Sandra
Kurtzig

BIO:

Sandra Kurtzig was one of Silicon Valley’s first female entrepreneurs. She was born in Chicago on October 1st, 1947. Her family moved to California when she was eleven, and once she completed high school she started at UCLA as a mathematics major. After graduation from college, she was accepted into Stanford University’s aeronautical engineering program and graduated in 1968.

She spent the next few years selling computer timeshare services for General Electric. After a while, Kurtzig decided to quit her job with General Electric, and in 1972 she launched her own programming business, naming it ASK Computer Systems. She worked long days to get her business off the ground, which was especially difficult while having a newborn baby, and eventually ASK Systems took off. Kurtzig’s first big break was in 1974, when the computer company Tymshare asked her to write an inventory management program for manufacturing purposes. Her software was called MANMAN, and in 1976 she launched a version of it for Hewlett Packard’s (HP) minicomputer, having predicted the rise of the new machines.

By 1983, ASK Systems was the fastest growing software company in the United States, and her own share was worth $67 million. Kurtzig stepped down from her role as CEO in 1985, though she returned in 1989 to continue to grow the company. At its peak, the company’s annual sales were just under $1 billion USD. In 1994, she published her autobiography, titled CEO: Building a $400 Million Company from the Ground Up.

In 2010, Kurtzig founded the business management software company Kenandy, where she served as CEO until she retired in 2015.

To learn more about Sandra Kurtzig, you can listen to her oral history recorded by the Computer History Museum.

Womanhood is a public art and digital media project that promotes the historical contributions of women to Santa Clara County. https://womanhoodproject.org/ 

Womanhood is supported by the County of Santa Clara Office of Women’s Policy.