Women’s History Month: A Celebration of Inspirational Women

In honor of Women's History Month, some of the leaders from our portfolio companies along with a member of our own team have shared stories about the women who have inspired them. Some of the women you may recognize, while others are lesser-known champions. But all have played an important role in the lives of their authors and for that we are forever grateful.

Garima Kapoor, Co-Founder and COO, MinIO

I first read about the pioneering Mexican artist and iconoclast, Frida Kahlo, when I was in high school in India. As someone raised in a traditional Indian upbringing with traditional and somewhat bounded expectations for women, her life seemed impossibly alive and exotic to me.

The more I learned about her life, the more she inspired me. Her resilience, her independence and her fearlessness were not just boundary breaking for the time, they were truly authentic. Despite extraordinary physical and emotional setbacks, she never wavered from what she saw as her inherent right to be the woman she wanted to be, in terms of her innovative art, her clothing, her haircut and her partners.

Personally, I draw particular inspiration from the concept of authenticity. You can be authentic in many ways simultaneously, as an entrepreneur, a leader, an investor and a mother. In Frida's case her commitment to authenticity came with consequences, but that did not deter her. I find that immensely inspiring and I am grateful for her example.

Alexandra Wright-Gladstein, Co-Founder, Ayar Labs

Ever since the age of 12 I have been passionate about preventing climate change, but it was not until college that I realized entrepreneurship could be a tool for positive change. One woman who has been particularly inspirational to me in pursuing my career in entrepreneurship is Lynn Jurich, the co-founder and CEO of SunRun. In founding her company, she created a new business model for installing solar panels on homes, removing the upfront costs for homeowners and saving them money on a monthly basis, dramatically broadening the accessibility to rooftop solar. At Ayar Labs, we aim to cut the amount of energy used in supercomputing and data centers in half by enabling new architectures that use light instead of electricity to move data between chips. As Lynn Jurich has done in the home electricity industry, we hope to transform the computing industry for a more sustainable future.

Emma Fauss, Chief Executive Officer, Medical Informatics Corp.

When I think about the women who have inspired me, who drive me to be better and to do better, I remember my grandmother, Eva Carol Potter. She was strength, resilience and hope personified.

Growing up one of eight children in rural Georgia and then graduating from college before World War II, Eva stepped up to join the U.S. Navy, becoming a member of the Women Accepted for Volunteer Emergency Service, or WAVES. In her 30s, she married a fellow war veteran and had a family, one child with special needs. She became a single mother of four when her husband's war trauma became too disruptive. Eva kept going, working hard as the office administrator for a scrap metal recycling plant in the D.C. area until her retirement in the 1980's. Even in her retirement she nurtured her grandchildren as she continued caring for her disabled daughter.

Eva and her three sisters from this Greatest Generation served as citizen leaders of their communities and as devoted mothers to their children, building their accomplishments through values of hard work and impossible dreams.

From my grandmother, I have learned that attitude is everything: You never saw her challenges because her great inner strength never let her fail. She took her intelligence, humor and genuine compassion for others and made a life rich with loyalty, meaning and kindness.

I named my daughter after Eva to inspire her to be all that my grandmother was, and more. The next generation of female leaders will change the world, and I hope my daughter will be a woman like my grandmother, ready, willing and more than able to embrace the future.

David Johnson, Managing Director, Intel Capital

Sundari Mitra has been an inspiration to me in my career since I met her in 2013. She was co-founder and CEO of Netspeed Systems, a leader in network-on-chip (NoC) technology for advanced SoCs. She co-founded Netspeed to solve the industrywide problem of managing the interconnect between IP blocks in SoCs as the complexity and performance demands were spiraling upward. After founding Netspeed, Sundari built a successful business winning licenses with multiple semiconductor companies, including Intel. After championing Netspeed's technology with our engineering groups, Intel acquired Netspeed in 2018. Sundari currently leads Intel's critical IP development as Vice President and GM of Intel's IP Engineering Group. What inspires me about working with Sundari is her conviction in her goals, her ability to sustain that conviction over difficult hurdles, and her fearless championing of what she believes is right. The definition of integrity is doing the right thing even when it's hard. Sundari's entrepreneurial ability to develop the vision and work with her team, her customers and her partners to continue to stay focused on the north star along the journey, even when things are hard, is a great example to me of how to lead.

The comments in this article represent the viewpoints of each individual contributor.