Laura Mather

Laura Mather is a worldwide expert in combating Internet fraud and was ranked 16th on FastCompany’s annual list of "The 100 Most Creative People in Business" for 2012. In 2008, after several years at the National Security Agency and later working on fraud prevention and anti-phishing at eBay, Laura co-founded Silver Tail Systems. Today, Silver Tail is the leading provider of predictive analytics to detect and prevent fraud and abuse on websites. In an interview with Start’HerUp’s Jill Fishbein, Laura talks about her unlikely path to computer engineering, her experience in the public sector and the rewards — and trials — of starting her own company.

Laura: When I first applied to college, I wanted to study journalism. It was my Dad who said, “Wait a minute; what you really love is physics and math. Don’t you think you should go into engineering?” To be honest, at the time I thought an engineer was the person who drove the train. It took me a little while to figure out what engineering was all about. Then, when I went to Preview Day at the University of Colorado, I visited both the journalism school and the math department. The math department was simply more fun and that’s how I ended up there. Having a math background turned out to be fortuitous, because my career involves a lot of vector analysis, which is math-based.