6 'most powerful' women in Silicon Valley

On a beautiful Sunday morning, a friend sent me a picture of a line of people waiting in front of Palo Alto Whole Foods store. That is the cover of the special edition " Founding Fathers of Silicon Valley" published by Newsweek. 7 faces on this cover include: Bill Gates, Mark Zuckerberg, David Packard, Bill Hewlett, Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk and Steve Jobs.

Ignore the fact that 3 out of 7 men do not live in San Francisco Bay. At least one of them has not yet been born when the valley orchards were first transformed into an empty land to serve as a computer revolution. Obviously, the truth is gradually becoming very difficult to understand.

In fact, not only 7 names, Silicon Valley has become the world's leading technology center, with the contributions of many other talented women. They are the co-founders who were never present on magazine covers. They are computer scientists who do not choose to leave to build their own careers, instead, they make important contributions by spending hours studying in the laboratory. They are people with intense passion for technology.

Here are six women behind the Silicon Valley boom that I have named "Mothers of Silicon Valley Founding" as a way to affirm that not only men, women also have can create a lot of miracles.

1. Judy Estrin

In 1975, Judy Estrin worked on a research team at Stanford responsible for Internet development. At that time, she was a graduate student and thanks to her passion, Estrin contributed greatly to network protocols, creating a premise to form the basic architecture of the Internet.

Born into a family where both parents were computer scientists, Judy Estrin also directed herself to follow this path. She chose to study mathematics and computer science at the University of California, Los Angeles and later, received a master's degree in mechanical engineering at Stanford University. She remembers the time when she came home after finishing her tearful computer science lesson and had to stay up all night running a program. Talking about this memory, Estrin shared: "the key to solving programming problems - which I think we can also apply to life - is to look at the biggest problem and split. it turns out to be small problems, then, find a solution for each one. "

Above all, Estrin understands network systems. Her first entrepreneurial effort was Bridge Communications, a company she founded with her husband and some other friends in 1981 to connect incompatible networks and make them work normally. The company was officially launched in 1985 and sold to 3Com two years later for more than $ 200 million.

Soon after, Estrin and her husband continued to join the founding team of Network Computing Devices, which provides Unix workstations (Unix workstation) with low cost and powerful graphics (officially launched in 1992). Three years later, the couple again founded Precept Software - a company that provides video streaming services over the Internet. In 1998, Cisco acquired Precept Software for $ 84 million and asked Estrin to be chief technology officer. At that time, this was the largest network company in the world.

Two years later, Estrin left Cisco to do what she wanted. She went on to launch 5 startups and in 2008, published a book about innovation. In addition, Estrin is also on the board of three public companies - FedEx (20 years), Sun Microsystems (8 years) and The Walt Disney Company (15 years) with many other startups (including Medium).

2. Lynn Conway

In 1968, Lynn Conway was dismissed from IBM Research because of a gender change. Conway went to IBM five years before starting physics studies at MIT and then Columbia. During this time, she contributed greatly to pioneering the formation of supercomputing technologies. After being dumped, she joined Memorex - at that time a relatively young computer company.

In 1973, Conway worked at Xerox Palo Alto Research Center (PARC) - a very well-known research center for inventing personal computers, laser printers, computer monitors and more. . Along with some colleagues, Conway was responsible for launching an improvement in microchip design in the 1970s, leading to a new approach to chip design. The integration of a series of large-scale methods (VLSI) allows engineers to combine tens of thousands of transistors on the same chip. Later, their handbook became "the Bible" about chip design.

Later, Conway joined DARPA. In her role as vice president of strategic computing, she planned great efforts in the 1980s to expand technology based on modern intelligent weapons systems. In 1985, she became a professor for EECS and Associate Dean of Engineering at the University of Michigan. Once retired, Conway's early days at IBM began to be revealed. Precisely because of the disdain for sex-changers, she began participating in the program as an advocate of transgender sex. In a talk about his life journey, Conway said: "If you want to change the future, you have to start living as if you have made those changes."

