Dame Stephanie Shirley
Refugee, Entrepreneur and Philanthropist
If I ask you to name the great tech entrepreneurs of our time you would no doubt list Steve Jobs, Bill Gates, Peter Thiel, Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg, and of course, Dame Stephanie Shirley.
Dame Stephanie Shirley?
Well before the men listed above, Dame Shirley (after escaping Nazi Germany as a child) built a UK technology company in the Dark Ages of the information era. Remarkably, it was intentionally an all-woman software company which eventually came to be valued at $ 3 Billion). Among her firm’s accomplishments was the programming of the flight data recorder on the first supersonic plane, the Concorde.
I hope you’ll take a few minutes for her short TED talk that recaps her remarkable achievement in building an all-woman tech company in a male dominated industry well before many of them even began. Among other insights offered in Dam Shirley’s talk is the explanation of “Why Ambitious Women Have Flat Heads.” (FYI, the title “Dame” is given to women in the UK who have been awarded the Order of the British Empire for contributions to the arts and sciences).
You can find a short bio of Dame Shirley here and if you may want to read her autobiography “Let it Go: My Extraordinary Story-From Refugee to Entrepreneur to Philanthropist.” Share it with a young woman you know who might need a little inspiration to pursue a tech career.
