Andreas Maria Maximilian Freiherr von Mauchenheim genannt Bechtolsheim is a German electrical engineer, entrepreneur and investor. He co-founded Sun Microsystems in 1982 and was its chief hardware designer. As of March 2024, Forbes estimated his net worth at $16.3 billion.
Weili Dai is a Chinese-born American businesswoman. She is the co-founder, former director, and former president of Marvell Technology Group. Dai is a successful female entrepreneur, and is the only female co-founder of a major semiconductor company. In 2015, she was listed as the 95th richest woman in the world by Forbes. Her estimated net worth is US$1.6 billion as of December 2021.
Kathryn A. Finney is an American author, researcher, investor, entrepreneur, and businesswoman. She is the founder of Genius Guild, a $20 million dollar venture fund & studio that invests in Black entrepreneurs building scalable businesses that serve Black communities and beyond. She is also founder and Board Chair of The Doonie Fund, a social platform that provides micro-investment to Black women entrepreneurs. Finney first made her mark as a tech entrepreneur when she sold “The Budget Fashionista” after running the site-turned-media company for 11 years.
Sarah Maria Austin is an American author and tech entrepreneur. She is the CMO and co-founder of metaverse funding platform, QGlobe, and former CEO at Broad Listening, an artificial emotional intelligence agent. She is the chairperson of the board of directors at Coding FTW, a nonprofit organization that promotes diversity and equal rights in the technology sector.
Vivek Wadhwa is an Indian-American technology entrepreneur and academic. He is Distinguished Fellow & Adjunct Professor at Carnegie Mellon's School of Engineering at Silicon Valley and Distinguished Fellow at the Labor and Worklife Program at Harvard Law School. He is also author of books Your Happiness Was Hacked: Why Tech Is Winning the Battle to Control Your Brain—and How to Fight Back, Driver in the Driverless Car,Innovating Women: The Changing Face of Technology, and Immigrant Exodus.
The Meltwater Entrepreneurial School of Technology (MEST) is an Africa-wide technology entrepreneur training program, seed fund, and incubator headquartered in Accra, Ghana. The three-phased institution was founded in 2008 to provide training, investment, and mentoring for aspiring technology entrepreneurs with the goal of creating globally successful companies that create wealth and jobs locally in Africa.
AnitaB.org is a global nonprofit organization based in Belmont, California. Founded by computer scientists Anita Borg and Telle Whitney, the institute's primary aim is to recruit, retain, and advance women in technology.
Marieme Jamme is a Senegalese-born French-British businesswoman and technology activist. In 2016 she founded the iamtheCODE initiative and is on the board of the World Wide Web Foundation. In 2017, Quartz Africa included Jamme in their "Quartz Africa Innovators 2017" list. In 2013 she was nominated as a Young Global Leader of the World Economic Forum. In 2017, she won the "Innovation Award" in The Goalkeepers Global Goal Awards, curated by UNICEF and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, for globally supporting girls and young women and advancing the UN's Sustainable Development Goals. That same year, she was listed as one of BBC's 100 Women.
The Muse is a New York City-based online career platform founded in 2011 by Kathryn Minshew, Alexandra Cavoulacos, and Melissa McCreery.
John C. "Bud" Colligan is a community activist, social entrepreneur, investor and company builder. He was appointed by Governor Gavin Newsom as his senior advisor for international affairs and trade in March, 2019. He is co-founder of the Monterey Bay Economic Partnership (MBEP), co-founder of the non-profit community-development organization Pacific Community Ventures, former partner at Accel Partners, a global venture capital firm, and former chairman and CEO of Macromedia, a multimedia software company.
General Assembly is an American-headquartered private, for-profit education organization founded by CEO Jake Schwartz, Adam Pritzker, Matthew Brimer, and Brad Hargreaves in early 2011 and purchased by The Adecco Group in 2018. It maintains campuses in various countries throughout the world to teach entrepreneurs and business professionals practical technology skills. It provides courses in mobile and software engineering, data science, product management, and other digital technology–related courses.
