EMPOWERED

CHAPTER 47Leader Profile: Debby Meredith

Path to Leadership

I first met Debby at Netscape, where she ran the engineering organization responsible for the Netscape Browser. She had joined Netscape through the acquisition of Collabra in 1995.

You may not have heard of Collabra, but they were an extraordinary team with very strong leaders, and their leaders quickly became key to Netscape's unprecedented growth.

Originally from the Midwest, Debby studied mathematics and computer science at the University of Michigan. She then moved out to Silicon Valley, studying computer science at Stanford, becoming a software engineer and soon an engineering leader at progressively larger organizations.

At Netscape, Debby earned her reputation as one of our industry's top engineering leaders, and later, working through a network of venture capitalists and industry friends, she has become known as the person to call if you want to significantly or urgently raise the bar on your engineering organization.

Leadership in Action

Debby specializes in going into companies, mostly startups, that have a promising business opportunity when either their engineering needs to scale to the next level or is, for various reasons, struggling to effectively execute and deliver products to market. She has done this now for more than 50 companies, many of which today are very successful companies.

Often, Debby ...