Sandra L. Kurtzig is an American businesswoman and technology entrepreneur. She was one of

Silicon Valley Silicon Valley is a region in Northern California that serves as a global center for high technology and innovation. Located in the southern part of the San Francisco Bay Area, it corresponds roughly to the geographical areas San Mateo Coun ...

's first female entrepreneurs, and as the founder of the business and manufacturing software producer

ASK Group ASK Group, Inc., formerly ASK Computer Systems, Inc., was a producer of business and manufacturing software. It is best remembered for its ''Manman'' enterprise resource planning (ERP) software and for Sandra Kurtzig, the company's founder and one ...

in 1972, was the first woman to take a Silicon Valley technology company

public In public relations and communication science, publics are groups of individual people, and the public (a.k.a. the general public) is the totality of such groupings. This is a different concept to the sociological concept of the ''Öffentlichk ...

Career

Early life

Sandra Kurtzig was born in Chicago on October 21, 1947. Kurtzig earned a bachelor's degree in mathematics from

University of California, Los Angeles The University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) is a public land-grant research university in Los Angeles, California. UCLA's academic roots were established in 1881 as a teachers college then known as the southern branch of the California S ...

in 1968,"Kurtzig, Sandra L." ''American Men & Women of Science'': ''A Biographical Directory of Today's Leaders in Physical, Biological, and Related Sciences'', edited by Katherine H. Nemeh, 31st ed., vol. 4, Gale, 2013, p. 699. ''Gale Virtual Reference Library'', Accessed 3 Feb. 2017. and a master's degree in

aeronautical engineering Aerospace engineering is the primary field of engineering concerned with the development of aircraft and spacecraft. It has two major and overlapping branches: aeronautical engineering and astronautical engineering. Avionics engineering is sim ...

at Stanford University.

Contract programming

In 1972, she left her job selling computer

time-sharing In computing, time-sharing is the sharing of a computing resource among many users at the same time by means of multiprogramming and multi-tasking.DEC Timesharing (1965), by Peter Clark, The DEC Professional, Volume 1, Number 1 Its emergence ...

for

General Electric General Electric Company (GE) is an American multinational conglomerate founded in 1892, and incorporated in New York state and headquartered in Boston. The company operated in sectors including healthcare, aviation, power, renewable en ...

and devoted more of her time to starting a family. She founded ASK Group as a part-time job, using "a $2,000 commission check from GE;" the $2,000 was needed to rent a time-sharing terminal. Kurtzig launched ''ASK'' as a small, part-time contract software-programming business out of her second bedroom "to keep her mind occupied" and increase her income, never intending the business to operate outside her house. She was asked by her first client, Halcyon, to create an inventory-tracking program that could efficiently provide manufacturing information. Realizing that other manufacturers might find such a program useful, she recruited several graduates with degrees in engineering and computers. Under her direction they wrote standardized applications that addressed problems faced by local manufacturers.

ERP

Manman

Kurtzig reinvested all profits into growing the company. Her company required access to minicomputers and she persuaded employees at a nearby Hewlett-Packard plant to allow her company to use one of the company's

HP 3000 The HP 3000 series is a family of 16-bit and 32-bit minicomputers from Hewlett-Packard. It was designed to be the first minicomputer with full support for time-sharing in the hardware and the operating system, features that had mostly been limite ...

minicomputers outside of normal working hours. By 1978, ASK released a package of programs called Manman, one of the first

enterprise resource planning Enterprise resource planning (ERP) is the integrated management of main business processes, often in real time and mediated by software and technology. ERP is usually referred to as a category of business management software—typically a sui ...

(ERP) software suites. She later concluded a deal for Hewlett Packard to sell ''Manman'' for use on HP-3000 minicomputers, at a time when most ERP software was only available to run on more expensive mainframe computers. The company went public on NASDAQ in 1981, and in 1983, Kurtzig's personal stake in the ASK Group was worth $67 million. She resigned from her role of CEO of the ASK Group in 1985. but returned in 1989 to refocus and once again grow the company. ASK bought

Ingres Corporation Actian is a computer software company headquartered in Sunnyvale, California that provides data management software. In July 2018, Actian was acquired by HCL Technologies and Sumeru Equity Partners for $330 million. On December 31, 2021, HCL Tech ...

in November 1990. At its peak, the company's annual sales were just under $1 billion U.S. dollars.

