U
D

Conversation

the

05/25/12 | Uncategorized

How Poornima Vijayashanker Fell In Love with Building Software

This article has been syndicated from TechCrunch.

By Semil Shah (Operations, Votizen)

“In the Studio” continues this week with an engineer who began programming at the end high school, double-majored in CS/EE in college, dropped out of Stanford’s graduate CS program to become the second employee at Mint.com, and after spending some time at Intuit (which acquired Mint), now has her own company focused on building software for the small-medium business market.

Poornima Vijayashanker is not your average engineer. Growing up in a household where electronics were regularly taken apart for fun, she started coding toward the end of high school and ended up majoring in CS for her undergraduate degree.

After a brief stint as an R&D engineer for Synopsis, she wanted to dive into the Valley’s startup scene and elected to enroll in a master’s CS program at Stanford. It was there she initially met Aaron Patzer, the founder of Mint, and when the opportunity arose for her to join the small team, she dropped out of Stanford and helped build the company.

From that experience, she ended up at Intuit, where she started plotting her next move, and now is the founder and CEO of Bizeebee, member manage software to help small business manage their customers, inventory, and a host of other services.

In addition to building her company, Vijayashanker manages to be extremely active in the startup community, giving back so much of her time and energy by speaking on college campuses to share her story and encourage students and why she thinks technology is a great professional choice. She is also an active mentor to students and has been blogging at her site Femgineer, which has been around for five years. But, that’s enough from me, you should really listen to all the wisdom she shares in this rich video discussion.

 

[Note: This discussion was originally taped at TechCrunch San Francisco on April 23, 2012.]

This post was originally posted at TechCrunch.

Anne-Gail Moreland

Anne-Gail Moreland

Anne-Gail Moreland, an intern with Women 2.0, was on the StartupBus. She studies neuroscience at Mount Holyoke College, where she is trying to merge a passion for tech and the brain into a new wave of cognition-based technology

Straight to your inbox.

The best content on the future faces of tech and startups.

"*" indicates required fields

This field is for validation purposes and should be left unchanged.

SHARE THIS STORY

NEW COHORT STARTS JANUARY 2024

Join the Angel Sessions

Develop strategic relationships, build skills, and increase your deal flow through our global angel group and investing course.

RELATED ARTICLES
[yarpp]