The 25 coolest women in Silicon Valley

Business Insider

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The tech industry has a reputation for being male-dominated, but women are carving out a growing and increasingly important presence. Our recently released edition of the Silicon Valley 100, our annual list of the people who matter most and define what it means to be in Silicon Valley, is still largely male, but it also features 25 women who have changed the game in the past year.

From household names like Sheryl Sandberg and Marissa Mayer to new faces like the founders of Project Include, a nonprofit aimed at diversifying tech companies, these women are taking charge and proving Silicon Valley isn't just a boy's club.

Read on to learn about 25 of the coolest women in Silicon Valley right now.

Additional reporting by Kaitlyn Yarborough, Tanza Loudenback, and Alexa Pipia.

Edited by Alex Morrell and Matt Rosoff.

Michelle Zatlyn

Getty Images/Steve Jennings

Cofounder, CloudFlare

Along with Matthew Prince and Lee Holloway, Zatlyn founded CloudFlare in 2009. The company handles 10% of the internet's traffic, giving it a lot of quiet control over the web. In April, the startup became the first company to widely activate a technology that lets webpages and apps load as much as 15% faster, potentially shaving precious seconds off of your search time. It will take a year for the speed boost to come to full fruition, but it could usher in a new class of web applications when it does.

CloudFlare's internet dominance has attracted the eyes of investors. In September the company raised $110 million in a round led by Fidelity and joined by Google Capital, Microsoft, Baidu, and Qualcomm Ventures. 

Jess Lee

Jess Lee / Polyvore

Cofounder and CEO, Polyvore

Yahoo bought the social shopping site Polyvore last July reportedly for a price of about $200 million, saying the company's expertise in community-driven experiences and retailer-supported commerce paired with Yahoo's premium content showed "amazing potential." Lee said Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer had a part in shaping her career when she interviewed Lee for Google's elite associate product manager program back in the early 2000s. Since it joined the Yahoo family, Polyvore expanded in February to include a new menswear category, an area that Pinterest is also aggressively going after.

Stacy Brown-Philpot

TaskRabbit

CEO, TaskRabbit

After Leah Busque stepped down from the role of TaskRabbit CEO for a second time, Brown-Philpot took over in April, becoming the first black female CEO in Silicon Valley. The former Google employee studied startups and played a lead role in global consumer operations before joining TaskRabbit in 2013. She took unpopular but necessary steps — including layoffs — to get the startup on track toward its goal of profitability this year.

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