Female Tech Entrepreneurs
We have all been watching the latest Disney plus TV show The dropout which portrays the rise and fall of the young female entrepreneur Elisabeth Holms. The events of this tragic tale are known and have been discussed relentlessly in various media outlets; however, one aspect that the TV show brings forward on many occasions is the byproduct such a story has on female entrepreneurship.
After finishing the TV show, I started thinking about the female tech entrepreneurs I personally know, and sadly I realized I don't know many. Shocked by the realization, I wondered if this is due to my knowledge deficiency or if it is indeed because there are not many tech female founders to start with.
This blog presents some of the tech female entrepreneurs that I know and admire but also others that I didn't know though I am familiar with their companies or products.
Dame Stephanie „Steve“ Shirley founder of F International
This is not the first time I mention Dame Stephanie Shirley in this blog page. I am an admirer of what she achieved and what she represents. Stephanie decided to not go to university instead she worked at the Post Office Research Station building computers and writing code while taking evening classes for six years to obtain an honours degree in mathematics. In 1962, she founded, with a capital of £6, a software company called Freelance Programmers. The company 297 of the first 300 staff were women working from home. Known by the name of Steven, Stephanie had to pretend to be a man and sign her letters as Steven because people either ignored her or were simply hostile to the idea of her being a female working in software.
Limor Fried „ladyada“ founder of Adafruit Industries
I personally owe a lot to Limor Fried and the company she founded Adafruit Industries. I got introduced to electronics and built my first electronic projects using Adafruit hardware, software, and great tutorials. Limor Fried obtained both her Bachelor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science and master's degree in engineering at MIT. In 2005, she founded Adafruit Industries an open-source hardware company that designs, manufactures and sells electronic components. It also produces learning resources about electronics, technology, and programming.
Melanie Perkins co-founder of Canva
I am ,by no means, a graphic designer; however, using Canva I managed to create decent designs for various visual content. I even received a compliment or two on some of them. Well, Melanie Perkins is the co-founder of Canva. Melanie is a 35-year-old entrepreneur who founded a first company that enabled students to easily design their own school yearbooks called Fusion Books in 2007. With a lot of persistence, the idea evolved into Canva founded in 2013, a free easy-to-use drag-and-drop graphic design platform.
Julia Hartz co-founder of Eventbrite
Eventbrite is an event management and ticketing website that allows users to browse, create, and promote local events. I have used Eventbrite on many occasions, but I didn't know that it was founded by Julia Hartz in 2006. Prior to Eventbrite, Julia was involved with PayPal and was the Co-Founder of Xoom Corporation, an international money transfer company that was later bought by Paypal.
Jessica Livingston, a founding partner of Y Combinator
Y Combinator is a start-up accelerator created in 2005. responsible for launching more than 3,000 companies including Airbnb, Coinbase, Dropbox, Twitch, and Reddit and is considered to be one of the most successful startup accelerators in Silicon Valley. Behind Y Combinator, to my surprise, is Jessica Livingston, who is also the author of the book Founders at Work: Stories of Startups' Early Days (which goes directly to my GoodReads wishlist) composed of interviews with founders of famous technology companies.
Arianna Huffington co-founder of HuffPost
Arianna Huffington is an entrepreuneur and an author. She co-founded HuffPost, a news aggregator and blog site. Arianna ranked 12th in the 2009 list of the "Most Influential Women in Media" by Forbes. She is the author of fifteen books among them is Thrive:The Third Metric to Redefining Success and Creating a Life of Well-Being, Wisdom, and Wonder. She also founded in 2016 Thrive Global company ,a well-being platform which provides behavior change solutions.
Diane Greene founder of VMware
Diane Greene is a tech entrepreneur. She started her career as a naval architect before transitioning to the tech industry, where she was the founder and CEO of VMware from 1998 until 2008. VMware is cloud computing and one of the first companies that brought virtualization technology to market. She, later on, was a board director of Google and CEO of Google Cloud from 2015 until 2019.
This is a minute homage to all women entrepreneurs in tech and a reminder that Ms Holms and what she represents is nothing but a small drop in a see of very successful and inspiring stories.