Radha Basu has over 30 years of experience in executive management. She is widely recognized as a leading woman entrepreneur in technology companies and as a pioneer in the Indian software business. Radha was born and raised in Chennai. She holds a bachelors degree in Electronics & Communications from the University of Madras, a master's degree in Computer Science from the University of Southern California, and is a graduate of the Stanford Executive Management program.

Radha held the position of Chairman & CEO of SupportSoft, a Nasdaq-listed company, from July 1999 to May 2006. She led the company through initial and secondary public offerings in 2000 and 2003, and built it into a worldwide market leader in support automation software. SupportSoft's customers include General Electric, Cisco Systems, Bank of America, Comcast, British Telecom, BellSouth, Procter & Gamble, Verizon, IBM and Bharti Telecom. SupportSoft is today considered a leader in the activation of consumer broadband offerings.

Prior to SupportSoft, Radha spent 20 years at Hewlett Packard with her most recent position being Senior General Manager of the Electronic Business Software Organization, which she grew to a global $1.5 billion business.

Radha joined HP in 1978 as an R&D engineer in HP Laboratories, working in the field of ultrasound imaging. In 1983 she moved to Germany as European Sales & Marketing Manager of diagnostic medical products. In 1985 she set up HP's Sales and R&D operations in India, including the India Software Operation, where she served as Managing Director. In 1989 Radha returned to the US to become General Manager of HP's International Software Organization with responsibility for eight offshore software centers around the world.

Radha has had significant impact on two groups during her career. First is the Indian software industry. In the mid-1980s she set up HP's software center in Bangalore and the HP-TCS joint venture in Chennai. While today many high-tech companies have software subsidiaries or development groups in India, the HP India software operation with its first satellite data link was truly ground-breaking. Radha has also had strong influence on women in technology as a whole. In addition to blazing a trail for other women executives, she makes an effort to mentor young girls in science and woman professionals in the technology industry.

Radha has won numerous awards including Excelsior Leadership, Top25 Women of the Web, CEO of the Year 2000, Leader of the Millennium, and has been profiled in the Wall Street Journal, Business Week, Upside Magazine and Economic Times. She has featured as a guest speaker at Wharton School, MIT Sloan School, Stanford Business School, Santa Clara University, and the Forbes Executive Summit. She is currently serving as Entrepreneur-in-Residence at Simmons School of Management and on the boards of Interplast, MIT Global Climate Change Consortium, Center for Science Technology and Society and C.E.O. Women.

After retiring as CEO of SupportSoft, Radha and her husband Dipak created a global social enterprise, the Anudip Foundation. The goal of Anudip is to generate livelihoods for the unemployed and marginalized poor of India through rural centers for development of entrepreneurs and their empowerment with access to markets and capital. It is now a well established social enterprise in economic empowerment of youth and women. (www.anudip.org)

She currently holds the position of managing director at the Center for Science, Technology, and Society (CSTS) at Santa Clara University. CSTS is a University Center of Distinction, and undertakes three integrative activities: educating students, engaging the public, and exemplifying the realization of social benefit through our flagship Global Social Benefit Incubator (GSBITM).The mission is to understand and enable the innovative application of science, and technology for global human benefit. We pursue this mission by linking the practices of scholarship, education, and science and technology innovation, in order to foster conscientious and responsible action on behalf of those most in need. The GSBI is a capacity-building program that provides social entrepreneurs with the knowledge and skills to develop and execute strategies for achieving at scale. Through the discipline of business planning, the GSBI helps social entrepreneurs to understand the process of early and mass-market adoption in target beneficiary populations as well as the vital role of "business models" in generating the capital for accelerating growth.

Radha and fellow co-founder, Dipak, are avid trekkers and have reached base camps on Mount Everest on the Tibet and Nepal sides. Radha applies this experience of resilience, risk-taking and extreme effort to achieve success in every aspect of her life.

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