Kenandy

In 2010 she founded the enterprise management software company

Kenandy Kenandy is a Rootstock Software company, is an American business-to-business software provider founded by tech entrepreneur Sandra Kurtzig. Kenandy is a vendor to combine quote to cash and enterprise resource planning in a single cloud computin ...

, where she served as the CEO through 2015 and is currently the Chairman. Kenandy specializes in producing cloud ERP solutions for manufacturing businesses. Kenandy is named after Kurtzig's sons, Ken and Andy Kurtzig,Gould, Lawrence S. "Manufacturing Meets Social Networking." ''Automotive Design & Production'' 124.1 (2012): 26-27. ''Business Source Complete''. Web. 3 Feb. 2017. who are serving as CEOs at other tech businesses. In June 2013, Kenandy announced a $33 million round of funding led by

Lightspeed Venture Partners Lightspeed Venture Partners is a global venture capital firm focusing on multi-stage investments in the enterprise, consumer, and health sectors. Lightspeed invests in seed, early and growth-stage companies. The company invests in the U.S. and a ...

. valuing the company at $350 million. Other investors are

Kleiner Perkins Caufield and Byers Kleiner Perkins, formerly Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers (KPCB), is an American venture capital firm which specializes in investing in incubation, early stage and growth companies. Since its founding in 1972, the firm has backed entrepreneurs ...

salesforce.com Salesforce, Inc. is an American cloud-based software company headquartered in San Francisco, California. It provides customer relationship management (CRM) software and applications focused on sales, customer service, marketing automation, a ...

, and WSGR (Wilson, Sonsini, Goodrich and Rosati). Kurtzig's autobiography, ''CEO: Building a $400 Million Company from the Ground Up'' was published by

Harvard Business Press Harvard Business Publishing was founded in 1994 as a not-for-profit, wholly owned subsidiary of Harvard University (distinct from Harvard University Press), with a focus on improving business management practices. The company consists of three ...

Personal

When Kurtzig was awarded the ''Wall Street Transcript's Bronze Award'' and was shortly thereafter "profiled in ''

The Wall Street Journal ''The Wall Street Journal'' is an American business-focused, international daily newspaper based in New York City, with international editions also available in Chinese and Japanese. The ''Journal'', along with its Asian editions, is published ...

'', ''

The New York Times ''The New York Times'' (''the Times'', ''NYT'', or the Gray Lady) is a daily newspaper based in New York City with a worldwide readership reported in 2020 to comprise a declining 840,000 paid print subscribers, and a growing 6 million paid d ...

'', and ''

The Washington Post ''The Washington Post'' (also known as the ''Post'' and, informally, ''WaPo'') is an American daily newspaper published in Washington, D.C. It is the most widely circulated newspaper within the Washington metropolitan area and has a large nati ...

''," she said "It's fun to clip articles and send them to your mother, but ''ASK'' is really a team." Her former husband's name was Arie,died late 2001 and their sons Ken and Andy Kurtzig were born c. 1973 and 1976; their parents divorced when the boys were 12 and 9. Her father's name was Barney Brody. Her mother "Marian (Boruck) Brodywho lived til 100 came from a wealthy Chicago family, graduated from the

University of Illinois The University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign (U of I, Illinois, University of Illinois, or UIUC) is a public land-grant research university in Illinois in the twin cities of Champaign and Urbana. It is the flagship institution of the Univer ...

, and worked for a time as a police reporter in Chicago."

References

External links

Kenandy
{{DEFAULTSORT:Kurtzig, Sandra American business executives American women company founders American company founders Technology company founders Living people University of California, Los Angeles alumni Stanford University School of Engineering alumni 1947 births 21st-century American women