Photograph by Kathy De La Torre
Teri Dahlbeck, 39, president and co-founder of GotMarketing.com, works from her home office in her Victorian house in Saratoga. The magazine 'Feminine Fortunes: Women of the New Millennium' recently named her as one of the top-achieving 50 women of the year.
Local entrepreneur profiled among top business women
By Rebecca Ray
Teri Dahlbeck is a street fighter, and not just because she kickboxes at Studio Kicks in Los Gatos. Kathleen Kelley Reardon referred to Dahlbeck as a "street fighter" in her book, The Secret Handshake--a book about mastering corporate politics--because Dahlbeck, the president and co-founder of the Campbell-based company GotMarketing.com, fights hard to succeed in business.
Recently, Dahlbeck was honored again for her perseverance--this time in technology--in the magazine Feminine Fortunes: Women of the New Millennium. The magazine, which honors the accomplishments of 50 top-achieving professional women each year, profiled Dahlbeck, alongside Maya Angelou and Mia Hamm.
"To be associated with Oprah Winfrey, Vera Wang and Maria Shriver is quite an honor," Dahlbeck, 39, said.
Dahlbeck, who received a bachelor's degree in information systems and an MBA in management from California Polytechnic State University, San Luis Obispo, has broken ground in both business and technology.
Two years ago, she co-founded GotMarketing.com, which provides web-based marketing tools to companies that advertise their products through email. Companies use the tools to measure the success of their email advertising campaigns. Unlike some of the other companies in this field, GotMarketing.com, which has about 50 employees, serves small to medium businesses, rather than large ones.
Before she started GotMarketing.com, Dahlbeck ran a consulting company called Dahlbeck Partners, which served venture capitalists, start-ups and enterprise organizations around the world.
Dahlbeck is also one of a few select women who has served as CEO of a major technology company. Before her job as a consultant, she was CEO and president of CI Labs, a joint venture between IBM, Apple Computer, Novell and Adobe Systems. At CI Labs, which had 3,000 member developers in 55 countries, Dahlbeck was part of the team that developed and licensed the first validation software product.
Before this venture, Dahlbeck had worked at Apple Computer in the Bay Area for 12 years, since 1985, where she had jobs as a C programmer and in systems integration consulting, business development, channel management and marketing.
Eight women's institutions, including the organization Women In Technology International, chose 3,500 candidates for this year's edition of Feminine Fortunes, from which Dahlbeck and 49 others were selected. The publication, which hit book stores this month and includes introductions from Madeleine K. Albright and Hillary Rodham Clinton, was commissioned as an outgrowth of The Vital Voices Global Democracy Initiative, which Clinton started in 1997 to further women's rights in the workplace.
Dahlbeck got the idea for GotMarketing.com when she ran Dahlbeck Partners. Often, when companies would hire her to help them with marketing, they wouldn't have marketing plans. Some of them didn't even have business plans. She saw that, although these companies had goals, they didn't have tactile marketing plans on how to achieve them.
Dahlbeck founded GotMarketing.com with business executive Lynda Partner of Ottawa, Ontario, Canada. Dahlbeck and Partner run the company from both Silicon Valley and Ottawa, because of the difficulty and cost of finding talent locally, Dahlbeck said. While she manages marketing and business development in the company, Partner manages finance and engineering.
Dahlbeck wanted the company to have a name associated with something not related to technology. When she saw a California Milk Processor Board "Got Milk?" advertisement on a billboard, she knew she'd found the perfect name.
Saratoga, California Since 1955
