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  The fact that my mother thought I was smart because I could play a sport, and not just because I was good at school work, was a huge encouragement.

  My greatest influence is my mom, who is the centrepiece of our family, the glue that keeps us together. She used to be a head nurse in Shanghai, and she is a caretaker, a giver, not only to her family but to friends and neighbours. She is always patient, always putting her husband and children before herself and taking care of everything. To this day, if it’s raining, I’ll get a call and she’ll say, ‘Make sure you bring your umbrella.’

  They say the apple doesn’t fall far from the tree, and I adopt the same traditional role with my husband and two sons, Christopher, 28, and Nicholas, 26. It’s all about loving and caring, and lots of encouragement. My husband and I met at UC Berkeley and I proudly worked to support him through his PhD. He is very smart – he starting tinkering with electronics when he was 12 years old – and I wanted to support him in achieving his credentials. Our first son was born one month before Sehat’s PhD graduation in 1988 – it was a special time for our family, indeed. From day one, my husband was the innovator and I was the face of the company, running the overall business and dealing with customers. My focus was to make the company successful and I passionately wanted my husband to be successful, and that combination made us pioneers and leaders in the semiconductor industry.

  I believe people need to understand that the natural talents of the female and male may be slightly different.

  My maternal role extends outside my family, as caretaker to our big Marvell family of 5,000. When we first started we had seven people and we would work weekends, and I would order in meals. One day an engineer said, ‘Hey, I hear that you are a good cook, do you think that one weekend you could cook for us?’ So it started a tradition – I would go to the supermarket to get crab, lobster and fish and make my Shanghai stir fry. On our campus in the Bay Area there now is a chef who makes three meals per day for the staff. Another of my hobbies is interior design and I use my natural talent to choose furnishings for the campus – including the Versace sofas from Italy and the beautiful 7,000-gallon saltwater fish tank in the lobby. I even designed the campus basketball court – and I still play!

  It has always been our mission to bring to market technology that helps people live better lives. Over the course of my career, I’ve aligned myself with influential women and mentored many other women in the technology industry. Julia Hu, CEO and founder of startup, Lark, is one example. I am proud of her achievement as she is developing artificial intelligence capability software for health and wellness. I have been mentoring a number of women like Julia, empowering them to feel that they can do whatever they want if they have the determination. And I tell them that it’s not just about proving that females can do it, because the track record already shows that there are no limitations for women in any industry. I believe people need to understand that the natural talents of the female and male may be slightly different, and that recognising those talents and using them to the best advantage is the secret recipe for success.

  Weili’s Object

  A basketball. The game of basketball summarises my leadership style – having a mission, providing great direction by strategic thinking, and being results-driven while also having fun.

  I grew up in the French quarter of Shanghai and, from the ages of 9 to 14, I played semi-professional basketball for the district. It was a big commitment as, each day, we spent the afternoon training, which meant that I only had the morning to study. So I learned how to balance my schedule and to be very efficient. Playing basketball made me physically strong and developed my confidence and, as I was captain, it taught me to lead by example, as well as participate as a team player. Running a company is like picking a basketball team – you try to select a superstar for each position. Within Marvell, my husband and I play in different positions but we have complementary skill sets and, as a team, we accomplish more. Sehat and I consider ourselves co-captains, he’s the captain of technology innovation, and I of customer engagement.

  WEILI DAI

  President and co-founder, Marvell Technology Group

  RAMONA PIERSON

  Ramona Pierson is the CEO of Declara, the personal learning technology company she co-founded in 2012 in Palo Alto, California. She began her career as a neuroscientist, and has founded several other companies in the field of education, including the Source, one of the first online social learning platforms for teachers, parents and students. Ramona was accepted into the University of California, Berkeley, at 16, and her aptitude for maths, in particular her skill with data and algorithms, led to her being recruited at 18 by the Marine Corps. In 1984, at the age of 22, she was hit by a drunk driver as a result of which she spent 18 months in a coma and was blind for 11 years. Having to relearn so much herself fuelled her lifelong passion for helping others to learn.

  * * *

  It’s interesting – I did not really identify as a great math person as a kid, because math was so easy for me! It was the easiest, most fun subject at school – that and science. If your parents are literary, you tend to pick up a book. My father was an electromechanical engineer and I think a certain math literacy was transferred in the family. It was just natural. Schools can’t be everything to kids; parents are their first mentors.

  We can’t just mentor other women. We have to buy women’s products, invest in women’s companies, and then we start to create a quorum around women in tech and science. We create a path for women.

  We hire a lot of women in our company, but when I meet other COOs [chief operating officers] and investors, they tend to be men and they tend to gravitate towards other male COOs. When there’s no female presence, women think, ‘Why would I go in that direction?’ It begins with all of us. We should all be fighting with schools to make sure your daughter, your niece, your sister gets to the top of the class in those fields. And we can’t just mentor other women. We have to buy women’s products, invest in women’s companies, and then we start to create a quorum around women in tech and science. We create a path for women. If there aren’t pathways, women aren’t going to go in that direction.

