Louise Kirkbride

ENTREPRENEUR IN RESIDENCE

Louise founded and managed two venture capital based startups. She raised the seed capital and all subsequent rounds of equity investment and managed the growth of the companies from first employee to successful acquisition. In particular, her expertise is in defining new and emerging markets and in building the business case for investors in these new areas. She is the holder of two patents in software design.

Answer Systems was the first company in the internal help desk automation market. From just an idea, the company grew to profitability by delivering proven cost savings to its Fortune 500 customers like Walgreens, Prudential Securities, Royal Bank of Scotland, British Air, and France Telecom. Broad Daylight, the second company, was among the very first to deliver SaaS CRM solutions to major organizations including Cisco, ATT, BellSouth, McDonalds, and Kodak.

Louise has served on two Boards for the State of California Department of Consumer Affairs. Prior to her experience in the Silicon Valley, Louise was a hardware design engineer for aerospace and computer hardware companies.

A member of the first class of female freshman at Caltech, Louise earned both Bachelor’s and Master’s degrees from that institution in engineering. She is currently a member of the Caltech board of trustees.

In 1976 she was a finalist in the first selection of astronauts for the Space Shuttle program.