Action Hero - Kathy Huber - video notes

Action Hero - Kathy Huber - video notes

There is a passion and a joy about creating and there I realize it's really fun getting a product out in the world and seeing people use it.

Kathy Huber graduated, with a degree in engineering, from MIT as one of only a handful of women. From there, she went to work for BBN technologies, and cultivated her passion for entrepreneurship, building the critical hardware infrastructure of the early Internet. Kathy continues to be a leader in her field and a mentor to those hoping to follow down her path to success.

Were you born to be an entrepreneur?

Go back to when I was a little I was always considered the responsible one at 5 and 4 years old  if kids got into trouble all the mothers looked at me and said "why did you let that happen?" so there must have been a sense of responsibility about me. But also there was tenacity and perseverance, and saying no didn't matter someone could tell me no and it didn't mean anything if I wanted it I went after it anyway.

What forced you to think outside the box?

I started out at MIT many, many years ago there were only 3 women in engineering and I was always amazed at the professors knew my name because I didn't know that there were only 3 women in engineering but I took my 1st entrepreneurial class then where companies would come and throw a class of students a problem that they were not able to solve then we played with it.  We learned how to think outside the box .

Has gender affected your career?

It's been an issue at every single corner when raises were given out I finally had a huge argument and I said I manage 40 PHD's  and I'm the lowest paid  oh no no, no that can't possibly be true Let's get the data, we got the data oh we're really sorry. It's with you every single day and you have to keep defining it.

How can you turn a setback into something positive?

We launched iron bridge network and had 200 hundred people working for us and product was in a beta our prospects loved us it was very headdy times and then the crash the .com crash occurred and that took down MCI our customer and we had to fold so I earned all the stripes on my back said this was iron bridge university better than an MBA program and started mentoring at MIT and starting other companies along the way too so now I've got people innovations and I still get to mentor.