10 Successful Companies Founded by Women

Bangalore: Business domain was once considered to be Men’s regime but now entrepreneurship has become quite gender-neutral. The National Women's Business Council reported that the female-owned businesses has grown twice as that of male-owned businesses in between the era of 1997 – 2007. Eighteen percent of all federal patents and trademarks’ awards went to women in 2008, which was only 9 percent 20 years back. Here is a listing of some companies that boast female founders.

1. Cisco

Co-founded by Sandra Lerner

Sandra Lerner co-founded Cisco Systems with her husband Leonard Bosack. Cisco Management designs, manufactures and sells networking equipments. She founded this company in a zeal as she and Leonard were unable to email each other from offices in different buildings while working as a Director of Computer facilities at Stanford University Graduate School of Business. The desire of Sandra to connect with her beloved led her to design this multi-protocol router, which ultimately founded Cisco in 1984.

Sadly she was expelled from Cisco in 1990, but she was reported to walk out with $170 million from the sale of stock option. She then went on to start Urban Decay, a cosmetics firm. Today she is also successfully running a certified organic farm in Virginia.