studies.”
Van Veldhuizen grew up on a farm in the Netherlands. “My parents had a very different background, and I only knew one thing: I didn’t want to become a farmer,” she says.
What followed was a 15-year career with IBM, including roles across Spain, Singapore, Belgium and the Netherlands.
One thing she remembers well is the first time somebody told her to aim higher.
“I met someone who told me I was thinking too small,” she says. “There’s so much more opportunity for you that you have no idea of. And that’s probably a message I would give to a lot of the young women out there.”
Asked what it’s like to be in an environment where women lead the charge, Van Veldhuizen says: “It is amazing. It’s not that I don’t like my male colleagues, I love them. And by the way, I have four brothers and three sons, so I have a lot of men in my life.
“But this is actually a first that we’re surrounded with women, like Janet and Kate, and the women in my own team.”
While she’s had her fair share of bumps along the road in her career, Van Veldhuizen says she finds that women in tech, particularly at more senior levels, all seem to share one similar trait.
“We all have grit. If you’ve been a woman in the tech industry, you need to have a bit of grit – but a lot of us have,” she says.
“And it’s fun to joke about it when things happen. It’s good to have those women as partners in the business and, yeah, just great to work with them.”
The team also includes Mindy Espidio-Garcia, the Australia director of operations, who will soon be succeeded by Sandra McNeil, who spent 24 years at General Motors before joining Amazon in 2020 at the company’s North American Customer Fulfilment team in Texas.
The List: 100 Innovators 2023 launches online and in The Australian on Friday, September 15.
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