Women Entrepreneurs
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THIS MONTH'S WOMEN TO WATCH PROFILES
Donna Novitsky
Founder and CEO of Yiftee
Donna Novitsky is the Founder and CEO of Yiftee, a social gifting platform that lets people send to someone else's smartphone an e-gift that can be redeemed at thousands of local businesses around the country (think your sister's favorite café or the hardware store your dad is always stopping by).
She is also a former partner of a top tier venture capital firm, teaches marketing to engineers and entrepreneurs at Stanford University and took a startup from scratch to IPO. She was named one of the 2014 Top 10 Women to Watch in Tech by Inc. Magazine in April 2014. Donna is a frequent speaker on the topic of women, entrepreneurship and investment, with recent engagements at Harvard Business School, Stanford Graduate School of Business, Stanford School of Engineering and the Apple Store in Soho, NYC. Donna holds a B.S. in Industrial Engineering with Distinction from Stanford University and a Harvard MBA.
Kelsey Falter
Founder and CEO of PopTip
Kelsey Falter grew up in an entrepreneurial home, and was taught how to be an entrepreneur by her successful entrepreneurial parents. At age eight, Falter got her first domain name. She worked on MySpace projects as a teen, and then spent a lot of time working with DormBooks.com and actually ran out of a final to fix the college textbook site when it crashed.
She then started Poptip’s predecessor, Markover.com, before realizing that she needed to tweak her original concept to provide a service for a broader audience. She pivoted Markover into PopTip, a program that provides instantaneous feedback for businesses through polls conducted on social networks like Twitter. Poptip has now snagged deals with Budweiser, CNN, and the NFL, among others, to use Poptip's technology to gauge customer sentiment and let people vote on topics socially.
Dr. Anne-Marie
Founder and CEO of Math Musical Minds
The Harvard and Oxford mathematician and musician began singing in local children's hospitals at the age of fourteen, when her mother suggested she use her voice to give service to the local community. She then formed volunteer groups across the nation to encourage other students like herself to do the same thing. When she got injured in a car accident, she experienced first-hand the power of music to uplift the spirit and the mind, so she created the first line of animated musical cartoons to use original music to introduce children to the hospital and the doctor's office, writing the screenplays, composing all of the music, drawing the storyboards, performing the singing, and providing the voices for most of the characters in the videos. The 'Doctor's Office Rock!' and 'Hospital Rock!' videos are now being used in hospitals and homes nationwide.
She then decided to use her mathematical expertise to create a line of math products to follow in the footsteps of the first two, and so she developed Math Musical Minds, a children's video harnessing the power of music and animation to inspire creativity in mathematics. Her products and company have been featured twice in the Huffington Post, and prominent toddler education specialists, mathematicians, and pediatricians nationwide have praised the products for their creativity, entertainment value, and content approach.