When Nancy Schoendorf funded Agile Software in the spring of 1995, she didn’t expect to sit on its board a decade later. Yet she remains a director of the product lifecycle management company,

long after Agile’s other venture capitalists cashed out. Mrs. Schoendorf saw the company through a 1999 IPO, a busted multibillion-dollar M&A deal with Ariba, seven acquisitions, and, now, $100-millionplus annual revenue that continues to rise.

“She has a lot of pride and a special attachment to the company,” says Agile founder and CEO Bryan Stolle. “She’s had a great head on her shoulders through growth and tough times.”

That kind of long-term dedication, combined with almost two decades of operating experience, has helped Mrs. Schoendorf achieve the same kind of success with several portfolio companies. Her largest exits include analytics software company Alphablox, which was bought by IBM last year for an undisclosed amount, nine years after its founding, and analytics and automation software company Broadbase, which merged into KANA in 2001.

When Mrs. Schoendorf arrived as a freshman at IowaState, she knew she loved math, but didn’t know how to apply it to the real world. A friend suggested that she try computer science. “It solved the problem of what I was going to do—other than teach math,” she remembers.

IowaState

Shortly after graduating with a mathematics and CS double major, Mrs. Schoendorf moved to Silicon Valley to work as an engineer for Hewlett-Packard. She rose through the ranks during 10

Silicon Valley

years at HP, and met her husband, Joe Schoendorf, now a venture development partner at Accel, along the way.

They had two children, but Mrs. Schoendorf never stopped working. After a three-year stint as officer and vice president of R&D at Software Publishing, Mrs. Schoendorf joined Sun Microsystems as director of systems software development, then became a VC at Mohr Davidow Ventures.

Mrs. Schoendorf was wary of speaking about women in technology, until her younger daughter graduated from high school and decided to become an engineer. “It’s important to talk about women in technology because it encourages girls,” she says. “It makes it feel possible and real to them.”