About Heidi Roizen and brief background

• Raised in Silicon Valley. Surrounded by technology and entrepreneurship at a young age

• Parent’s divorce lead to financial conservatism during high school years
• Graduated 2 quarters early from Stanford ( Dec 1979) majoring in creative writing
• First Job – Editor of company newsletter of Tandem Computer. Roizen impressed the woman in charge of hiring and
this proved to be her 1st experience in networking
• Worked closely with CEO and sat in monthly top management meetings
• MBA from Stanford - Decided to return to school for degree in Business. CEO of Tandem wrote recommendation for
her. Graduated in 1983
• Worked with her brother ( computer programmer) and established T/Maker ( spreadsheet software introduced in 1979)
• President of SPA – Served as President of Software Publishers Association (SPA), which gave her significant industry
exposure and opportunity to meet industry leaders
• T/Maker designed software for the Mac (1984) including Click Art Personal Publisher and broadened its product line.
Brother’s stake bought by Roizen and Farros in 1986
• CEO of T/Maker Subsidiary – T/Masker grew to $15M and 100 employees. Company sold to Deluxe Corp in 1994.
CEO of the subsidiary till 1996
• VP –Worldwide Developer Relations, Apple - Joined Apple as VP of worldwide developer relations. Primary role to
shore up Apple’s relationships with its 12,000 external software developers ( Apple was losing market at this point)
• While doing her old job, became involved with helping senior management refocus Apple’s strategy.
• Burned out by relentless pace and huge technical and political issues faced by Apple left company in 1997
• Mentor Capitalist – Not wanted to work in another corporate job. Started working as mentor capitalist. She served as
an active outside board member for start-ups that had received at least one round of venture capital banking. Her
experience, skills in strategic planning and networking were her strong points
• Frequently helped people she liked and respected find new career opportunities
• Invited to join Softbank as 1 of 5 investing partner in 1999. Brought in for her mentoring abilities and her executive
contacts
• Within 4 months, was working 80% of her time at Softbank
• As her role as a VC increased, she couldn’t help but wonder what impact it would have on the nature of the network
that she had worked so hard to establish