Women on Top in Tech: Esther Dyson, Linda Avey, Carol Bartz, Winifred Mitchell Baker and more

They manage millions, lead companies, and even fly into space. Women may be underrepresented in Silicon Valley, but their numbers are growing. More CEOs and venture capitalists than ever before are female. And as you’ll see in the following profiles, they’re anything but underachievers.

[highlight_text] “My father helped design a rocket ship (the Orion Project) back in the ’50s, so I just assumed I would visit the moon well before 2000.” [/highlight_text]

Esther Dyson
Company: EDventure
Home: Manhattan

Dyson’s home is technically in Manhattan, but one could argue that her presence is felt the strongest in Silicon Valley. Since the early 1980s, she has been a visionary in predicting how technology innovations will impact business, society, and people.

Her investments include Airship Ventures, a Bay Area zeppelin tour company, 23andMe of Palo Alto, Flickr, now owned by Yahoo! in Sunnyvale, California, and Delicious, which was also bought by Yahoo! She’s also involved in several Internet non-profits including ICANN and the Long Now Foundation.

Dyson began a career as a journalist when she started the Dyson Gazette using carbon paper at the age of eight. The daughter of physicist Freeman Dyson and mathematician Verena Huber-Dyson, she had healthy curiosity at a young age.

After graduating from Harvard in economics, she joined Forbes as a fact-checker and quickly became a reporter. After a stint at Oppenheimer covering software companies, she moved to Rosen Research and, in 1983, bought the company from her employer Ben Rosen, renaming it EDventure Holdings.

“As it happens, newsletters are great cash collectors: you get the cash and then you deliver the service,” Dyson said in an email interview from the Yuri Gagarin Cosmonaut Training Center in Star City, Russia, where she’s training to become a cosmonaut. “So I bought him out for approximately the cash that was in the business, and we both were happy.”

She sold EDventure Holdings to CNET Networks in 2004, left CNET in late 2006, and has operated as an independent investor and entrepreneur. In recent years her focus has turned towards space exploration, hence the cosmonaut training.

“I woke up in the mid-90s and discovered [space travel] still hadn’t really happened the way I had expected-it was still a few government projects rather than a vibrant commercial market-and so I got interested in figuring out why not and what to do about it,” Dyson said. “My father helped design a rocket ship (the Orion Project) back in the ’50s, so I just assumed I would visit the moon well before 2000.”

Dyson is training to be a backup for Charles Simonyi, who’s scheduled to take his second trip in a Soyuz spacecraft to the International Space Station on March 26. One of Dyson’s investments, Space Adventures, sells space flight training packages to civilians for about $30 million. “As an investor, I couldn’t refuse!” she said.

Linda Avey
Company: 23andMe
Home: Los Gatos

In 2006, Avey, along with her co-founder Anne Wojcicki, helped launch the personal genome revolution. They hope to make learning about your genes mainstream, and with $10 million from investors including Google and Genentech, they’re well on their way. Their “spit parties,” where attendees fill vials with saliva for a $399 DNA analysis, have drawn celebrities including Diane von Furstenberg and Harvey Weinstein. Avey has spent more than 20 years in the biopharmaceutical industry, including stints at Affymetrix, Applied Biosystems, and Spotfire.

Carol Bartz
Company: Yahoo!
Home: Atherton

Bartz replaced Jerry Yang as CEO of Yahoo! in January and is in the midst of revamping the company’s management. She spent 14 years as Autodesk’s CEO, where she grew revenues from $285 million to $1.5 billion by 2006. She’s credited with making the company a leader in design software for architects and builders. Bartz has also held executive positions at Sun Microsystems. She was appointed to President George W. Bush’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology and also serves on the boards of Intel, Cisco, NetApp, and the Foundation for the National Medals of Science and Technology.

Winifred Mitchell Baker
Company: Mozilla
Home: Peninsula

Famous for her flaming red hair cut in a style reminiscent of her company’s logo, Baker (who goes by Mitchell) has the best title of any of the women on our list: chief lizard wrangler. As one of the first Netscape employees, Baker wrote the license for Mozilla, an open source project that was spun off as an independent non-profit in 2003 after AOL bought Netscape. The Firefox web browser was the leading product to come out of Mozilla, and it has been chipping away at Microsoft’s stronghold on the browser market ever since. By late 2008, Firefox had a more than 20 percent share, while Internet Explorer had fallen to about 70 percent. Baker, a part-time trapeze artist, was included in Time Magazine’s “100 Most Influential People in the World: Scientists & Thinkers” in 2005.

