Pc Entrepreneurs Break Molds, Barriers

Quick: Give us your stereotype of the computer entrepreneur. It’s a guy, right? Age 35 max. Began jockeying a keyboard long before he encountered puberty, hacked his way through MIT, runs a company in Cambridge that’s littered with pizza boxes and get-rich dreams. Wants to be the next Bill Gates.

Now meet counter-stereotype. She’s no guy. Seen her 40th birthday and perhaps then some. Grew up before teenagers had computers in their rooms, graduated from someplace like Bryn Mawr, runs a company that may even be located in the suburbs, and perhaps raised some kids along the way. Wants to be the next Bill Gates.

Although there are no statistics on such digital cowgirls, there are considerably more of them dotting the landscape than you might think, women hunkered down in tiny home offices or perched in comfortable corporate digs. But despite the fact that the National Foundation for Women Business Owners recently reported that women now own one-third of all US businesses, it startles many folks to encounter a computer company, however small, where the reins aren’t held by a man.

“It’s still kind of unusual for women to be CEOs of companies,” says Marcia Radosevich, 43, chairman of the board and CEO of HPR Inc. in Cambridge, Mass., who was paid $242,000 in salary and bonuses last year to run the specialized software and database outfit she co-founded eight years ago. “But it’s even more unusual for them to be CEOs of technology companies. I don’t think it causes anybody any grief. But it’s a surprise.”

What’s more, because women often put off their entrepreneurial inclinations for a number of years, most of those who fire up such companies will never be referred to as young Turks. Judith Brodman of Needham, Mass., now 52 and who went into the computer consulting business on her 40th birthday, has been greeted by that certain startled look more than once. “You might go to a conference and meet someone with whom you’ve exchanged e-mail, and you can tell by the expression on his face that you’re not exactly what he expected,” she says.

So who are these women, anyway? Sitting in her spacious office overlooking the Charles River, Radosevich is a former academic from Iowa whose original field of expertise was deviant sociology. “I thought I’d teach, do research and add to the world’s knowledge bank,” she says. But she eventually went to business school, became a health care consultant and started HPR with three employees in what was once a tiny student apartment in Boston located above a yogurt shop. Today her company, which makes products that allow health care providers to measure costs and quality, employs some 120 people, requires more than a half-acre of office space and features a sun deck that’s digitally wired.

Radosevich, who is single but shares a penthouse condominium with the man she has lived with for 20 years, discovered computers - room-size mainframes, as opposed to the tiny laptop she uses today - as a graduate student some two decades ago. “They seemed to have some beautiful internal rhythm, once you figured them out,” she muses. Yet today she sits in an office that is no more digitally sophisticated than, say, a typical journalist’s. “I’m not a computer geek,” she hastens to report. “I don’t operate out of command central.”

Across the Charles River in Boston’s Kenmore Square, however, 62-year-old Jackie Grubb looks as if she’s flying the Concorde. Sitting next to a window located 11 stories above the pavement, this former high school economics teacher, widow and mother of two grown children is a full-time consultant who helps both businesses and home users sort out their computer lives. And she’s wired for the job: a pair of desktop computers, a subnotebook computer, a monitor, a printer, a scanner, a label printer, a ZIP drive and so forth. When she leaves her two-bedroom apartment, Grubb slips her subnotebook into a bag with a phone and a beeper. Sometimes, she says, she sets up shop at the food court in the Prudential Center shopping mall: “I call myself the electronic bag lady.”

Grubb grew up on the West Coast, taught school and encountered her first computer when she and her late husband purchased an early PC during the 1970s. She even tried writing software, including Mother Grubb’s Computer-Aided Instruction on How to Use Unit Prices to Save on Your Grocery Dollar, a product that didn’t exactly fly. “When I started using computers, they just came naturally to me,” she recalls. “I tell people I was born into the wrong body. I’m a nerd but don’t look like it. When I go into a computer store, the salespeople look at me like I couldn’t possibly know what I’m doing.”

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