About the Femgineer

Hi, I’m Poornima Vijayashanker.  I graduated from Duke with double major in Electrical and Computer Engineering and Computer Science, and moved to Silicon valley to be a femgineer.  I was the sole femgineer at Mint.com, a startup, based in down town Mountain View, which was acquired by Intuit.  Post acquisition I decided to leave Mint and start my own startup, BizeeBee.  I truly love coding and solving engineering problems day and night.  When I’m not writing code, I write about coding and software architecture, and my experiences as a little femgineer in a mengineer’s world :)

My Startups

BizeeBee (January 2010 – Present) CEO & Founder

Mint.com (September 2006 – January 2010) Employee #2, founding engineer.

Startups I Advise

BuyVite

SmartAsset

Other Blogs I Frequently Write For

Women 2.0 Focused on Women in Tech Startups

TeachAsana Blog for Yoga Teachers

The Hive Resources for Membership Based Small Businesses

BizeeBee Buzz News on the Evolution of the BizeeBee Product and Company

  1. I’m glad I stumbled across your blog on the Women 2.0 twitter stream. I love Mint.com, I’ve been using it for almost a year. FINALLY, there was a solution that helped me keep track of my expenses on the go (mainly, on my phone). I paid off all my credit cards and just have a little over $1500 in school loans. Yes, most of the discipline in paying off the debt came from me but not being able to see how much my real net worth prevented me from getting rid of my debt before.

    It’s great to know there is a femgineer on the Mint team, I wish you much luck in your own startup venture. Incidentally, I went to the Women 2.0 Startup Weekend and thought it was an amazing experience, was Hacker Dojo something similar? I look forward to reading more, I wish I continued my degree in computer engineering, unfortunately, coding is not one of my talents.

    • Poornima Vijayashanker
    • December 16th, 2009

    Thanks a lot for using Mint.com! I’m happy you love it and find it useful and making your life better everyday. Good work on paying off your debt :)

    Hacker Dojo is a place in MV where entrepreneurs/engineers can go to work, its not an conference. Check it out here: http://venturebeat.com/2009/08/13/hacker-dojo-finally-a-hangout-where-coders-can-go-247/

  2. He he – femgineer in a mengineer’s world. I’ll have to remember that.

  3. I just signed up for Women 2.0’s Will it Launch? workshop and saw that you will be there. Looking forward to this workshop, I actually extended my visit to California to attend that workshop.

  4. Great presentation today at the MEMP. It really showed that you had rehearsed it well. I would have expected the same delivery and poise from a CEO twice your age, but not from an engineer. You also gave me and other entrepreneurial MEMP students inspiration to keep working on our own IT ventures with the balance of our waking hours, so many thanks.

    Best luck carrying this momentum and aplomb into your next venture.

    • H
    • March 11th, 2010

    Fabulous blog!

    Silly thing, but have you ever thought about enabling Pretty Permalinks in WordPress?

  5. Awesome page you got here.

    btw computer does’nt know the difference between femgineer and mengineer’s code. may be soon it evolve to learn about the differences i presume !!

    • Poornima
    • April 25th, 2010

    No need to tell the difference, thats what makes it awesome!

    • Debasish Das
    • April 28th, 2010

    Hi Poornima,

    Great blog. I am still reading through it. Thanks for pointing out the hacker dojo link. I recently moved to bay area and I was looking for something like hacker dojo :-)

    Best of luck with BizeeBee..I am sure it will rock like mint.com !

    Deb

    • Kevin Le
    • May 31st, 2010

    I’d like to read about coding and software architecture and your engineering problem solving experiences. But why do you have emphasize so much on the word femgineer, which I am not even sure that’s a valid word. This text area highlights it in red as if it does not recognize that word or as if it was a typo.

    • Poornima
    • June 1st, 2010

    Kevin – Thanks I’m glad you enjoy the blog. Femgineer is a made up word! Its how I’ve chosen to brand myself, and all female engineers who aspire to be sophisticated and can code.