  I grew up in the in-between time when we were making ground because of the women who had gone ahead of us, but the world hadn’t moved on as much as it has today. I wasn’t allowed to join in certain sports although I wanted to, because they were for boys. I love football and I kept hearing, ‘No, no, no.’ I said, ‘You’ll have to kick me off the field!’ Even in the Marine Corps I’d hear the scuttlebutt [rumour] of men saying they’d never salute a woman officer. They’d salute a male officer but spit when they saw a woman officer.

  When I went into the business world it was still a boys’ club. An investor once said to me, ‘I’ll never invest in a woman or someone over 29.’ OK, I had two strikes against me just from walking in the room, but I got an investment from that firm. It’s not just about building our own success, but about being leaders for the next generation so they don’t have to hear the things I’ve heard. It’s hard enough to be an entrepreneur without the additional obstacle of someone looking at your gender. That’s why we need a different approach as women around each other’s businesses, and we need to drive for our success as a community. No one else will do it for us.

  My generation’s parents got a job and stayed in it for 20, 25 years. Now it’s so different. If you’re not a lifelong learner, you’re going to fall out of the running. You need the cognitive flexibility to take on new roles. When I had my accident, careers were changing slowly. By the time I had my sight back, the world had changed. When I was experiencing relearning myself, I didn’t find any companies picking up on this incredible need for lifelong learning. Now we have so many more different types of technology. Our own consumer product right now is amazing. It’s exciting! Learning is fun, it’s interesting, it can be challenging, and it is part of our lives.

  We need a different approach as women around each other’s bus
inesses, and we need to drive for our success as a community. No one else will do it for us.

  After I was hit by the car, I still had all of these dreams of things I thought I’d do and become. I thought about the Olympics – the Games are held every four years, but in the interim those athletes are training, working. So I decided to take that as my analogy, and I thought, ‘If I’m only going to live four years, there are things I want to accomplish’ – not a bucket list, but as a productive human being. If I was going to have a short life, I wanted it to have meaning. So I’d pick a goal, such as finishing college. Every break I’d have more surgery, but I’d always give myself time to recover so I could make it back to class. So, if there was a long weekend, I’d have surgery on the Thursday and be back in class on Monday.

  I kept living and I thought, if I’m going to live, I have to build a career. If you don’t have a plan, a goal, you don’t know the steps of how to get there. People who feel kind of lost often don’t have a goal. As humans, we find our identity in being productive. It gives life meaning. Goal-setting is very important. Build hard goals in chunks of time – go to college; get a degree; land your first job; take a year off travelling – and give yourself a gift goal, too. Reward yourself for hitting the goals.

  I absolutely consider myself a leader. If you think that, you carry yourself a little differently. You feel more comfortable out on the edge and innovating. You lead by example, by the interactions you have with people. An innovator sees around the corner; a leader can drive the company around that corner. That’s the magic. You need empathy, communication skills, honesty – you need to be an evangelist. You have to shape the future so people can see it in their heads. Communicate with your team, and inspire them.

  You can’t do everything alone. I learned this lesson in my last company. I was micro-managing. Someone said to me, ‘Obviously, Ramona, you can do everything in a company, so why did you hire anybody else?’ If you do everything, if you’re not trusting people, you are not demonstrating that you believe in what you’re doing. I have learned to demonstrate that I believe in myself by giving other people autonomy.

  I love hiring people who are leaders, young people who have a plan. One of my interview questions is: ‘What do you want to do five years from now?’ I want to help them build a path that can lead them to that goal.

  Ramona’s Object

  A box of rosaries. There’s irony in that choice. I’m not a religious person, I’m a scientist, but when I was really sick in hospital, in the coma, having surgery, wellwishers whom I didn’t even know would sometimes leave a rosary on my bed. When I left hospital, I had a box of them and, although I don’t believe in God, I carry them everywhere. The act of leaving a rosary showed me that these strangers felt a connection and cared about me. They remembered me, thought about me, believed in me when I didn’t believe in myself. The rosaries represent a reaching out. Those people wanted me to know someone cared.

  Everything we do is about connecting to other people – helping and supporting. Connecting is such an important emotional aspect of being human – it can’t be automated.

  RAMONA PIERSON

  Technology entrepreneur and CEO, Declara

  TARYN DAVIS

  Taryn Davis is the founder and executive director of the American Widow Project, which supports the widows and widowers of American service personnel. She grew up in San Marcos, Texas, and married her high-school sweetheart, Michael, shortly after he joined the US Army. In May 2007, when she was 21, he was killed in a roadside bomb attack in Iraq. Today, the American Widow Project supports 1,600 service widows and widowers across the US with events, befriending and educational programmes. Taryn’s work has been widely celebrated in the media and she has received multiple awards as a leading social innovator.

