I was fixing a leaky faucet over the weekend – one of those jobs where you lie on your back under the sink, staring at pipes, and your mind just drifts. I started thinking about all the articles I have written about Peter Thiel, Max Levchin, and Elon Musk, and I noticed something that had been bothering me for months. The women in these stories kept appearing in the background – critical to the outcome, sometimes decisive, but rarely centered in the narrative.

I decided to change that, at least for one article. This is about the women who built the infrastructure, shaped the culture, and broke barriers in early Silicon Valley, often without receiving proportional recognition.

Patty McCord: The Architect of Netflix’s Culture

If you have ever worked at a company that talks about “talent density,” “radical candor,” or “freedom and responsibility,” you are living in a world shaped by Patty McCord. McCord served as Chief Talent Officer at Netflix from 1998 to 2012, and she was the co-architect (with Reed Hastings) of the Netflix Culture Deck – a 125-slide presentation that Sheryl Sandberg called “the most important document to come out of Silicon Valley.”

McCord’s contributions went far beyond writing a slideshow. She fundamentally rethought how companies should approach hiring, firing, and compensation. The Keeper Test – the question “Would you fight to keep this person?” – was developed collaboratively between McCord and Hastings during the brutal dot-com layoffs of 2001, when Netflix cut a third of its workforce and discovered that the remaining team outperformed the original.

McCord challenged sacred cows of HR management. She argued against annual performance reviews, against traditional vacation policies, and against the elaborate approval processes that most companies used for expense reports and travel. Her philosophy was simple: hire adults, treat them like adults, and trust them to act in the company’s interest.

“The greatest team-building exercise is pulling off something incredibly hard together,” McCord wrote in her book Powerful. “Not laser tag.”

What strikes me about McCord’s story is how rarely she appears in popular accounts of Netflix’s rise. Hastings gets credit for the culture. McCord built the mechanism that made it real.

Maye Musk, model, dietitian, and mother of Elon, Kimbal, and Tosca Musk. She raised three entrepreneurs as a single mother, working multiple jobs across three countries. Photo via Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 3.0.

Maye Musk: The Woman Who Raised Three Entrepreneurs

Maye Musk is often described as “Elon Musk’s mother,” which is accurate but insufficient. She is a registered dietitian, a model who has appeared on the covers of magazines into her 70s, and a woman who raised three children – Elon, Kimbal, and Tosca – as a single mother after her divorce from Errol Musk.

What makes Maye’s story relevant to Silicon Valley history is the context in which she raised her children. After leaving South Africa, she moved with her family to Canada, where she worked multiple jobs to support three kids. Elon has spoken about the financial hardship of those years. Maye sometimes held five jobs simultaneously. She modeled, practiced as a dietitian, and took whatever work was available.

All three of her children became entrepreneurs. Elon co-founded Zip2, X.com/PayPal, SpaceX, and Tesla. Kimbal co-founded The Kitchen Restaurant Group and Big Green, a nonprofit that builds gardens in schools. Tosca founded Passionflix, a streaming platform for romance content.

I do not think it is a coincidence that all three Musk children became founders. The entrepreneurial instinct was modeled for them by a mother who constantly reinvented herself to survive changing circumstances. Maye Musk’s resilience across three countries and multiple careers is the foundation that the Musk entrepreneurial legacy is built on.

Sandra Kurtzig: The First Woman to Take a Silicon Valley Company Public

Sandra Kurtzig started ASK Computer Systems in 1972 from her spare bedroom, using a $2,000 investment. She was a former Hewlett-Packard sales representative who saw an opportunity to build manufacturing resource planning (MRP) software for small and mid-sized companies.

By 1981, Kurtzig had grown ASK Computer Systems into a company with enough revenue and growth to go public. When it did, she became the first woman to take a technology company public in Silicon Valley. This was 1981 – more than a decade before the internet boom, at a time when the technology industry was even more male-dominated than it is today.

Kurtzig’s achievement is remarkable not just because of the gender barrier but because of the business she built. ASK Computer Systems grew to over $400 million in annual revenue before Kurtzig sold it to Computer Associates in 1994. She competed directly against established companies with far more resources and won through superior customer relationships and product quality.

