As a part of our series about “Why We Need More Women Founders”, I had the pleasure of interviewing Janine Firpo.

Janine Firpo is an author and speaker who spent more than 20 years in executive roles at Hewlett-Packard, the World Bank, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, and more. She is a values-aligned investor in companies that make the world a better place and is passionate about teaching women to learn how to invest their own money. Embodying these principles, Janine is releasing her first book, Activate Your Money — Invest to Grow Your Wealth and Build a Better World in May of 2021.

Thank you so much for doing this with us! Before we dig in, our readers would like to get to know you a bit more. Can you tell us a bit about your “backstory”? What led you to this particular career path?

My current work is actually my third career, but I would not be doing it if the other two had not come before. My first career, which sprang out of nowhere, started in the early 1980s. I was in graduate school at the time working towards what I thought would become a PhD in Marine Biology, but was floundering because my heart was not in it. One day I was hanging out at a swimming pool in the middle of the day, because that is what you did in Florida in the summer, when a stranger and I started talking. When I told him of my uncertainty about my future, he said “Computers. They are the future.” It was like a scene out of “The Graduate.”