Kelly Seidl’s parents taught her and her sister to be resilient, a trait that Seidl believes led both of them to enter male dominated professions.

Seidl’s sister works in the automotive industry, while Seidl has made a name for herself in the technology realm, where she has worked for Google and co-founded BillGO.

At BillGO, Seidl wrote the first line of code and led a team of over 160 people for the real-time bill management and payment platform.

“I have to give our parents credit on that. I think they raised two pretty headstrong, independent females,” she said. “I like to think that’s how we ended up in industries that are male dominated.”

Seidl and BillGO co-founder Dan Holt will receive a Governor’s Citizenship Medal during a ceremony this month. They will be presented with the Growth and Innovation Medal.

“Kelly’s one of the smartest engineers I’ve ever met and she’s absolutely amazing at what she does,” Holt said. “She did a fantastic job of getting BillGO where we are today and raised two children in the process. She’s truly incredible.”

Seidl left Maryland in 2010 after graduating from the University of Maryland with a computer science degree. She said she always loved snowboarding and after graduation decided to pack up her things and move out west.

Shortly after arriving in Colorado, Seidl was contacted by a Google recruiter in the company’s Boulder office. She received a job offer and became a technical team lead at Google Payments, where she was responsible for integrating international payment platforms.

“I had a phenomenal experience at Google, but after four years I decided I wanted to stretch my legs in a more white space area. So I really wanted to go work for a startup or a smaller company,” she said.

She knew Holt and reached out to him about any possible opportunities. Coincidentally, Holt was just starting to plan his new business endeavor, BillGO.

Seidl said some questioned her decision to get off the “rocket ship” at Google, but she saw the opportunity as a low-risk move because at the time she wasn’t married and didn’t have any children.

“I learned from Google around building things the right way to be scalable and monitoring, like being observable,” she said. “But I had to balance that with the need for speed and being in an environment where we needed to make it survive. That was a really big education.”

Since 2015, BillGO has served over 8,000 financial institutions and 32 million consumers around the globe. Its platform is intended to give people an opportunity for financial well-being by giving them a one-stop shop for their bill payments.

Seidl said she often reflects on being able to achieve as much as she has in a male dominated industry and believes the best way to encourage other girls and women to get involved is by being visible.

“A lot of studies have attributed that a lot of women are opting out of (this industry) because they don’t see other women being successful. So I’ve put an emphasis on making sure I’m seen and not just a picture on the website, and I was able to be interacted with and accessible,” she said. “This is how I attempted to break down the barrier for everyone that I came into contact with.”

Seidl added that it was important to show that it’s OK for women in a male dominated industry to embrace who they are and not have to “sacrifice any elements of a woman in order to accomplish anything.”

In January, Seidl stepped down as BillGO’s chief technology officer and moved into a consulting role because she wanted to spend more time with her children and needed to take a break as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic.

She has been able to be there for her children and has gone snowboarding every week, something she wasn’t able to do for several years.

“It has been absolutely phenomenal,” Seidl said. “I’ve gotten to focus on getting outside, investing in the kids and hanging out with my husband. And those are my top three priorities right now.”

Seidl said she’ll eventually return to the workforce full time but hasn’t decided if that means going back to a larger corporation like Google or another startup.

She said her career has been one of the most rewarding things in her life.

“Being a female has been something that has been celebrated along my journey instead of something that I feel like I’ve been battling against,” she said. “So go for it and change the world.”