Radha Ramaswami Basu

Radha Basu's unbelievable story illustrates her incredible intelligence and passion for pushing boundaries, as well as her desire to give back to her community.

Basu has been breaking sterotypes since youth, earning the highest score on an entrance exam to an engineering school that she secretly took. She entered as one of only 17 girls in a class of 2,700 students. After graduating, she moved to the US with only eight dollars, working her way into a masters degree in electrical engineering and computer science from the University of Southern California. She even defied her parent's wishes for an arranged marriage, meeting her husband at a tech conference in the US.

She began Hewlett Packard's first software center in India (which she initially ran out of her dining room), planting the seed of what would become one of HP's strongest centers in the world. She went on to become leader of eight HP offshore software centers worldwide and General Manager of HP's electronic business software division, which became a $1.5 dollar business.

During a trek with her husband to the base camp of Mount Everest, she had the revelation to leave HP and start her next project, SupportSoft. She was the chairman and CEO from 1999-2006 of the company that reduces companies expenditures and time spent on customer service. Again, she started working with SupportSoft as a small startup and grew it to a multi-million dollar business.

She is the winner of San Francisco Women on the Web Leader of the Millennium award in 2000. This was preceded by the Woman of Achievement Award for leadership and vision in the corporate field in 1995 and the Excelsior Leadership Award in 1997.

Other links to know more about her:
http://techdivas.com/radhabasu.htm
http://www.sawnet.org/whoswho/?Basu+Radha
http://padmininatarajan.sulekha.com/blog/post/2004/03/radha-basu-woman-o...