Gina Bianchini
Company: Ning
Home: Palo Alto

As CEO of Ning.com, Bianchini has helped make the company she co-founded in 2004 with Marc Andreessen the leading online tool for building custom social networks. Ning has raised more than $100 million, and people have used it to build more than 600,000 networks. The company’s software hosts groups on topics ranging from raw-food enthusiasts to Britney Spears fans. Bianchini is a former Goldman Sachs analyst, CKS Group executive, and president of Harmonic Communications. The Stanford business school grad is a Bay Area native, hailing from Cupertino.

Sukhinder Singh Cassidy
Company: Google
Home: Bay Area

As president for Asia-Pacific and Latin America Operations, Cassidy has established Google offices in 18 countries. She started her Internet career in strategy and business development at Amazon, OpenTV, and co-founded financial software company Yodlee.com. She has also worked in strategy for British Pay TV provider, BSkyB, a division of News Corporation, and in investment banking for Merrill Lynch in both New York and London. She has two children, 5 and 2, and often takes the youngest with her on business trips abroad.

Caterina Fake
Company: Hunch
Home: San Francisco

Fake co-founded the massively popular photo-sharing site Flickr in early 2004 with her husband Stewart Butterfield. Yahoo! bought the company in 2005, and Fake stayed on to run the company’s technology development group until she resigned in 2008. She’s in the process of helping to launch a new startup called Hunch, which she describes on her website as “a consumer internet application, it will have a lot of user participation, and it is more than a little fun.” Before founding Flickr, Fake was art director at Salon.com. She has worked as an investment banker, a painter’s assistant, on a crew shooting interstitials for Seinfeld, and in a dive shop in Arkansas. She joined the board of directors of Creative Commons in August 2008.

Carly Fiorina
Company: Carly Fiorina Enterprises
Home: Los Altos Hills

By becoming CEO of computer giant Hewlett Packard in 1999, Carly Fiorina smashed the glass ceiling. She held the position for seven years. Before joining HP, Fiorina was an executive vice president at AT&T, where she orchestrated the spinoff and initial public offering of Lucent, which until then was the most successful IPO in United States history. At HP in 2002, Fiorina completed a controversial merger with rival Compaq, and, in 2005, she suffered a public ousting from HP. Fiorina then took a break from public life, launching a charity and writing a memoir called Tough Choices in 2006. But she was back in the limelight during the U.S. presidential campaign, stumping for Sen. John McCain.

Alexandra Hall
Company: Airship Ventures
Home: Los Gatos

Hall has been in the aerospace industry for 18 years, but it doesn’t get much cooler than launching your own zeppelin company. She co-founded Airship Ventures, the first firm to offer public blimp rides (for around $500 per hour), with her husband Brian Hall in 2008 with $8 million in funding. Their customers can see the Bay Area from a few hundred feet up in a quiet, luxury environment. The 246-foot “Eureka” blimp is one of only three in operation in the world, and it’s the largest. Hall spent six years at the U.K.’s National Space Center, and came to California to become executive director and CEO of the Chabot Space & Science Center. A former science TV host for the BBC, Hall also sits on the board of Hiller Aviation Museum in San Carlos.

Marissa Mayer
Company: Google
Home: San Francisco and Palo Alto

As Google’s vice president of search products and user experience, Mayer is responsible for Google’s Web search, images, news, books, products, maps, Google Earth, the Google Toolbar, Google Desktop, Google Health, and Google Labs. She joined Google in 1999 as the company’s first female engineer. Mayer has worked on designing and developing Google’s search interface, defining Google News, Gmail, and Orkut, and launching more than 100 features and products on Google.com. Google has filed several patents based on her work in artificial intelligence and interface design. Mayer has also taught introductory computer programming at Stanford to more than 3,000 students, and she has received the Centennial Teaching Award and the Forsythe Award for her contribution to undergraduate education. Before Google, Mayer worked at the UBS research lab in Zurich, Switzerland, and at SRI International in Menlo Park. She graduated with honors from Stanford receiving a B.S. in symbolic systems and an M.S. in computer science.

