“In the Studio,” How Bizeebee’s Poornima Vijayashanker Fell in Love with Building Software

Editor’s note: TechCrunch columnist Semil Shah currently works at Votizen and is based in Palo Alto. You can follow him on Twitter @semil

“In the Studio” continues this week with an engineer who began programming at the end high school, double-majored in CS/EE in college, dropped out of Stanford’s graduate CS program to become the second employee at Mint.com, and after spending some time at Intuit (which acquired Mint), now has her own company focused on building software for the small-medium business market.

Poornima Vijayashanker is not your average engineer. Growing up in a household where electronics were regularly taken apart for fun, she started coding toward the end of high school and ended up majoring in CS for her undergraduate degree. After a brief stint as an R&D engineer for Synopsis, she wanted to dive into the Valley’s startup scene and elected to enroll in a master’s CS program at Stanford. It was there she initially met Aaron Patzer, the founder of Mint, and when the opportunity arose for her to join the small team, she dropped out of Stanford and helped build the company. From that experience, she ended up at Intuit, where she started plotting her next move, and now is the founder and CEO of Bizeebee, member manage software to help small business manage their customers, inventory, and a host of other services.

In addition to building her company, Vijayashanker manages to be extremely active in the startup community, giving back so much of her time and energy by speaking on college campuses to share her story and encourage students and why she thinks technology is a great professional choice. She is also an active mentor to students and has been blogging at her site Femgineer, which has been around for five years. But, that’s enough from me, you should really listen to all the wisdom she shares in this rich video discussion.

[Note: This discussion was originally taped at TechCrunch San Francisco on April 23, 2012.]