One of the few female ad tech CEOs explains why there may be so few women in ad tech
This year, Drawbridge - which aims to create an anonymized ID to help marketers identify their customers across devices - has become the fastest-growing female-led company in America, according to the Inc. 5000.
Women in leadership roles are rare and even rarer in ad tech. Ad tech company Maxifier identified women account for just 2.9% of ad tech CEOs.
And Sivaramakrishnan's achievements are rarer still: As a former planetary scientist, one of the instruments she helped design during her PhD is currently on the NASA New Horizons spacecraft mission to Pluto.
Why so few women are ad tech leaders - the lack of females in STEM subjects and the aggressively competitive nature of the ad tech industry
Sivaramakrishnan is the first to admit that her career path has been unusual. Coming from a discipline of applied mathematics research, she had no expertise in advertising or marketing when she graduated from Stanford University and joined mobile advertising company AdMob in 2007 as the only woman in the engineering department. AdMob was acquired by Google in 2009, where Sivaramakrishnan worked as a member of technical staff for under a year before founding Drawbridge in 2010.
There are a few reasons why Sivaramakrishnan thinks this is the case.
She describes the ad tech industry as an "aggressively competitive environment." That attracts certain personality types.
"If you're fiercely competitive and you're male, you tend to attract people of a similar kind, and that can skew the stats," Sivaramakrishnan said.
There's also a long-running trend of women not chasing STEM (science, technology, engineering, and math) qualifications - something a number of companies and governments are trying to address. One isn't just limited to ad tech, but entrepreneurship in general: "The risk profile is distinct between the way men and women view risk, especially with respect to a work/life balance. It propels [women] towards less risk, especially when large companies offer you less risky opportunities, a steady stream of income, a certainty about what the next month will look like."
How Sivaramakrishnan uses being one of the few women in her field to her advantage
As a result, every time Sivaramakrishnan goes to present on stage, or sits on a conference panel, or enters into a partnership discussion, she is always conscious to put her best foot forward and be very prepared as she is acting as the biggest brand ambassador for the company.
She says she has only sat on two or three panel sessions in her career where there were other women - and even then they were not technologists. But she said that's not just what has set her apart - it's her approach to the panels that come from a perspective of technology, mathematics, and data, rather than personal bias.
We asked whether this approach, plus Sivaramakrishnan's gender, can sometimes work as an advantage.
Sivaramakrishnan responded by telling a story of a meeting she had with a big UK agency earlier that day. At the end of the meeting one of the male executives asked: "Can I ask you a question outside the scope of this discussion? There are few women who lead companies and have backgrounds like yours. Can you tell me what it feels like?"
Sivaramakrishnan said: "I was like 'wow'. He vocalized something that other people had been thinking of, that they want to ask, but some don't ... as I left, the group said I was an inspiration to them. I knew I did not just do right by the partnership but I felt good that I had inspired some of the women in the room. And the person asking me the question was a man."
Sivaramakrishnan's advice for other women in tech: "Do your research"
We asked whether Sivaramakrishnan would advise other women to go into ad tech. She explained that while one of the applications of Drawbridge is ad tech, she considers it more of a pure technology company. And instead, she would encourage women to become technologists.
"I think women bring perspective, calmness, and balanced aggression in a positive way. If you're good at what you do as an engineer or a mathematician and you also have that natural bi-product of being a woman to supplement your work [you're likely to go a long way,]" she said.
Sivaramakrishnan also shared advice for those other entrepreneurs and technologists who find themselves as the only woman on the panel, or the only woman in a meeting. She said she has always stood out - in a good way - when she comes to the conversation from a perspective of data, mathematics, and logic.
"Logic and sound reasoning and a sense of conviction has played to my strengths. Notice I'm not saying 'be confident, 'sound convincing,' 'have a positive attitude,' 'do your thing,' 'be charming,' 'believe in yourself,' 'have swagger' - no. Do your research," Sivaramakrishnan said.
As for Drawbridge, Sivaramakrishnan says her position at the helm of the company has helped the company hire a woman to its four-person engineering team and has increased female participation across the 105-person business.