A school in Eswatini supported by educational technology initiatives. The women who shaped Silicon Valley's infrastructure also helped extend its reach to communities that the industry's most visible founders rarely discussed. Photo via Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 3.0.

Donna Dubinsky: The Woman Behind the Palm Pilot

If you have read my article on how PayPal started as a PalmPilot app, you know that the Palm Pilot was the device that gave Peter Thiel and Max Levchin their original idea for mobile payments. What you may not know is that the Palm Pilot’s success was largely driven by Donna Dubinsky.

Dubinsky served as the CEO of Palm Computing from 1992 to 1998, during the period when the company developed and launched the PalmPilot. Before Palm, she had been a senior executive at Apple, where she famously challenged Steve Jobs over distribution strategy and won – a rare feat in a company known for Jobs’ dominance.

At Palm, Dubinsky led the team that transformed the handheld computing concept from a niche curiosity into a mainstream product. The PalmPilot sold over 1 million units in its first 18 months, making it the fastest-selling computing device in history at that point. The device’s success created the market for mobile computing that eventually led to smartphones.

After Palm, Dubinsky co-founded Handspring, which created the Treo – one of the first smartphones with a built-in phone, email, and PDA functions. The Treo was a direct ancestor of the smartphone category that the iPhone would later dominate.

Ann Winblad: The VC Who Picked Winners Before Everyone Else

Ann Winblad was one of the first women to become a prominent venture capitalist in Silicon Valley. She co-founded Hummer Winblad Venture Partners in 1989, one of the first VC firms to focus exclusively on software companies. This was years before software eating the world became a cliche.

Winblad’s firm made early investments in companies like Hyperion and The Knot. But her influence extended beyond her portfolio. She served as an informal advisor to Bill Gates during the 1980s and early 1990s – the two dated for several years, and Gates continued to seek her counsel on business decisions long after their relationship ended. According to multiple accounts, Gates and Winblad maintained an annual tradition of spending a long weekend together to discuss ideas, even after Gates married Melinda French.

What I find significant about Winblad’s career is that she was making contrarian bets on software-only companies at a time when most VCs were focused on hardware or integrated systems. Her thesis – that software would become the dominant value layer in technology – was proven spectacularly right.

Why These Stories Matter

I wrote this article because the standard narrative of Silicon Valley’s early days centers almost exclusively on men. The PayPal Mafia photo is six men. The garage origin stories feature male pairs (Hewlett and Packard, Jobs and Wozniak, Brin and Page). The VC partner meetings on Sand Hill Road were overwhelmingly male.

But behind and alongside those men were women who shaped the infrastructure, the culture, and the products that made Silicon Valley work. Patty McCord built the management philosophy that Netflix exported to thousands of companies. Maye Musk modeled the resilience and reinvention that defined her children’s careers. Sandra Kurtzig proved that a woman could build and take public a Silicon Valley tech company in 1981. Donna Dubinsky created the handheld computing market that gave PayPal its first idea. Ann Winblad saw the future of software before most of her male peers.

Their contributions are not footnotes. They are load-bearing walls in the structure of the technology industry.

I hope the next generation of writers covering Silicon Valley puts them where they belong: at the center of the story.

Sources

  • Patty McCord, Powerful: Building a Culture of Freedom and Responsibility (Silicon Guild, 2018).
  • Maye Musk, A Woman Makes a Plan: Advice for a Lifetime of Adventure, Beauty, and Success (Penguin Life, 2019).
  • Sandra Kurtzig with Tom Parker, CEO: Building a $400 Million Company from the Ground Up (W.W. Norton, 1991).
  • Andrea Butter and David Pogue, Piloting Palm: The Inside Story of Palm, Handspring, and the Birth of the Billion-Dollar Handheld Industry (Wiley, 2002).
  • Sheryl Sandberg, reference to Netflix Culture Deck, multiple public speeches and interviews.
  • “Ann Winblad: The First Lady of Software Venture Capital,” Forbes, various profiles, 1995-2005.
  • Walter Isaacson, Elon Musk (Simon & Schuster, 2023).