Penny Herscher

Penny Herscher President and CEO, FirstRain, Inc.

Penny Herscher: So far my greatest accomplishment has been building Simplex into a very successful, profitable company which went public in 2001 and was sold at a premium in 2002. But what makes that accomplishment so meaningful is not just the business success (which was considerable) but the customer base, the team and the culture that I built. The Simplex team still gets together, 7 years later; I am still friends with customers from that era because we solved some very hard problems for them. Simplex' success grew people's careers, put kids through school, made down payments on houses - we were able to make meaningful changes in people's lives and careers. I am well on my way to doing this again at FirstRain.

EE Times: You are what we call a "Woman of Vision". Can you describe the "vision" that has motivated your professional decisions and choices? Are you still implementing it or have you changed direction?

Herscher: My vision is about growth - how to build a team/product/company that creates growth - financial/technology/career growth - because growth creates energy and opportunity - and joy. I have made my professional choices based on near term and long term growth, and not always at the same time. I chose to move from R&D to marketing to general management through a series of challenges over 20 years and I think my focus on growing my own skills broadly helped me survive as a growth company CEO.

EE Times: Would you say that the visibility of women in technological fields has been improving, albeit slowly?

Herscher: Yes, definitely. Women are moving up the ranks and getting more visibility - it is certainly great to see Carol Bartz running Yahoo. I serve on the board of the Anita Borg Institute for Women in Technology and we see that the employment culture is definitely improving for women in engineering and technological fields. I find young women coming up the technical ranks now are finding a great deal less prejudice and discrimination than I experienced 25 years ago.

EE Times: What should be done to encourage more women to become masters of technology and science and take on greater roles in tech in general?

Herscher: Keep girls in sciences and math in middle school and high school, encourage them to study technology as undergraduates and then support them as they enter the workplace. Women drop out of technical jobs at an alarming rate because they do not find the support needed to stay in - the peer group and the mentors - so organizations like ABI and WITI are very important to keep women connected with their community in technology.

Herscher's biography
As CEO of FirstRain since 2005, Penny Herscher has transformed FirstRain into the leading provider of search-driven research - search, analytics and reporting for business professionals solving the web information challenge facing institutional investors, marketing and sales professionals.

Prior to FirstRain, Ms. Herscher was CEO of Simplex Solutions, an electronic design automation company serving the global semiconductor industry. As CEO, she grew Simplex from a few engineers in 1996 to a high-growth, profitable software company. She led the company to successful IPO in 2001 and through to the sale of the company to Cadence Design Systems in 2002. She then worked at Cadence as chief marketing officer and General Manager of a major division of the company. From 1988 to 1996, she was an early employee and senior executive at Synopsys.

Ms. Herscher started her career in 1982 as an R&D engineer with Texas Instruments and then Daisy Systems and she holds a BA with Honors in Mathematics from Cambridge University.

Ms. Herscher serves on the boards of JDSU and Rambus. She is also active in the non-profit world serving on the boards of the Anita Borg Institute and Planned Parenthood Mar Monte; she volunteers teaching business classes at Stanford Business School, Berkeley Haas School of Business and Santa Clara University as well as speaking on leadership and career growth at various industry organizations.