Contributor

Penny Herscher

President and CEO, FirstRain

Penny is a serial entrepreneur and second time CEO. Her CEO was job with Simplex Solutions – a software provider in the electronic design automation space - which she took public in 2001 and sold to Cadence Design Systems in 2002. Her current company is FirstRain which is growing fast and which provides enterprise customer intelligence to the world's largest companies.

Originally a mathematician from Cambridge University in England, Penny worked in software engineering, marketing, business development and general management on her path to CEO. She’s a big believer in diversity – both in building careers paths and in building teams – to bring richer experience into leadership and decision making.

Penny serves on the boards of FirstRain, JDSU and Rambus and the non-profit Anita Borg Institute for Women in Technology. She speaks on entrepreneurship, career management and technology challenges and has taught at the Haas Business School at Berkeley, Stanford, Boston University and Santa Clara business schools as well as for numerous industry organizations and women's career development organizations.