Forging a Path:

Taylor Lint ’11 works to create spaces for women in tech

Early on in her computer science career, Taylor Lint ’11 found that she was often the only woman on her team. All too frequently, those in management positions above her were all male.

Now, Lint is striving to do her part to bring other women into the computer science and engineering industries. As the CEO and Cofounder of Swantide, which automates the management of software used by sales, marketing, and customer success teams, Lint has committed to maintaining an engineering staff that is at least 50% women.

“It’s important to me to start changing the status quo,” Lint said.

Working toward greater female representation in the workplace is just one of the ways Lint is making waves in the computer science industry. Since founding Swantide, Lint has raised $7 million in venture capital funding, and she was recognized this past year in Forbes’ 30 under 30 list. She credits her confidence in part to the power of an all-girl education.

“I think that at CSG, you see girls and women doing everything, holding every role, doing every extracurricular activity,” Lint said. “You don’t ever think that you can’t do something, because girls are doing everything.”

Lint attended CSG from kindergarten through Form XII. In addition to building her confidence, she said her experience at CSG fostered a curiosity for learning and an adeptness at building relationships. As a student, Lint took every AP science and math course that was available to her, but she was also interested in political science and government.

When she began her undergraduate career at Cornell University, she started as a government major. After a summer internship on the Hill in Washington, D.C., Lint realized she wanted to move in a new direction. At the suggestion of her mother, an engineer, Lint decided to try a computer science course.

“It clicked, and I ended up doing that, and I’m really glad I did,” Lint said.

Lint graduated from Cornell with a Bachelor of Arts degree in Information Science with a minor in German. Following that, she worked at LinkedIn as a software engineer. The experience was a great way to start her career, and from there she joined a team at Alphabet. While there, Lint worked on a team that was responsible for looking for ways to make cities more data-driven. The work eventually led to the founding of a spin-off company called Replica.

When founding her own company, Lint wanted to leverage this product building experience and apply it to a new sector. She was drawn to the management of go-to-market tools because of how painful the problem is for companies and how manual the solution is currently.

“It’s such a huge problem that companies spend a ton of money on,” she said.

Lint founded Swantide in March of 2020 and spent her first year doing market research, talking to people in the industry to understand the problem and work to build a solution for how to best serve her customers. Lint now has 16 employees and a customer base that appreciates the ways in which Swantide helps them more efficiently manage their internal systems. Customers have shared that they wouldn’t have been able to grow their businesses as quickly without using Lint’s products.

“Launching a business isn’t easy, but I’m so grateful to have a great team building alongside me, and it’s really rewarding to see customers use our product to run their business more efficiently,” Lint said.