Critical Careers - Women Building Careers in Digital Infrastructure - Book - Page 71
“I’ve become much clearer on
what I’m good at. I’ve stayed quite
focused within my niche, but at the
same time I’ve kept building my
knowledge, staying curious, and
really investing in my network.”
Your journey feels quite novel, but at the
same time, it really shouldn’t be. Why do
you think stories like yours still feel so rare
in this industry?
The honest answer is that the investment side of this industry is still very
closed. Not hostile, but closed. The relationships that move deals, the
funds that back projects, the infrastructure committees where capital is
actually allocated, those circles were built over decades and they tend to
replicate themselves. You get in through someone who is already in. And
for a long time, the people already in looked very similar to each other.
But I also think it’s a cycle. If you don’t see people like you in certain
roles, particularly on the investment side, it’s harder to imagine yourself
there. And then the industry continues to reinforce that pattern.
For me, one of the moments that really stayed with me was seeing a
project in Toronto that was developed entirely by a women-led team.
Every part of it, from investment through to development and delivery.
And I remember thinking, why don’t we see that in our world? What
would it look like to have a data centre developed, 昀椀nanced, and
operated by women across the entire value chain? That’s when it really
clicked for me. It’s not that it’s not possible, it’s just that it hasn’t been
normalised yet.
How have you decided to stretch yourself
with a bigger role or higher-stakes
responsibility?
For me it’s been more about listening to what the market is telling me, and
then having the con昀椀dence to step into that.
As I’ve progressed in my career, I’ve become much clearer on what I’m
good at. I’ve stayed quite focused within my niche, but at the same time
I’ve kept building my knowledge, staying curious, and really investing in
my network. I speak to a lot of people, I stay close to the market, and that’s
helped me understand where I can add the most value.
One of the biggest stretches was the AWS role, where I was responsible
for building and executing the data centre site strategy for France and
Saudi Arabia. This was not advisory work. I owned the full process, the
market assessments, the grid and land analysis, the engagement with TSOs,
and the delivery. When you are accountable for which sites a hyperscaler
commits to, and what that means for hundreds of millions in capital
deployment, you learn to think like an investor very quickly.
Then co-founding Sepia moved me further still. I was no longer executing
someone else’s investment thesis. I was helping to build one. That meant
being in the room when infrastructure funds were evaluating projects,
understanding how they priced risk, and learning to speak that language
昀氀uently. It is a very different thing to have conviction in a site versus being
able to defend that conviction to a capital committee.
Starting TechHer Capital has been the biggest stretch, because now I
sit entirely on the advisory and investment intelligence side. I work with
developers, infrastructure funds, and sovereign capital evaluating sites,
structuring mandates, and translating technical feasibility into investment
risk. The market has validated that quickly. What I have built over the past
years, the ability to read a site the way an investor reads a balance sheet, is
exactly what this phase of the AI infrastructure build-out requires.
So stories like mine still feel rare because we’re still in that transition phase.
The industry is changing, but the visibility of women, especially in the roles
where decisions and capital are concentrated, hasn’t caught up yet.
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