Sexism in the technology industry is overt, subtle, or covert occupational sexism which makes the technology industry less friendly, less accessible, and less profitable for women. While the participation of women in the tech industry varies by region, it is generally around 4% to 20% depending on the measure used. Possible causes that have been studied by researchers include gender stereotypes, investment influenced by those beliefs, a male-dominated environment, a lack of awareness about sexual harassment, and the culture of the industry itself. Margaret O'Mara, a professor of history at the University of Washington, in 2019 concluded that Silicon Valley is uniquely influential locale that is shaping our world. But she points to problematic failures regarding diversity. Male oligopolies of high-tech power have recreated traditional environments that repress the talents and ambitions of women, people of color, and other minorities to the benefit of whites and Asian males.
HackerNest is a not-for-profit organization and global movement founded on January 11, 2011. The organization unites local technology communities around the world through community events and socially beneficial hackathons to further its mission of economic development through technological proliferation. It is Canada's largest, most prolific technology community with growing international reach.
Aileen Lee is a U.S. venture capital angel investor and co-founder of Cowboy Ventures.
Women in venture capital or VC are investors who provide venture capital funding to startups. Women make up a small fraction of the venture capital private equity workforce. A widely used source for tracking the number of women in venture capital is the Midas List which has been published by Forbes since 2001. Research from Women in VC, a global community of women venture investors, shows that the percentage of female VC partners is just shy of 5 percent.
Theresia Gouw is an entrepreneur and venture capital investor in the technology sector. She worked at Bain & Company, Release Software and Accel Partners before co-founding Aspect Ventures, a female-led venture capital firm, in 2014. Gouw was named one of the 40 most influential minds in tech by Time Magazine. and has been recognized seven times on the Forbes Midas List as one of the "world's smartest tech investors". According to Forbes, Gouw is the richest female venture capitalist, with a net worth of approximately $500 million, primarily due to her involvement with Accel (company)'s early investment in Facebook.
Carol Elizabeth Reiley is an American business executive, computer scientist, and model. She is a pioneer in teleoperated and autonomous robot systems in surgery, space exploration, disaster rescue, and self-driving cars. Reiley has worked at Intuitive Surgical, Lockheed Martin, and General Electric. She co-founded, invested in, and was president of Drive.ai, and is now CEO of a healthcare startup, a creative advisor for the San Francisco Symphony, and a brand ambassador for Guerlain Cosmetics. She is a published children's book author, the first female engineer on the cover of MAKE magazine, and is ranked by Forbes, Inc, and Quartz as a leading entrepreneur and influential scientist.
Monique Morrow is a Swiss-American business woman, technology engineer and entrepreneur. She is president and co-founder of the Humanized Internet, a nonprofit focused on providing individuals with a digital identity. She was previously Senior Distinguished Architect of Emerging Technologies at Syniverse, and CTO and Evangelist of New Frontiers Development and Engineering at Cisco Systems, Inc. She sits on a number of advisory boards and has 17 patents related to digitalization, networks, the Internet of Things, cybersecurity, and the safe handling of data.
Julia Hu is an American entrepreneur and the co-founder and chief executive officer of the digital health company Lark Health. Hu was named one of the “Top 10 Women in Tech to Watch” by Forbes and was a winner of Inc. Magazine’s “30 under 30, Class of 2013". She was listed in 2016 as one of “17 Female Healthcare CEOs to Know,” in Becker’s Hospital Review, and was honored in 2017 as one of Silicon Valley Business Journal’s “40 Under 40". Silicon Valley Business Journal listed Hu as one of “Silicon Valley's 2018 Women of Influence".
Shamim Rajani is an entrepreneur and businesswoman from Karachi, Pakistan. In 2004, she began to work professionally in the Information Technology (IT) industry of Pakistan. In 2005, she co-founded Genetech Solutions, a software development company, based in Karachi, Pakistan. Since 2010, she has been serving as the chief operating officer (COO) in the same company. In the year 2017, she launched the computer training program under the ConsulNet Corporation to educate non-tech women in Karachi. In 2018, she launched another training program, CodeGirls, in partnership with Faiza Yousuf. The CodeGirls is the subsidiary of ConsulNet Corporation. In the same year, she also began to serve as an advisor for WomenInTechPK and became the Pakistani ambassador at CryptoChicks, a research institute based in Toronto, Canada. In 2019, she became the board member of the Pakistan Agile Development Society. In the second quarter of the year 2020, she was elected as the vice-chairperson of P@SHA. She began to serve in the office from the mid of October 2020 while working closely with Jehan Ara, the president of P@SHA.
