Did your dad run a service station when you were growing up?

Yeah. He had me help him. I was maybe 12 years old, just old enough to be able to reach things under cars. He had me changing oil. I was just a young kid pulling heads off of engines and lapping valves and stuff. He didn’t isolate me from any of that stuff, which was awesome.

What obstacles have you faced in your field?

There are lots of obstacles in Silicon Valley, especially for a female entrepreneur. The money that female entrepreneurs can raise is dismal compared to men. It’s like 2 percent. It rewards the kind of male bravado where you go in and get a fist bump and get a bunch of money. That’s how it feels. There’s been some really disheartening surveys recently. They followed 300 women and 300 men, and then they determined, what questions do venture capitalists ask men versus women and men get asked, “tell me all about the upside,” while women are asked, “tell me how you’re going to defend yourself from the marauders.” And so that’s been a bit of a challenge for me.

How do you define success?

I’ve done a lot of things in my life. And not many of them are public, and I think they’ve been successful. Some of them are just my mentoring and giving back. I don’t get much recognition for some of these things. Sometimes it’s the satisfaction of doing something that folks think will be impossible. So, I mean, a few years ago, I built semiconductors in my garage. I began doing research and people told me it would be impossible. They said you have to have clean rooms and millions of dollars of equipment and I decided I think I can do it in any case. I spent like five years researching. It was like a passion project, and then I did it.