Today we’d like to introduce you to Anita Brearton.
Anita, let’s start with your story. We’d love to hear how you got started and how the journey has been so far.
My story begins long ago before the introduction of the PC, I graduated from college with a degree in psychology and after making a lot of calls, knocking on a lot of doors and filling out a lot of applications I suddenly found myself with a job offer from a high tech data communications company. The company was rapidly growing, had 1,000 employees, had recently gone public and was still under the control of the founder/CEO. He didn’t believe that women belonged in his company and after an argument on the subject with his HR director, agreed to test his theory with a bet.
I was literally the next woman to come through the door with a great grade point average and good communication skills after the bet was placed. I was hired as an engineering program manager and clearly remember going home after my interview and telling my dad that the good news was that the interview had landed me a job but the bad news was that I hadn’t understood any of the technical jargon I’d heard all day.
Nonetheless, I took the job and within six weeks found myself in the CEO’s office being given the first of many tests to, in his words, “prove that women don’t belong in my company. It was a challenging time but in the end, I persevered and that CEO became a mentor, a teacher and gave me some extraordinary opportunities that set me up for a long and exciting career as a startup marketer in high tech.
Since those early days I’ve worked for a number of startup companies, many of which were acquired or went public, been an angel investor, co-led an angel investment group, served as an interim CEO/Executive Chairman of an e-commerce company, sat on the Angel Capital Association and MassVentures boards, served as a startup advisor and executive in residence at Simmons College and am now the co-founder of my own startup, CabinetM.
Has it been a smooth road?
I wouldn’t describe my journey as a smooth one, in many ways I’ve had an accidental career — nothing was pre-planned, I just jumped at each opportunity as it presented itself. The challenges have generally come from being a woman in the predominantly male environment and having to earn my place at the table over and over. One of the more interesting times in my career was when I lived in Sydney, Australia and was responsible for driving my company’s marketing strategy for the Asia Pacific.
It took a while to earn the respect of my distributor partners in each of the countries I was responsible for, but I eventually got there. I distinctly remember keynoting a technology conference in Japan sponsored by the American Embassy and the conference organizers told me there would be hundreds of people in attendance and that no woman had ever done this before and the embassy personnel was nervous. When I went to present, at the back of the conference hall where all of the embassy personnel lined up to judge my performance — and I NAILED IT!
Of course, I’d practiced a million times and could deliver the presentation in my sleep and in the end, it was really easy because I had to work with a translator. When you work with a translator you have the benefit of being able to pause and think while they are still translating what you just said. Other challenges have come from trying to raise a family while working in a startup where the working hours were crazy and the environment was not supportive of working parents. In my case, this was exacerbated by the fact that my husband was a startup guy himself.
I always tell people that point at which I realized my life was out of control was the night I came home completely exhausted, went upstairs to change and saw a bowl of water in the upstairs hallway. When I asked my four years old what the water was doing there she told me “it’s for the chipmunk”. I, of course, said “what chipmunk” and she responded with “uhh the chipmunk that lives here duh.” I suppose it could’ve been worse, it could have been any variety of animal and in the end, we sent the chipmunk on its way. I’m not sure I would recommend startup life to someone trying to raise five kids but somehow we managed. We were permanently exhausted but made it through.
We’d love to hear more about your business.
CabinetM is a business born out my experience as a marketer and time spent as a consumer goods CEO. Marketing has changed dramatically over the last ten years due to the shift in buying to online. Marketing is now responsible for top-line growth and customer lifetime value. The job has become very technical with companies using north of 50 products at any one time to acquire, engage and retain customers.
My co-founder, Sheryl, who has spent a tremendous amount of time with young marketing technology companies, and I began with a mission to make it easy for marketers to find the technology they need to achieve their objectives. As we built the company we came to realize that marketing teams were finding it challenging to manage all of the technology they had acquired and developed internally.
Today, the CabinetM platform provides marketing teams with the tools to manage all of the technology they have and to find the technology they need. I’m most proud of the fact that when we demo our platform to prospective customers they frequently say — you must be marketers because you’ve built a product that exactly what marketing needs today.
Is our city a good place to do what you do?
I think Boston is a great place to start a business, it has a robust ecosystem of talent, investors, advisors, support organizations and technology. It’s also small enough that its possible to develop a really connected community – you can get anywhere and meet anyone pretty easily.
As a member of the board of MassVentures, I’d be remiss if I didn’t point out that our government (state and city) is supportive of the startup ecosystem and have developed a number of funding and support programs for both startups and companies that are growing.
The one thing that I would wish for is for there to be more early-stage capital available. I think Boston investors, for the most part, are more conservative than their west coast counterparts and prefer to invest when a company has product in the market and are starting to see traction and growth.
Contact Info:
- Address: 4th floor, 226 Causeway Street,
Boston, MA 02114 - Website: www.cabinetm.com
- Email: eross@cabinetm.com
- Twitter: @cabinetm1
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