Donna Auguste on Resilience, Breaking Barriers and Ignoring the Naysayers

Have you ever seen a picture of someone you've never met and wanted to know their story?

I first saw a picture of Donna Auguste in Doug Menuez's great book –Fearless Genius: The Digital Revolution in Silicon Valley 1985 - 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 exclusive chance to sit down with Donna who shares her inspiring story for this podcast – from being the first African-American (man or woman) to enter the PhD program at Carnegie Mellon researching AI, 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.

With a bachelor’s degree in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science from Berkeley, Donna went on to research Artificial Intelligence at Carnegie Mellon where she spent the holidays interning at Xerox PARC in the early 80s before heading to IntelliCorp as a software engineer working on products which incorporated AI. She then went on to Apple before co-founding her own company - Freshwater Software.

This episode is one of my favourites – Donna’s story is one of grit, faith, determination, ignoring the naysayers and ultimately, a story of success.

As Donna says when discussing the VC’s reaction to her when fundraising, “They had a whole model of what they were looking for and I fit none of it.” Donna proved them wrong. And the lessons she shares shows that you can too, whoever…wherever you are.

As this is the final episode in Series 2, I wanted to thank you dear listeners for coming on this journey with me. I have so enjoyed speaking to my incredible guests: 

Dan Bricklin, Rana el Kaliouby, Nolan Bushnell, David Byttow, Avery Wang, Megan Smith, Ed Smith and of course, Donna Auguste.

I look forward to welcoming you back for Series 3.

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Let us know what you think of this episode and please rate, review and share - it means the world to me and helps others to find it too.

Danielle on Twitter @daniellenewnham and  Instagram @daniellenewnham

Donna on Twitter / Auguste Research website

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This episode was hosted by me - Danielle Newnham, a recovering founder, author and writer who has been interviewing tech founders and innovators for ten years - and produced by Jolin Cheng. 

Mentioned in this episode: Fearless Genius: The Digital Revolution in Silicon Valley 1985 - 2000 by Doug Menuez