The Woman Who Broke The Code

- Maria Aspan

ONE EVENING IN MAY, a team of Goldman Sachs bankers helped a founder-CEO raise some secondary money for investors in BlackLine, a fast-growing software company now worth more than $1.5 billion. After the deal priced, as they ushered the hoodie-clad founder and the besuited CFO into an elevator, the bankers ran into a senior Goldman guy: “Hey, you should meet the CEO of BlackLine. They’re raising $115 million.”

The executive looked right past Therese Tucker, in her black hoodie and flower-printed blue jeans and pastel-pink hair, and directed his praise to her male finance chief: “Great job.”

Tucker is laughing about this a few minutes later, humor loud and infectious, ethereal hair swinging along. It’s been a good year for BlackLine, a nine-time Inc. 5000 honoree that analysts credit with inventing a new market for accounting software. The Los Angeles company, which had $123 million in 2016 revenue and went public a year ago, has seen its stock outperform buzzier recent tech IPOs, including Nutanix’s and Snap’s. So for Tucker, a blazingly intelligent and impish 56-year-old, this evening wasn’t the first time in her long career as a tech founder—or her relatively short one as a public company CEO—that she’s been underestimated. But such dismissals barely give her pause.

“Why have a modest ambition?” she shrugs. “Because then you accomplish it, and it’s boring.”