Women Who Inspire Us
Internet

Cynthia Typaldos

Cynthia Typaldos is the founder and chief executive officer of RealCommunities. She is a leading authority on the software infrastructure needed to build, operate, and evolve thriving Internet communities. Her company, RealCommunities, builds enterprise community software for vertical portals, corporate, and B2B web sites. Cynthia is a regular speaker on web communities at various technology conferences.

Cynthia is a pioneer among Internet entrepreneurs. In January 1995, she co-founded and launched GolfWeb, the leading golf portal, which was acquired by CBS Sportsline in January 1998. Business Week named GolfWeb as one of the world's 7 best websites in their "Top Products of the Year" issue for 1996. At GolfWeb she created one of the earliest Internet business models and raised over $10M in venture and corporate funding based on projected revenues of advertising, ecommerce, and membership. While developing the GolfWeb Player's Club, she realized that web community software could be generalized and this led to the creation of her current company, RealCommunities.

Cynthia has been in the hi-tech industry her entire career. After graduating from the University of California at Berkeley with a degree in chemistry and a minor in computer science, she started as assembly language programmer doing fault-tolerant, database driven, networked systems at Bank of America in San Francisco, California. During her stint at BofA she also attended graduate school at UC Berkeley in computer science. Later, Cynthia attended MIT's Sloan School of Management, and after graduating started her second career as a marketing professional. Cynthia worked for Sun Microsystems, as head of desktop and mass storage product marketing, then later as director of software marketing. She was also Suns' first director of standards.

In 1991 Cynthia decided to teach a course on Software Product Marketing through UC Berkeley Extension, as a way of giving back to the community and, as it turns out, the start of a terrific network! As the class became more and more popular, other topics for classes about the software business also seemed like they would be successful. Cynthia put together a program for UC Berkeley Extension, called the Business of Software and signed up various friends and experts to teach courses. The program now consists of approximately 20 different courses and trains more than 1,500 people each year. She also taught a course on web communities. Cynthia has taught continuously since 1991.