3. Sandy Kurtzig

The first software entrepreneur who owned millions of dollars was Sandy Kurtzig. However, this was not her original goal. In 1972, she quit her part-time job selling computers to General Electric to spend more time with her own family. Avoiding boredom, she started a software business, invested $ 2,000 in savings and ran a "small company" at home. Kurtzig's software primarily supports manufacturing companies to track inventory, sales, financial operations, manufacturing and jobs on a scale that previously could only be stored on machines. Majority has huge memory and is quite expensive. She called it ASK Computer Systems.

To develop her business, she began to create. Investment capital from venture capital funds is very limited in the early 70s, so she had to use up all the profits earned. Wishing to reach the minicomputers (medium-sized computers that are larger than the PC) that the company needed, she had to convince her friends at the Hewlett-Packard factory near her home to be able to use them. Use them in the evenings. Kurtzig and his co-workers must work from 6pm until 6am the next day - too much for a part-time job or side project (sub-project). By 1978, Kurtzig established an agreement with Hewlett-Packard to sell minicomputers that had already been pre-loaded with programs. When officially launched in 1981, her company ranked 11th in the nation's fastest growing group of businesses at that time.

In 1985, Kurtzig began spending more time with other passions and taking care of his two sons. A few years later, the company's growth was low and began to level off. In 1989, at the request of the executive board, she returned to the company and in a few years, she helped increase the sales of ASK products including database software and sales again. face. Two years later, the company was sold to Computer Associates.

Currently, Kurtzig is the founder and chairman of the cloud-based enterprise software company Kennandy - a startup named after her two sons.

4. Donna Dubinsky

Before the iPhone or even the Blackberry, there's a "Palm Pilot" - this is a handheld device company founded by Palm and Donna Dubinsky as the executive director of the founding board.

After graduating from Harvard Business School, Dubinsky started working at Apple in 1981 as a customer support staff. A few years later, she was tasked with running an Apple subsidiary named Claris.

In 1991, Dubinsky left Apple and became CEO of Palm thanks to the knowledge and experience she had accumulated during her time working for "Apple App". Here, she was tasked with raising capital, expanding the company and developing sales strategies. In 1995, Palm was bought by US Robotics. Dubinsky and his partner, Handspring, provide computer equipment.

In 2005, Dubinsky and her engineering team joined Numenta in an effort to apply reverse-engineer to the necortex region of the brain. After nearly 10 years of working quietly, she and her colleagues started to announce their products. In a sharing session, Dubinsky emphasized: "Imagine you can create a brain with a speed of processing information 1 million times faster than a human brain, never tired and smart like anything else. an excellent mathematician ".

5. Sandy Lerner

In 1984, Sandy Lerner was tasked with managing computers at Stanford University's Graduate School of Business. With his boyfriend and other team members, Lerner realized the growing need to help computers "talk to each other" and they called the idea " router" .

Lerner was a CEO at Cisco, founded a cosmetics company (later sold to Moet-Hennessy Louis Vuitton) and author of Second Impressions: Ava Farmer followed Jane Austen's very famous work. Pride and prejudice (Pride and Prejudice). At this time, Lerner also began to participate in the women's union that initiated the research on mathematics science at Shenandoah University and the advice she gave to the entrepreneurs was: never give to the investors Control your company.

6. Diane Greene

Diane Greene's first job was to design offshore oil rigs. She graduated from the engineering department of machinery at the University of Vermont and maritime architecture at MIT. However, because she was a woman, Greene was not allowed to directly observe oil rigs. She decided to quit her job and experience other jobs.

In 1988, Greene received a master's degree in computer science from the University of California at Berkeley. After that, she worked for Sybase, Tandem Computers and Silicon Graphics before establishing a company that provides stream video services called Vxtreme. The company was sold to Microsoft for $ 75 million in 1997.

In 1998, Greene and her husband (a computer science professor) and several other colleagues established VMWare. The company is considered a "pioneer" for the virtualization industry. In a talk in 2013 involving representatives from Ycombinator, Greene explained that virtualization is a software layer between the hardware and the operating system."It's like thinking that an operating system is running on a piece of hardware but that's not true." Exactly, it allows you to run multiple operating systems at the same time. In 2004, EMC Group bought VMWare for $ 635 million and Greene remained as chief executive.

In 2007, Greene joined Google and continued to set up a startup to provide business software called Bebop. Later, Google paid $ 380 million to Bebop and appointed Greene as senior vice president of enterprise solutions.