Liam enjoys his “bionic hand”, the product of a 3D Printer (Image courtesy of MakerBot) Source: Forbes
MakerBot CEO Jenny Lawton
Jenny Lawton is coming back this year. Last year Jenny and Bre were interviewed by John Biggs (who is also coming back to Startup Iceland 2015, I will write a post about that later). Since then Jenny has taken over as CEO of MakerBot and Bre has taken on a new role to lead the Innovation Workshop at Stratasys or in other words he has Tony Stark‘s workshop to build whatever he wants to, sounds pretty cool to me. Anyways, I digress, Jenny has played so many different leadership roles in her career and it is great to have her back. I have included the link to the video of the interview from last year.
Jenny is a serial entrepreneur, although her current role is CEO of a large organization. Here is a quote from her on founding:
I co-founded my first company, Net Deamons and Associates, in 1991. It was an Inc. 500 company with a goal to provide outsourced systems service support solutions, right at cusp of the Internet. I co-founded with one person; then we later brought in a third. We bootstrapped and sold in 1999 to Interliant (Nasdaq: INIT), which was a public company and one of the first application service providers.
In addition to having the success of founding and being acquired by a listed company she has been a small business owner, here is her quote about being a small business owner:
“I bought an independent bookstore in Greenwich, Conn. I ‘dropped out’ of corporate life for 10 years and ran two bookstores instead. It was an awesome learning experience. Everything I do I take something away from. It was great to gain the retail experience. I ran a very large event series and learned to create events; the value of networking. It never hurts to extend your reach.”
Her success was not always easy, here she talks about the challenges of being a women entrepreneur:
“I’ve been the only woman in the room in many meetings. One former co-worker disliked having me there so badly he’d walk past my cubicle and say something negative every day. He told me I should be home having babies. (I was single and did not even have a boyfriend at the time!) Later on, while running my small business, I had an environment in which 8 of our 10 people were women and I realized it was a different set of challenges entirely–I learned I could hurt feelings instantly based on the nuances of something I’d say.”
You can find a detailed interview of Jenny on Forbes magazine here. We are fortunate to get her back. All those women founder, here is a chance to meet Jenny and get connected to her. She will act as a mentor during Startup Iceland 2015.
