Five Questions with… Email Meter CEO Marianella Mace

Every Monday we fire five questions at a senior technology sector leader. Today we’re pleased to be joined by Marianella Mace, CEO of Email Meter — a Madrid-based email analytics provider with a growing customer base that now incudes Asics, Netfix, and Uber.

Marianella – What’s the Biggest Challenge for your Clients?

Gauging team performance, productivity and workload is a challenge for many companies we work with from small businesses of three people to Fortune 500 companies. Email — the most widely used tool, and arguably the richest source of insight into employee performance — is often overlooked. Over the years, businesses have adopted a variety of costly and time consuming approaches and technologies to solve this problem with little result. I feel this is becoming a rapidly growing pain point for many businesses out there — especially now with so many employees working from home.

Businesses come to us to gain a better understanding of their overall business from staffing allocation, to the flow of their agents, to client/prospect correspondence, to understanding the amount of work employees are taking on. And they don’t want to have a number of different tools to monitor all of these activities and gain insights. That’s why we built Email Meter: to help companies unlock powerful email insights so their teams can become more productive — all without having to change the way they work.

Technology that Excites You Most?

Easy: Serverless! Without a doubt, this computing paradigm helped build Email Meter in record time, especially the data ingestion and analysis parts of our technology. The concept of having my developers invest their precious time focused on developing product features instead of having to provision, manage, maintain, secure, and scale is what makes this an easy choice for me.

Email Meter is built on top of Google Cloud Platform serverless products like BigQuery (analytical database), Cloud Functions (computing), Stackdriver (logging and monitoring) or Pub/Sub (message queues) among others. If I had to choose just one of them, I’d have to go with BigQuery. It’s amazing how easy it has become to analyze huge data sets!

Greatest Success?

I feel my greatest success up to now is accepting the position at Email Meter. Cheesy, I know, but let me elaborate. Making a 360-degree change can be nerve wracking, but packing up my life in just a few weeks to move with my doberman from the States to Madrid was the best decision I have ever made.

I feel this is my greatest success because this transition has helped me reach a new level of happiness and fulfillment in my career, and my quality of life. Eduardo Fernandez, the founder of Email Meter, not only believes in me and supports my career development, but has given me the opportunity to lead, grow and expand the business.

I never imagined I could love going to work as much as I do now and be a part of an extremely talented team where every single person truly cares about their colleagues. I would tell my friends I was always waiting for the other shoe to drop, like what was the catch here? Truth be told, there’s no catch! I’m just one of the lucky people to be part of an amazing company and a team working towards a common goal: to create an amazing product and make our mark in the world.

Worst Failure?

Thinking that it would be difficult to have a successful business career because I am a female. I often would be one of the only females on a team and I felt like it was my responsibility to change who I was to make it. Before, I didn’t stand up for myself when comments were made that made me uncomfortable, and rarely voiced my opinion when I thought I deserved a promotion. I desperately sought advice on how to deal with this and I was told things like “try not to pay attention to it,” or “let it go” or “that’s just how it is.” I felt helpless.

It wasn’t until I started many reading books, articles and blogs on the subject that I realized I wasn’t alone. I changed my thinking to one of female empowerment, which boosted my confidence, self image and, in turn, my career. Going through this experience helped me realize how other women need support to avoid falling into the same trap I did. That’s why I always look for opportunities to be a mentor. It sucks to feel like you are fighting the world alone and if I can help change that, I will.

In Another Life, I’d Be…

A wildlife biologist! Animals truly fascinate me and I love being around them. I am the person always carrying treats, who loves watching the Discovery Channel and can’t get enough of the Disney nature movies.