Donna Auguste on Resilience, Breaking Barriers and Ignoring the Naysayers
And selling her startup for $147M… in cash
Have you ever looked at a picture of someone you’d never met and wonder what their story was? That’s exactly what happened to me when I saw a picture of Donna August today’s guest and Doug Menuez’s great book, Fearless Genius, a photography book, which documented the digital revolution in Silicon valley from 1985 to 2000.
And I had to know more about her, a black woman leading an engineering team at Apple. Her photo stood out for all the right reasons, among a sea of pictures of Steve Jobs, Bill Gates, John Sculley, et al. Two years later and I got the chance to sit down with Donna to share her inspiring story — from being the first African-American, man or woman, to enter the PhD program at Carnegie Mellon to managing the Newton engineering team at Apple to selling her software business for $147 million. It’s all the more amazing when you learn the obstacles she had to overcome.
Donna’s story is one of grit, faith determination, ignoring the naysayers and, ultimately, a great success story. Here’s her story…
