Therese Tucker

She bootstrapped a unicorn for 12 years with no salary and two kids.

In 2001, Therese Tucker was a single mom of two.

She was also CTO at a Fortune 500 company.

But inside the boardroom, all she saw were middle-aged white men collecting awards.

She knew she’d hit a ceiling and that she’d never be CEO unless she built the company herself.

So she cashed out her nest egg, nearly raided her kids’ college funds, and launched BlackLine from scratch.

Their first product was a wealth management software.

It flopped.

But Therese was humble enough to pivot when a customer pointed out the real opportunity…

An early client, The Bank of Nebraska, called one day in a panic: they were trying to reconcile tens of thousands of accounts trapped in a massive spreadsheet.

Therese took the $10K job, built a quick tool to fix it, and realized no one was solving this pain point.

So she invented a new category: cloud-based accounting automation.

She went to raise money but only got lowball offers and condescension.

Instead, she bootstrapped her way to $38M in revenue by 2013.

Serving clients like Coca-Cola, SiriusXM, SunTrust, GoDaddy, and Costco.

And when you’re spending your own money, you get good at it.

Therese used frequent flyer miles to buy plane tickets.

Waited until the last minute to get cheaper booths at trade shows.

And when payroll was tight, she begged friends for $30K to bridge the gap.

Because she couldn’t get paid until her clients did.

She didn’t take a salary until year six.

And when she finally did, it was $30K. A tenth of what she made at SunGard. And she was thrilled.

In 2016, she took BlackLine public at a $1.5B valuation.

By 2018, the company had over 800 employees and 2,400 customers.

By 2020, her stake was worth $370M.

Therese doesn’t look like a typical Silicon Valley founder.

She wears a black hoodie, pastel jeans, and has pink hair.

A style choice that started as a marketing dare but stuck as her signature.

Ultimately, Therese built BlackLine on boring software for a boring function.

Because she knew that sometimes, the best businesses are the ones no one else thinks are interesting.