Meet the ExaGals
The ExaGals program focuses on supporting and empowering the women of Exabeam, as well as women in the technology community at large, with career development, education and personal growth opportunities.
Changing the game
The ExaGals first began as an initiative driven by our then CEO, now Chairman of the Board and Co-founder, Nir Polak, when he selected a handful of women at Exabeam to help forge the company culture. Over time, our mission has grown. Today, the ExaGals community reaches out to women in the technology community at large, with career development, education, and personal growth opportunities.
In the beginning
The origin story
The first version of ExaGals launched one year after Exabeam was founded. There were a handful of women in the company and Nir Polak, Co-founder and former CEO and Chairman of the Board, asked three of them to form a company culture committee.
Culture was (and is) paramount at Exabeam. At the time the company was small enough to be fun, casual, and impulsive, but big enough to need a team that could wrangle that brash young energy and map it onto a cohesive organizational culture. Nir believed these three women embodied the values, behaviors, and attitudes he wanted at Exabeam, and wanted to support them as more women joined the company.
It started with a budget for monthly lunch meetings, and grew so large it eventually needed a name to make its impact and its influence recognizable. The prefix Exa made sense, and Gal had two meanings as the bookend of the name: the first, a classic and approachable synonym for woman, and the second, a more obscure meaning, a measurement unit of gravitational acceleration.
Exabeam’s growth was off the charts, so the metaphor fit. And it fit culturally, ExaGals were cultivating the values and identity that the people of Exabeam shared and helped forge the company culture we have today.
Now
How ExaGals has evolved
As more women joined the company they brought with them more ideas and inspiration of where ExaGals’ energies should be spent. The mission of the ExaGals is moving ever more external, focusing on women in the broader technology community and beyond.
One of the areas we identified as a challenge in the cybersecurity labor gap, a lack of qualified female college graduates entering the workforce. Our hope is that by supporting programs that expose women and girls to the possibilities of an education and career in tech, we can help address the cybersecurity skills shortage by introducing new perspectives and problem-solving skills to an industry that requires a multidisciplinary approach to protect against adversaries. Diversity truly improves the overall outcomes of security teams, an area where we believe a new way of thinking can help.
Who knows how many more iterations of the program there will be and how many more women the ExaGals will be championing. The takeaway: no matter how few of you there are or the size of your mission, it’s important to continue to self-evaluate, refine what is important, and ask the questions that will help you get ahead. Start moving and accelerate.
