Kristin Brandt

I attribute my success to a combination of personal dedication, the support of my family, and a balanced approach to life. I cherish spending quality time with my partner and our two dogs, exploring the outdoors through hiking, nurturing my garden, and engaging in DIY projects. Traveling and connecting with family bring me perspective and inspiration, while my volunteer work with the SF AIDS Foundation allows me to give back to the community and stay grounded in purpose. These experiences collectively fuel both my personal growth and professional achievements.

I know it's incredibly cliche, but "you miss 100% of the shots you don't take." Failure is important. It's shaped who I am as a person and a professional. As a young athlete, my father would encourage me to try out for the most elite club soccer teams, knowing I would not make the squad. However, the experience of playing with young women who were better than me and then receiving the news that I did not make the team helped me learn about failure and rejection at a very early age. We would always sit down and discuss what I learned and how I was going to use that experience to improve, and it drove me to work harder.

I'm in a niche sector of the Software as a Service (SaaS) industry. It's incredibly male-dominated since I sell engineering products to engineers. Then you add the fact that I sell to Fortune 100-500 companies; there are really only a handful of women doing what I'm doing at this level. I mention this because I've had to be more organized, more strategic, and work harder than most of my peers as a woman. I also do not have a software engineering background, so I've had to learn a great deal about the problems that large-scale engineering organizations face and the impact on their overall success or failure, particularly in terms of the bottom-line business. I must establish immediate credibility and a genuine rapport with my male clients, as I may not have the same amount of casual face time with them as my male counterparts. Example: I'm never going to take my clients out bar hopping all night.

Artificial Intelligence has ushered in a whole new era of challenges and opportunities. The digital world is evolving, and new challenges are emerging. At Gremlin, we automate the testing of infrastructure and application resiliency, which is at the forefront of many C-Suites' minds at the moment. More complex infrastructure poses new and unknown challenges. We saw this with some major outages over the past 12 months or so. With the public cloud outages in particular (Google, Amazon, Azure), many of our customers were able to test their dependencies within those environments proactively. They therefore avoided any outages or impacts during those periods.

I always try to lead with kindness and empathy. Consistently giving your colleagues, partners, and customers the benefit of the doubt can significantly reduce unnecessary daily stress and anxiety.

I'm very focused on being present in what it is I'm doing at any given moment. For instance, if my partner and I are cooking together, we don't discuss work. We focus on the time we are sharing, making a beautiful meal. When I'm walking my dogs, I don't put headphones in or take phone calls. That time is for the puppies and me to bond and be aware of our surroundings.

The same goes for work; when I'm working with a client or collaborating with my colleagues, they have 100% of my attention. Many people believe they can effectively multitask, but in reality, they often struggle to do so. There is nothing worse than realizing you are talking to someone who is more focused on their Slack messages than the time you've mutually set aside. I want to make sure no one ever feels like I'm one of those people.