Radha Basu
Radha Basu
Advisory Board Member, Chairman of the Board, SupportSoft
Radha was
born and raised in Chennai,
India, where
she secretly applied to an engineering school and where she received the
highest result in the entrance exam as one of just 17 women in the course with
2,700 students. At the age of 20, she
earned a master’s degree in electrical engineering from the University of Southern
California and subsequently attended the Stanford
Executive Management Program.
Professionally,
she served a 20-year tenure as general manager for Hewlett Packard’s
international software division. Radha joined
SupportSoft as CEO in July 1999 and is considered a pioneer of the
support automation market having built SupportSoft into a global market leader
in support automation software, with customers, including GE, Cisco Systems,
Bank of America, BellSouth, Procter & Gamble, IBM, Comcast, Verizon, BT and
Airtel.
In addition
to the guidance and inspiration she provides others on a daily basis, Radha has
had significant impact on two groups during her career. First is the
Indian software industry. In the mid-1980s, she developed HP’s software
center in Bangalore,
one of HP’s first foreign subsidiaries; and it is still thriving today. While today many high tech companies have satellite
offices or development groups in India,
when Radha set up the software center in Bangalore,
it was truly a pioneering event. Radha has also had strong influence on
women in technology as a whole. In addition to blazing a trail for other
women executives in high technology, Radha makes an effort to mentor young
girls in science as well as lend her expertise to other woman professionals in
the technology industry.
Radha
recently retired from her role as CEO and along with her husband Dipak founded
the Anudip Foundation to fund humanitarian projects. Their first project - the Linkage
Rural Entrepreneur
Development Center
of the Anudip Society was inaugurated on May 8th at the premises of our
partner, Asha Welfare Society, in beautifully rural Namkhana island in the
south Sundarbans. The goal of Linkage India is to create
livelihood for the unemployed and marginalized poor through a chain of
resource centers for the development of rural entrepreneurs and their
empowerment with access to markets and capital.
Radha,
and her husband Dipak, have trekked on Mt. Everest
twice, reaching its base camps on both the North and South sides. She applies
this experience to every aspect of her life - “The mountain doesn’t care if you
are a Hollywood actress or a CEO - the
enormity of the trek forces you to be prepared for every disaster. Resilience,
team work, risk taking and passion are key to both trekking and being a CEO.” 
