Women leading successful technology start-ups are a rare but growing community. According to the U.S. Census Bureau, about 20 percent of US businesses are owned by women. What’s more, that number is even smaller in the technology sector. Meanwhile, across all industries, only 2 percent of women-led companies ever exceed $1 million dollars in revenue.
Even rarer still are women leading successful cybersecurity companies, an industry long dominated by men. But now a new generation of women cybersecurity innovators are not only changing the face of the industry, they’re also changing the very nature of cybersecurity training at a time when the worldwide COVID-19 pandemic has impacted where and how we work almost universally. Research conducted by Stanford University reports that 42 percent of the US labor force is working remotely from home. As a result, there’s been an alarming rise in cybercrime resulting from people working in less secure environments and practicing less than stringent “data hygiene.” The FBI reports that since the advent of COVID-19, cybercrime is up some 400 percent.
A vision for the future
The development of more effective cybersecurity training method for home-based workers has been the focus of cybersecurity visionary Heather Stratford and her almost all-woman team at Drip7, a new microlearning platform that uses new advances in brain science and AI to be more effective for deeper retention and greater behavior change than traditional methods of rote training.
“Cybercrime cost global businesses over 6 trillion dollars and that figure is expected to double by 2025,” said Drip7 CEO Heather Stratford. “While even the most effective training cannot prevent all cybercrime, 90 percent of data breaches are caused by human error and almost of half of US businesses don’t regularly train their employees. We are seeking to make training more effective, more affordable and more available.
Taking steps to transform the cybersecurity industry
Prior to launching Drip7, Stratford led her own IT training firm Stronger International. Clients include US government agencies, state and local municipalities, major US colleges and universities and widely recognized multi-national companies. Then, with the outbreak of COVID, Stratford and her team developed a powerful new AI-enabled microlearning platform for cybersecurity that makes training accessible anywhere.
“Drip7 is a totally new approach to training”, says Christina Lowe, Drip7’s Chief Content Officer. “The platform asks one question a day, seven days a week, and uses gamification to create a sense of friendly competition. As a result, our users enjoy the training, remember the training and use the training in their daily professional and personal lives more often.”
Stratford is also leveraging her expertise as a cybersecurity industry influencer to encourage more young women to enter her industry. She said, “Too many young women pass on science, technology, engineering and mathematics related fields and yet when they do launch tech ventures, according to the Women’s Business Enterprise National Council, women-led tech start-ups achieve 35 percent higher return on investment than their male-run counterparts.”
About Drip7
Drip7 was started by Heather Stratford, a visionary entrepreneur with a passion and track record of creating successful small businesses, as a product developed for a customer of her parent company, Stronger International, during the early and most worrisome days of the COVID-19 pandemic. Above all, Drip7 is proving its usefulness in changing the old system of training and information retention in any workforce. Stratford explains it as, “Drip7 is a micro-learning platform that is re-inventing the way organizations train their employees and build lasting cultural change within them, especially in today’s age of remote workforces.” Drip7 combines delivery, content and science to drive behavioral change and to increase knowledge retention. Please visit https://drip7.com.
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