Interviews at The Entrepreneur Center @NVTC

An Interview with Julia Loughran, Co-founder and President, ThoughtLink Inc.
June 5, 2006

If Julia Loughran’s company had a motto, it might just be, “Can’t we all just get along?” The Vienna-based research and consulting firm specializes in helping government agencies figure out what technology to use to help teams of people communicate and collaborate on projects. She started ThoughtLink with another woman in 1997 after working for a government think tank called the Institute for Defense Analyses for a decade. The two got the entrepreneurial itch and today ThoughtLink is run out of Loughran’s home. It brought in $2 million in revenue last year and employs five people and several subcontractors. The 42-year-old grew up near Park City, Utah and made her way to the Washington area in 1987 when her husband’s work demanded the move.

Tania Anderson, for Bisnow on Business: What gave you the inspiration to launch the firm?
My business partner and I had worked at a government think tank and we were both very ready for a change. My mother had passed away too, and it made me reflect on life being short and following my passion. ThoughtLink was started as a lifestyle company where I wanted to work less and make more money and hand-select the projects and people that I worked with. For the most part it’s worked out that way. One of the unique things about ThoughtLink is we are a completely distributed company ourselves so we practice what we preach. We all work from home in five different states.

Do you have any small business certifications?
We’re a woman-owned business. We don’t use the 8(a) status. I would have had to write an essay on how I had been disadvantaged, and other than wearing panty hose I couldn’t think of any other disadvantages I’ve had in being a woman.

Have you had any problems being a woman in the male-dominated world of defense?
Being in defense and being in technology, I am in a very male-dominated work place. I definitely notice it. I go to conferences where it might be me and one other woman and 500 men. Sometimes I might sense that I am not part of that old boys’ network but I believe that I have a lot of self confidence. Just be honest and up front and say what you have on your mind. Men respect that. I have not felt like I was mistreated in any way. But I have felt like it would be nice to have more women in this field.

Why are there so few women in the defense and technology fields?
When I was in high school, I had three older brothers and they all told me to study computer science. But I didn’t want to because I thought all the guys in those classes were geeky and I was more interested in literature. That perception is still true today but I personally am trying to fight that stigma. For awhile I was leader of a Boy Scout Explorer post that lets boys and girls explore certain career paths. I led a computer science and engineering explorer post. I could never get girls to come to these meetings. I think the world of government and defense has been predominately men although I think over time more women are entering into it. I’m here and ready to have more people join me.

Why did your brothers encourage you to go into technology?
It was when personal computers were just barely coming out and one of my brothers saw it as a high growth area. He also saw that there weren’t many women in it. The thing that’s missing is that it’s perceived as not having a lot of human interaction. But particularly in tools for collaboration and social networking tools, it all brings that human side together. We’ve done a lot of building of games. We built a game similar to Battleship to study team interaction. It was an interesting study in human nature. All four team members try to work together to find the scud launchers, and one of the things that we noticed is women players really wanted consensus. And the men said, ‘This is what I’m doing. I don’t care what you’re doing.’

So what exactly does ThoughtLink do?
We are a research and consulting firm that’s trying to help build better organizations and better teams by innovative uses of technology. Some of the methods and technologies we use are simulation and gaming and collaboration tools. So much work is done in teams, and sometimes it’s teams of people in the same organization, and sometimes those people don’t work together, they’re distributed. Sometimes teams are made up of people in different organizations and different organizational cultures. That’s what we’ve been focused on, improving that team productivity, and it has fallen a lot into the government domain.

Who do you work for?
The U.S. government interagency community like the Defense Department and the State Department and all of the different agencies that need to work together in times of crisis, as well as the Department of Homeland Security which was a bunch of different teams and organizations all brought together to form DHS. And we have a niche in the whole nation-building piece because that’s bringing together people from military backgrounds, as well as civil and non-governmental organizations. It’s not about technology. It’s about how people form trust and how they build relationships and how they build networks. A lot of it is the processes and the techniques as well as the technology.

You were one of the first companies to work for DHS soon after it was formed. What did you do?
We do a lot of independent research for homeland security. After 9/11 they were getting their doors knocked down by different vendors that wanted to sell them products. We came in and did an assessment of how the different models and games and simulations might fit homeland security’s training and exercise needs. And we built a methodology from mapping capabilities of these tools based on the requirements that they had.

Where does your business experience come from?
My parents gave me a strong work ethic and they encouraged me to pay for college. When I was 13, I got a job at the zoo working at a concession stand, working up to the role of trained engineer. Then my dream was to be an advertising consultant and write Cleo-award winning television commercials. Unfortunately, when I graduated all the ad agencies wanted me to work for free. I got into technical writing because I could get a paycheck. Then we moved out here and that’s when I worked at the government think tank. I learned a lot and got the opportunity to see how projects were managed. I was motivated by having someone to start a business with. Within six months we had our first project studying simulations for peace keeping. From there it grew and we started doing work for all the other U.S. military services. I was very intrigued by non-governmental organizations and we’ve done work for NGOs that help refugees here in the United States. The thread that ties all our projects together has been improving how people work together.

What do you think makes a successful entrepreneur?
You have to be extremely risk tolerant. You need to have high self confidence. You have to have someone within your company who is very good at sales and marketing. Being extroverted and gregarious is helpful. You can’t feel bad about picking up the phone and talking to people. You just have to have an idea that you believe in and are passionate about.

[This interview conducted by Tania Anderson for Bisnow on Business.]