If you had befriended Penny Herscher as a young girl, play dates would have been in a room with carefully crafted modeled airplanes hanging from the ceiling. It was her dream, after all, to become a member of the Royal Air Force. But, at the time women weren’t allowed to serve in combat forces in the UK. Despite this setback, Penny grew up inspired to change the status quo for women, and has shaped her career path accordingly.
Penny, who uses the word “fierce” in conversation as frequently as Taylor Swift takes selfies, has devoted her life to creating a culture of equality in the all-too-often gender-lopsided industry of technology. After graduating from Cambridge with a degree in mathematics, Penny wrote code for years before switching to the business side of tech and launching her own company in 1996 – Simplex Solutions, an electronic design automation company serving the semiconductor industry.
After taking the company public in 2001 and selling it for $300 million in 2002 to Cadence Design Systems, Penny became the general manager and chief marketing officer. Just over a year later, she decided to retire. “I wasn’t really good at it [retiring],” she says. “I really wanted to prove that you could build a successful, highly-diverse company.”
So, in 2005 Penny started her second company, FirstRain, a leading provider of analytics solutions for sales, marketing and business professionals around the world. FirstRain serves multiple Fortune 500 companies and has seen growth with clients like Cisco, HP, Pfizer, GE, Microsoft and others.
In addition to her own entrepreneurial adventures, Penny was an early employee and senior executive at Synopsis, and an R&D engineer with Texas Instruments and Daisy Systems. She currently serves on the boards of JDSU and Rambus, and was on the Anita Borg Institute Board for 11 years.
Today, Penny is as passionate as ever about achieving equality for women, in and out of the workplace. Whether it’s drafting a company’s maternity leave policy, mentoring her daughters, or encouraging young women to be more aggressive with their goals, she doesn’t back down from a challenge. In fact, she’s always ready to be a revolutionary.