Ryan Phelan
Company: DNA Direct
Home: Sausalito

In 2003, she founded DNA Direct, a revolutionary direct-to-consumer genetic testing company where she now serves as CEO. Phelan was a pioneer in marrying health care information with the Web back in 1995 when she created Direct Medical Knowledge, the first online medical library. In 1999, she sold to the company to WebMD, and the database became the consumer site’s backbone. Phelan has been a consumer health advocate for 25 years, and started the first medical library for consumers in 1978. She was also a founding director of Planetree, a nonprofit consumer health care organization, where she helped create the Planetree Resource Center. She’s co-founder of the ALL Species Foundation, a global science initiative to discover all life on Earth in the next 25 years. Phelan graduated from UC Berkeley and lives in the Bay Area with her husband Stuart Brand, founder of the Whole Earth Catalog. She enjoys riding her horse, hiking, and running the trails of the Marin Headlands.

Sheryl Sandberg
Company: Facebook
Home: Bay Area

Sandberg became the chief operating officer of Facebook in March 2008 after serving as vice president of global online sales and operation at Google for seven years. After graduating from Harvard, Sandberg worked under Lawrence Summers, her senior thesis adviser, at the World Bank. She later earned her MBA from Harvard Business School and worked at McKinsey & Co. as a management consultant. Sandberg then served as chief of staff to Secretary of the Treasury Lawrence Summers from 1999 to 2001. Turning down several investment bank offers, she joined Google when George W. Bush came into office and Summers and his team left the Treasury. At Google, Sandberg led many of Google’s advertising products, including Google AdWords, the company’s main revenue generator. She also served on the board of Google’s philanthropic division, Google.org. Sandberg serves on the board of eHealthInsurance and was included in Fortune’s 50 Most Powerful Women of 2007. At 38, she was the youngest on the list.

Ann Winblad
Company: Hummer Winblad Venture Partners
Home: San Francisco

As co-founder and managing director of Hummer Winblad Venture Partners, the first venture capital fund to invest exclusively in software companies, Winblad is Silicon Valley royalty. She’s been involved in entrepreneurship in the software industry for more than 30 years and is known as one of Silicon Valley’s savviest investors. Winblad began her career as a systems programmer at the Federal Reserve Bank, and in 1976 co-founded Open Systems, an accounting software maker, with a $500 investment. After six years of profitability, she sold the company for more than $15 million. Winblad served as a strategy consultant for prestigious clients including IBM, Microsoft, Price Waterhouse, and many start-ups. She’s also co-author of the book Object-Oriented Software and has published many articles. Winblad serves as a director for Voltage Security, Krillion, Mulesource, and Star Analytics. Winblad is also an advisor to several entrepreneur groups, as well as co-chair of SD Forum.

Anne Wojcicki
Company: 23andMe
Home: Palo Alto

In 2006 Wojcicki, along with her co-founder Linda Avey, gave everyone access to their own genome (for a fee) when they founded 23andMe. If her experience as a hedge fund and biotech analyst and Yale graduate doesn’t give her enough caché, she’s also married to Google founder Sergey Brin (and expecting their first child). Google helped launch the company with a $3.6 million investment, and the company has raised a total of about $10 million with investments from Genentech and Esther Dyson. Giving individuals access to their own genetic information is a longtime goal of Wojcicki’s, and the company does just that with a mail-order “split kit,” which sells for $399. In addition, 23andMe aims to create a common, standardized resource that will accelerate drug discovery and bring personalized medicine to the public.

Meg Whitman
Company: eBay
Home: Atherton

In 1998, Whitman joined a small startup called eBay with 30 employees and about $4 million in revenue. During her 10-year tenure she transformed the company into a $7.7 billion global auctioning giant. In her 30-year career, Whitman has worked at companies including Stride Rite, Bain & Company and Procter & Gamble. At FTD, she helped a network of florists strengthen their business networks. And at Hasbro and Disney, she helped develop educational toys, shows and programs. She worked for Sen. John McCain’s presidential campaign, and on February 9 announced her own candidacy for California Governor. Her net worth was estimated at $1.4 billion in 2007.