President & CEO, FirstRain
Penny is President and CEO of firstRain Inc, an emerging market intelligence company serving the financial services, pharmaceutical and high tech markets. Prior to joining firstRain Penny was Chairman and CEO of Simplex Solutions which was an electronic design automation company. As CEO, she grew Simplex from a few engineers in 1996 to a profitable software company, an IPO in 2001 and the sale of the company to Cadence Design Systems in 2002. Penny then worked with Cadence as Chief Marketing Officer and General Manager of a software division. Before Simplex, she was an executive at Synopsys for 8 years and started her career as an R&D engineer with Texas Instruments and then Daisy Systems.
Penny serves on the boards of firstRain, the Anita Borg Institute and California Community Partners for Youth and holds a B.A. with honors in mathematics from Cambridge University in England.
Officers
- Telle Whitney, – President and CEO
- James Beck, CPA & CMA, Managing Director & CFO, Mayfield Fund – Treasurer & Vice President
- Deanna Kosaraju, Corporate Secretary
Corporate Counsel
- Allison Spinner, Wilson Sonsini Goodrich & Rosati
Staff
- Telle Whitney, President and CEO
- Deanna Kosaraju, Vice President Programs
- Jody Mahoney, VP of Business Development
- Jerri Barrett, VP of Marketing
- Kirk Ross, Director of Finance
- Caroline Simard, VP of Research and Executive Programs
- Kathy Gee, Director of Operations
- Kim McLeod, Leadership Development & Academic Initiatives Program Manager
- Rachelle Siskin, Program Logistics Manager
- BJ Wishinsky, Communities Program Manager
- Christine Chiu, Program Content Manager
- Christina Pratt, Program Manager
- Linda Bohn, Office Manager
Our Founder
Board of Trustees
- William Wulf, Ph.D., Former President, National Academy of Engineering, Board Chair
- Francine Berman, Vice President of Research and Professor of Computer Science, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute – Vice Chair
- Robin Abrams, Investor
- Prith Banerjee, Senior Vice President, Research, and Director, HP Labs, HP
- James Beck, CPA & CMA, Managing Director & CFO, Mayfield Fund – Treasurer & Vice President
- Mark Bregman, CTO, Symantec
- Josephine Cheng, IBM Fellow and Vice President, IBM Research – Almaden
- Debi Coleman, Managing Partner, SmartForest Ventures
- Nora Denzel, Senior Vice President and General Manager, Payroll, Intuit
- Alan Eustace, Senior Vice President, Research and Systems Engineering, Google
- Shanna-Shaye Forbes, graduate student, UC Berkeley
- Eugenia Gabrielova, student, Northwestern
- Penny Herscher, President & CEO, firstRain
- Kathy Hill, Senior Vice President, Development Strategy & Operations, Cisco Systems Inc.
- Leah Jamieson, John A. Edwardson Dean of Engineering, and Ramsburg Distinguished Professor, Purdue University
- Maria Klawe, President, Harvey Mudd College
- Ike Nassi, Executive Vice President and Chief Scientist, SAP
- Brian Pawlowski, CTO, and Senior Vice President, NetApp
- Richard Rashid, Senior VP and VP Research, Microsoft
- Justin Rattner, Senior Fellow & CTO, Intel
- Bill Unger, Partner Emeritus, Mayfield Fund
- Telle Whitney, President & CEO, Anita Borg Institute for Women and Technology
- Linda Bernardi, Emeritus (Term: 1996 -2006)
- Greg Papadopoulos, Emeritus (Term: 1996 -2006)
- Margaret Ashida, Emeritus (Term: 2003- 2009)
- Wayne Johnson, Emeritus (Term: 2002-2008)
Individual and Organizations
Board of Advisors
- Rebecca Norlander, Partner Engineering Manager, Microsoft Online Advertising Platform, Microsoft Corporation – Co-Chair of Advisory Board
- Ann Redelfs, Redelfs LLC – Co-Chair of Advisory Board
- Frances Allen, IBM Fellow Emerita, IBM
- Pamela Arya, VP, Business Development, Harris Crucial Security Programs
- Nina Bhatti, Principal Scientist, HP Labs
- Anne Condon, Professor of Computer Science, University of British Columbia
- Katy Dickinson, Director, Business Process Architecture, Sun Microsystems
- Catherine Didion, Senior Program Officer, National Academy of Engineering (NAE)
- Allan Fisher, Vice President, Laureate Education
- Mark Guzdial, Professor in the School of Interactive Computing,
Georgia Institute of Technology - Robin Jeffries, Google
- Chandra Krintz, Associate Professor, UC Santa Barbara
- Ellen Lapham, Entrepreneur & Designer, Innovation Ventures
- Sarah Loos, PhD Student, Carnegie Mellon University
- Carol Muller, Department Manager for Electrical Engineering, Stanford University
- Elisa Camahort Page, co-founder & COO, BlogHer
- Tracy Prentiss
- Nancy Ramsey, Author, The Futures of Women: Scenarios for the 21st Century
- Kathy Richardson, Consultant
- Ruth Stergiou, Principal, Planning Dynamics, Inc.