  * * *

  I was an awkward, introverted child and as a teen I had a fear of not being accepted or liked, because of not wearing the right sort of make-up or something like that. I was not the sort of person you’d think would start an organisation. But the one good thing about grief and loss is that you just don’t care what people think any more. You have no fear.

  I had seen Michael a month before he died, when he was home on leave, and I was instant messaging him an hour and a half before he was killed. He broke off, said he had to go, which I knew meant he was being sent out, but that was his job so I thought nothing of it. I went over to my parents’ house for dinner, which I often did because I was still at college. And then at ten o’clock, the call came. It was a neighbour to say I had to get home because some people were there who needed to speak to me.

  There were two of them, men wearing the uniform Michael had worn to marry me 18 months before. They told me he was dead. All I could think of was talking to Michael about this man who couldn’t compose himself to tell someone that her husband had died. They asked me to sign some paperwork and then they gave me a folder called ‘The Days Ahead’, which had photos in it of coffins and urns.

  I didn’t eat or leave the house.

  I pushed away my family.

  I didn’t want to go through losing anyone again.

  After the funeral, I thought I was going to die. I didn’t eat or leave the house. I pushed away my family. I didn’t want to go through losing anyone again. I was just sitting on the couch in front of movie channels. Physically, I’d given up. And then one day I googled ‘widow’ to see what other people thought it meant. It said: ‘Did you mean ‘window’?’ I tried images – they were mostly of spiders. I felt like I was the only young widow in the world.

  The average age of US service men and women who have been killed in combat is 26, and 51 per cent of all service personnel are married. About 3,000 people had died in Iraq and Afghanistan at that point, so I figured that there must be at least 1,000 other young widows out there. After a few months, I went to see the only other one I knew, whose husband had been in the convoy with Michael. We’d been stationed in Alaska together when they were training. I found her sitting holding her 11-month-old baby. We cried a lot and I recognised something in her. She looked dead behind the eyes, like I did.

  We started talking about our memories and I saw something then, a spark. I wanted to find out what could make that come back. I had a ‘death gratuity’ of $100,000 from the government and I used that to start the American Widow Project, tracking down other young service widows and asking a friend to help me make a documentary. I filed for tax exemption to start a non-profit and set up a website. In the summer of 2008 we held our first event. Thirty people came, most of us in our early 20s.

  We did zipwiring and shooting rapids and watching bats come out at sunset. We needed to be forced into situations that would make us live. At the end of the weekend we watched the documentary. People who’d met as strangers were hugging and crying and laughing. I knew then that none of us would feel any more that we were the only young widow.

  Since then, the AWP has run about 70 four-day events, all free of charge. We keep them small and intimate so the places get booked in minutes but it’s what happens in between that’s most important. Many friendships have developed and we’ve started programmes to help people go back to college. We went off to build homes after Hurricane Katrina. Some members have remarried and other widows have been their bridesmaids. Members have started businesses and AWP friends have been their first customers.

  So many widows live with the fear that if they decide to live again, other people might think they’ve forgotten their husbands. We reassure them that we know they haven’t, however they decide to spend their lives.

  So many widows live with the fear that if they decide to live again, other people might think they’ve forgotten their husbands. We reassure them that we know they haven’t, however they decide to spend their lives. In keeping your husband’s legacy alive, it’s easy to overlook your own life. We don’t give ourselves any option but to live. We’re not letting what has happened to us determine everything about us in the future. We’re
defining for ourselves what it means to be a young widow.

  I never wanted AWP to grow into some enormous organisation – you don’t want there to be more widows. At the height of the Iraq and Afghanistan conflicts there were between 30 and 40 deaths a month. Now we’re seeing 22 suicides a day among those who have left and are still in the military. There are more non-combat than combat widows now. We’ve also had Gulf War and Vietnam widows asking to join. I created AWP hoping that one other widow would have it easier than I did. Now I look back and I think, ‘How the hell did I do that?’

  Taryn’s Object

  The tattoo on my back of Michael’s wedding ring, with words from a Ralph Waldo Emerson poem. I don’t have Michael’s wedding ring. The army tells personnel not to wear them on combat missions, because they can catch the light or snag on equipment. When I got Michael’s effects – they sent back what he was wearing – I told them that if he had been wearing his ring, they should leave it on his body. I had a feeling he wouldn’t have taken it off. That turned out to be right, so he was cremated with it and then I threw it with his ashes in the river.

  At his funeral, I read a quotation from Ralph Waldo Emerson’s poem ‘Threnody’:

  The eager fate which carried thee

  Took the largest part of me.

  For this losing is true dying.

  The tattoo on my back runs from my shoulder blade to the middle of my spine and has that quotation running round the wedding band. Neither of us had tattoos and I came from the sort of family where you get a tattoo and your parents disown you. But I had it done two months after his death. I felt it was an object that nobody could take away from me. It was a sign of what I had gone through and it’s something that will never leave me, a sense that he’s always there.