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Armed with a master’s degree in psychology, Anke Audenaert, an assistant adjunct professor of marketing at UCLA's Anderson School, never planned on working in the tech industry. But when she moved to Silicon Valley to join Yahoo’s market research team in 1999, she was immediately captivated by the fledgling company’s innovative and inclusive culture.
That was more than 15 years ago, and Audenaert has been in the tech world ever since, moving from marketing at Yahoo to launching several of her own startups. In addition to her teaching role at Anderson, she is now the digital marketing nanodegree lead at the fast-growing startup Udacity, an online university that aims to bring accessible, affordable and effective higher education to the world through its nanodegree programs.
Despite now being a veteran of the tech industry, she still “feels excited by the prospect of putting a human face on technology.”
A native of Belgium and an alumna of Catholic University of Leuven, Audenaert started her career in the consumer research division of multinational consumer goods company Unilever. She later joined Yahoo as the vice president of market research, requiring a move to the Bay Area. She eventually became Yahoo's vice president of content optimization.
As part of Yahoo’s first market research team, Audenaert took on the responsibility of network optimization. “I was finding the high trafficked portions of the page and using that information to inform decisions on advertising,” she said.
She highlights this time at Yahoo as one of her favorite experiences. “The company was very inclusive and good to all of its employees,” she explained. “It was a large group of really smart people who all came from exciting, diverse backgrounds.”
It was also at Yahoo that she found one of her early mentors, Karen Edwards, who was vice president of worldwide marketing from 1996 to 2001. Edwards instilled in her a sense of “brand perspective and the power of digital marketing,” Audenaert said.
Audenaert credits the tech giant’s strong employee network for giving her a “group of women in tech from Yahoo who still keep in contact and support each other to this day.”
While Audenaert found mentors and a female network to fall back on, the gender gap wasn’t as widely discussed then as it is now, she explained. Yet she said Yahoo still made a conscious effort to recruit and maintain a diverse workforce. “They tried at every level, especially the hiring one, to make sure it was as diverse as possible. Women didn’t feel like the exception there,” she said.
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