Active and powerful women who develop IT
Masha Vorslav
Recently CEO biotech 23andMe Anna Wojitsky told Bloomberg that she plans to use the company's experience to produce drugs and thus set a new standard for them. In the history of 23andMe there were ups and downs, but it is impossible not to admit that Vojitsky exercises a talented management of a "serious" company. Her case is not exceptional: despite the fact that IT is still considered to be a non-female sphere, we can tell a lot about bright women (not only Marissa Mayer and Sheryl Sandberg) who are somehow involved in technology.
Anna Vojitsky
Co-founder and CEO 23andme
In 2006, Anna Wojitsky and Linda Avey founded the company 23andMe, which gave us all the available genetic testing. Three years later, Awey left a specific business in order to work on her Alzheimer's foundation, but Wojitsky remained and was in charge. As you can guess, Anna has a medical background: in 1996, she graduated from Yale with a bachelor's degree in biology, then conducted research in molecular biology, was a thematic consultant in an investment fund, and worked for a total of ten years with biotech companies. Actually, her own company grew out of this experience, and so quickly and successfully, that in 2008 TIME called the 23andMe kits an invention of the year, and in 2013, Fast Company recognized that Anna was the coolest CEO. The personal life of Wojitsky is not very personal: the state of their marriage with Google’s founder Sergey Brin was not discussed at the time by only the most lazy media.
Daphne Koller
co-founder and president of Coursera
Elf-like Daphne Koller is a professor at Stanford University and co-founder of a site that allows you to educate yourself for free. The field of view and the work of Koller - artificial intelligence, more precisely - its use in medicine; in his book on probabilistic graphical models, the professor read an online course on his own website in 2012 (we are also surprised that Coursera was founded only two and a half years ago). For the first time, Koller tested the idea of an open educational website among her students in 2010 (this is why Stanford developed the first courses of Coursera). There was nothing to foretell such a development of events: before that, Koller had already managed to establish and lead CURIS, a computer science research program for university graduates, which were attended by a total of 500 people. Now Koller is engaged in a site, gives lectures and periodically publishes scientific articles, of which more than 200 have already been published.
Gwynn Shotwell
president and chief operating officer of SpaceX
When looking at Gwynn Shotwell, it seems that she is Marissa Mayer's spiritual sister: the same broad smile, costume and always the same hair lay. However, the only serious similarity that we can confirm is that neither Meyer nor Shotwell would like to put a finger in his mouth. A graduate of Northwestern University, Shotwell, along with Ilon Mask, makes SpaceX — in other words, it produces rockets and explores space. SpaceX sent its first rocket, the Falcon 1, into space in 2008 (although its first launch two years before was unsuccessful), having already managed to start with NASA by that time. Musk sees no obstacles in order not to use space transport for the needs of states and people, and wants to create machines that could transport people and cargo to Mars. Actually, Shotwell, the president and chief operating officer of the company, is working on it with him.
Ruchi Sangui
Dropbox Operations Director
Ruci Sangui is 33 years old, in 2005 she became the first female engineer hired by Facebook, in 2011, together with her colleagues, founded Cove (this company avoiding publicity developed communication tools "for their own"), and a year later as operations director ( VP Operations) joined Dropbox, which Cove and swallowed. After graduating from university in 2004, Sangwy first wanted to move to New York, but eventually went to the Valley, where her boyfriend worked. There she got a job right away at Oracle, and what happened later, we already told. Now Sangui is not only involved in Dropbox, but also acts as an investor and adviser to a number of companies, and is also involved in politics: in 2013, she took part in the creation of FWD.us, a group lobbying the interests of immigrants, of whom there have always been many in the Valley.
