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
- Cindy Goral, VP of Operations - Secretary
- Catherine S. Kirkman, Wilson, Sonsini, Goodrich and Rosati - General Counsel
- James Beck, CPA & CMA, Managing Director & CFO, Mayfield Fund - Treasurer & Vice President
Staff
- Telle Whitney, President and CEO
- Cindy Goral, VP of Operations
- Deanna Kosaraju, Vice President of Programs
- Jody Mahoney, VP of Business Development
- Jerri Barrett, Director of Marketing
- Kirk Ross, Director of Finance
- Caroline Simard, Director of Research
- Kathy Gee, IT Project Specialist
- Kim McLeod, Program Manager
- Rachelle Siskin, Program Logistics Manager
- BJ Wishinsky, Communities Program Manager
- Amy Clark, Office Manager/Executive Assistant
Our Founder
Board of Trustees
- William Wulf, Ph.D., Former President, National Academy of Engineering, Board Chair
- Bill Unger, Partner Emeritus, Mayfield Fund - Vice-Chair
- Margaret Ashida, Director, Diversity and Workforce Programs - IBM Software Group
- James Beck, CPA & CMA, Managing Director & CFO, Mayfield Fund - Treasurer & Vice President
- Francine Berman, Professor, Dept of Computer Science and Engineering, UC San Diego and Fellow, ACM
- Debi Coleman, Managing Partner, SmartForest Ventures
- Alan Eustace, Senior Vice President, Research and Systems Engineering, Google
- Penny Herscher, President & CEO, firstRain
- Kathy Hill, Senior VP Ethernet and Wireless Systems Technology Group, Cisco Systems Inc.
- Wayne Johnson, Vice President, University Relations, Hewlett-Packard
- Maria Klawe, President, Harvey Mudd College
- Richard Rashid, Senior VP and VP Research, Microsoft
- Justin Rattner, Senior Fellow & CTO, Intel
- Cheryl Shavers, Former Undersecretary of Technology, Clinton Administration, & CEO of Global Smarts, Inc.
- Telle Whitney, President & CEO, Anita Borg Institute for Women and Technology
- Linda Bernardi, Emeritus (Term: 1996 -2006)
- Greg Papadopoulos, Emeritus (Term: 1996 -2006)
Individual and Organizations
Board of Advisors
- Frances Allen, IBM Fellow Emerita, IBM
- Pamela Arya, Executive Director, Applied Minds, Inc.
- Nina Bhatti, Principle Scientist, HP Labs
- Katy Dickinson, Director, Business Process Architecture, Sun Microsystems
- Catherine Didion, Senior Program Officer, National Academy of Engineering (NAE)
- Carole Dulong, Google - Co-Chair
- Allan Fisher, Vice President, Laureate Education - Co-Chair
- Mark Guzdial, Professor in the School of Interactive Computing,
Georgia Institute of Technology - Robin Jeffries, Google
- Dr. Chandra Krintz, Associate Professor, UC Santa Barbara
- Ellen Lapham, Entrepreneur & Designer, Innovation Ventures
- Carol Muller, President and CEO, MentorNet
- Rebecca Norlander, Technical Assistant to the Chief Software Architect, Microsoft Corporation
- Nancy Ramsey, Author, The Futures of Women: Scenarios for the 21st Century
- Ann Redelfs, Redelfs LLC
- Kathy Richardson, Consultant
- Ruth Stergiou, Principal, Planning Dynamics, Inc.
- Sarah Revi Sterling,Student, University of Colorado, Boulder
- Janice Stockard, Visiting Professor, Mills College