Field: Mobile communications security
Personal: | 45 | In a relationship, mother of one daughter | BA in international marketing and economics from Hawaii Pacific University
ListenApp, an application that facilitates telephone information security
"I entered the company at a very early stage of its founding. The CEO, Israel Haikin, is my partner. The idea was to develop technology that would enable you to preserve the privacy of your calls, and to know what's happening at the other end of the line - in other words, to conduct a smart, open, and secure call, even if the other side doesn't have our platform.
"Quite a few people thought the idea was impossible, but every breakthrough takes place where they ask why you want to do something that isn't feasible, and you try to do it anyway."
"Our way is a little unusual on the startup scene. We decided that we wouldn't chase after funding. After the first financing round from a private fund, not a venture capital fund, our business model was based on sales. We did beta testing and the pilot from this money, and started to make profits. Our second funding round will also stem from need, and not from raisin money for the sake of it. We're now starting to install the product in the medical sector."
"For me, it's a combination of emotion and intellect. If you're creative, your DNA is different, and you'll always do things differently. Sometimes you express your creativity through photography, sometimes through writing, and sometimes through a marketing campaign."
"The failure that I learned the most from was my first business- international branding and productions. People always want their business to grow, but in my case, the business grew too fast. We found ourselves with 12 new projects simultaneously, and that required personnel we didn't have. The budgeting and planning were wrong, and that eventually led to the business being closed down. I didn't have the tools to cope with the rapid growth.
"Today, I realize that you have to prioritize markets, not go charging after all of them at the same time. You have to act so that one market feeds the next one, so that the revenue from one project, for example, will cover recruitment of new employees. Growth needs to be horizontal, not just vertical."
