And all that was BEFORE she got into the VC business, and not just the old-style VC business: she does mentoring at TechStars, invested early in UStream, and is CEO of Get Satisfaction, a 50,000+ customer startup which uses social media to support customer relationships.

For all I know, she probably fits brain surgery and rocket science into her spare time.

What might have held her back?

I have some difficulty imagining anything but some seriously futuristic extra-terrestrial technology holding Wendy Lea back for more that a nanosecond, but when asked, she puts up some of her own suggestions as to what might have held her back, if she had been held back, which, judging by her achievements, she probably wasn’t:

  • no classic tech education (not from Stanford or MIT, although she’s since been on the Stanford Directors’ Forum)
  • not got an MBA (although she did graduate Cum Laude with a business degree  from the University of Mississippi)

Being a woman?

She says she never found this to be a problem with the [predominantly male] VCs.

She also talked about the advantages that helped her get started in the VC business:

  • financially independent
  • had a hit startup exit
  • was from the software business

And if you think that all the above achievement looks pretty good on her CV, there’s plenty more:

She serves as a board member at:

She is also:

She established Siebel Systems’ eBusiness Consulting business unit, where she served as VP of Marketing and Alliances at OnTarget

She co-founded The Sales Consultancy (TSC) at which she developed two innovative sales methodologies which were adopted as global standards by:

She also started The Chatham group, through which she ‘provided consulting, angel investments and board to dozens of venture-backed technology start-ups and selected public companies’, which in addition to some of those mentioned above, included Sustainable Minds.