  6. Congrats on your blog! And of course the exit with Mint :)
    Best of luck with the new startup! Would love to hear more.

  7. Hi Poornima,

    Stumbled across this blog by accident through my Google Reader off another feed. In any event, would love to connect. Sounds like you got a pretty good blog going.

  8. Hi Poornima!

    I really like your blog, and I wanted to share another site with you that might be of interest — Stemming (http://stemming.org), a collaborative blog and social network for women in science and technology. We’d love to have your perspective on our blog and on the site in general!

  9. Hi Poornima,
    I really enjoyed your talk and chatting with you at the Hub in San Francisco last night. Love your blog, eventhough I am not a Femgineer. Cheers and I hope our paths will cross again.

    • bp
    • June 12th, 2010

    Reading your blog was inspirational. Keep up the awesome work!

    • Ed
    • September 21st, 2010

    Too bad you’re up to your eyebrows in BizeeBee, I’d love to have you for a cofounder on my own startup.

  10. Hi Poornima,

    I am not sure how I started following you on Twitter. But trust me I use to read all your Tweets. Today out of curious I thought of explore your profile and found http://www.bizeebee.com is not working and when u try visiting this website it takes you to some search engine page. I also tweeted you now in a while asking for your company URL and later I noticed femgineer.com I should say its worth me putting the effort to reach your blog through fremgineer. I am glad that I read your wonderful write-up about yourself and the blog contents, its highly motivating. Let me know if you visit India, I would be more than happy to meet such wonderful people who dream their own dream and who live their own dream.

    Congratulations on starting your own start-up and I am sure its gonna rock.

    All the very best to you.

    Regards,

    Bharat
    Headhunter by passion
    http://www.bharatheadhunters.com

    • Poornima
    • October 30th, 2010

    Bharat – Thanks for your vote of confidence and for reading my blog! I haven’t visited India in 10 years, i probably should, but haven’t taken the time to make it a priority right now. When I do you’ll see me tweet, so be sure to reach out again :)

  11. Hey Poornima,

    Congratulations on mint’s success and now with bizeebee’s launch! I was joyed to see femgineer’s contributions!

    Curious with bizeebee’s idea and niche market – whats your marketing strategy? I have a startup in the education+HR niche (online software for schools to manage teachers) and would appreciate inputs on how to target niche areas like yours or mine effectively?

    Thanks and look forward to connecting soon..

    Yash

  12. Congrats i am very proud of you :)
    i was just going through my twitter tweets list when i got your tweet retweeted by some person and then through that link i visited your twitter profile,femgineer and bizeebee.

    i am also working on a saas startup from india so your blog articles are very inspiring and helping me :)

    for us the main challenge is getting early adopters for our product.

    can you please write some post on how you got your early adopters for bizeebee please :)

    • Poornima
    • August 6th, 2011

    Thanks Jayesh! Sure I can write a post on that. Although I will say that getting early adopters is the kinda thing you work on for awhile…

  13. wow thanks for replying well that itself is very inspiring for me.

    i will work on getting early adopters for my product once again Thanks :)

    • Daisy Jing
    • November 14th, 2011

    Hi Poornima, I found your blog through Women 2.0 and good to see that you are a Duke Alumni! I love your post on career and relationship and the sacrifice you have to make. I can totally relate to that! It’s so great you are honest and open about the realities of the startup work.

    I would love to grab coffee with you sometime! Hope you see this post :D

    Daisy Jing.

    • Poornima
    • December 20th, 2011

    Hi Daisy,

    Apologies for the delay, I’m going to be out of the country until end of January. But lets plan on getting together when I’m back.

    Kindly,
    Poornima

    • Thomas Mendy
    • February 4th, 2012

    Hi,

    I follow you on twitter ( @5millioncity), i have seen something interesting for me, about my future start-up, could you send me your email please to talk about it ?

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