Tech 10 Award Profile: Ellison Anne Williams

Excerpt: Surprisingly, Williams is more than willing to talk about her time at the intelligence agency and how becoming an "intrapraneur" there allowed her to pursue being an entrepreneur on the outside. She left to create Enveil, a cybersecurity firm that focuses on data encryption. The Fulton startup received $1 million in seed money from DataTribe, a local cyber incubator concept that aims to commercialize ideas coming out of the intelligence community.

And late last year, Enveil received another $4 million from Thomson Reuters, a USAA affiliate as well as Bloomberg Beta and DataTribe to help it ramp up commercialization of its products.

"Starting my own company is something I always wanted to do as long as I can remember," Williams said. "It was something I wanted to do when I was a little girl. I come from a long line of entrepreneurs from both sides of my family."

Williams' family business was in real estate and development — a far cry from cybersecurity.

But the South Carolina native says the two industries share a common theme — solving a big problem by building something new.

"In cybersecurity, that solution happens to be technical – writing code to create it,’’ she said. "In real estate, you have a big lot that's being underutilized. What you’re creating is something from concrete and steel and brick-and-mortar. At the end of the day, you’ve created something out of nothing."

Read the full profile.