Anna Toth
Slack Development Director
For the world's best Slack messenger, you need to say thanks, including Anne Tot. In English, her specialization sounds brief and clear: "privacy and policy expert"; he worked with Path, Airbnb and other young and not-so companies. Her career can be called, if not dizzying, then enviable: graduated from the University of California at Berkeley, she went to work at Yahoo !, where she worked for thirteen and a half years, with the last year as the head of the unit responsible for the confidentiality and loyalty of the user (Chief Trust Officer). Then there was a similar work on Google+, its own startup and, finally, work in the young Slack (it was founded only in 2013). It sounds impressive, but the willingness to change and not too serious attitude towards yourself cause to the respect no less than its professionalism.
Rebecca Inonchong
CEO AppsTech
Rebecca Inonchong was born in Cameroon in 1967 into the family of a famous lawyer who then moved to the States, where she was able to get a degree in economics from the Catholic University of America. Together with Dayo Olopad (about her below), she is one of the few involved in IT who draws attention to her native continent with its heap of problems. Her company AppsTech is a significant, but not the main focus of activity; Inonchong sees its main goal in promoting various technologies in Africa, and, it must be admitted, she is doing well in this (she also founded the African Technology Forum). Back in 2002, the World Economic Forum called it “the global leader of tomorrow” (along with Google co-founder Larry Page), in 2013 it almost won the African Digital Woman Award, and a year later Forbes included it in the list of ten women founders from Africa to watch out for.
Dio Olopade
journalist
From this list, Dayo Olopad is the least connected with "iron" - by profession she is a journalist, writing including technologies. Olopade graduated from Yale Law School (where her specialty was the junction of digital and law) after she finished studying literature and the state of affairs in African countries there. In 2010, she moved to Nairobi, where she spent four years collecting information for her book on modern Africa, which also tells about what commercial prospects and technological innovations are taking place on the continent. Now Dayo writes for The Atlantic, The Daily Beast, The Foreign Policy, The New Republic, The New York Times and The Washington Post and continues to educate both Africa (it is not only text) and the rest of the world.
Tara Wheeler Van Vlak
CEO Fizzmint
As if van Vlac, who came off the poster of “Mad Men”, calls himself “The Tara”, because he can afford it. Tara is a co-founder and CEO of FizzMint, automating the process of hiring workers. As you might guess, Van Vlak is a public person, she often speaks at conferences and lectures on how to pump herself and give such an opportunity to others. FizzMint is not the only Tara brand: it has experience in managing mentoring projects Hack The People and LadyCoders and b2b companies Red Queen Technologies. Before doing all this, Van Vlak worked as a developer at Microsoft, and before that she graduated from three universities with knowledge in psychology, international relations, politics and computer science.
Elena Kolmanovskaya
Consultant "Yandex"
We could not do without a review of one of the most successful Russian (that is, European) Internet companies and those behind it. Elena Kolmanovskaya was for a long time the editor-in-chief of Yandex (Igor Ashmanov says that Kolmanovskaya "came up with the image of Yandex as a young, energetic and intellectual company"), but three years ago she left the position, continuing to work as a consultant to the company. its shareholder. Elena, like Arkady Volozh, graduated from Gubkin University, then worked as a programmer in Moscow and the USA, until in 2000 she came to Yandex. Now Kolmanovskaya is conducting the workshop “Working with content and interfaces of the site” in the “School of New Media”.
Tina Wen
Dropbox Developer
Tina Wen is a charismatic smiling girl who, with some other colleagues, changes the way a typical engineer looks. Now, Wen is busy at Dropbox, where he improves the mobile and web versions of the cloud service, which makes many people's lives better. In fact, for a whole year, Wen was the only iOS developer at the company, but then the staff grew and she managed to work with the web. Tina did not collect a bunch of universities in her resume: at eighteen she moved from Beijing to America, she enrolled at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where, she said, she liked it so much that she decided to stay for a year and get a “master”. On her website, Tina writes that for a long time she did not wake up with the thought that she did not want to work, and it is difficult to come up with a more accurate indicator of a happy life.
Photo: Getty Images / Fotobank (2)