Meet Amy Millman of SB.co

A passionate advocate for women entrepreneurs building big businesses starting small, Amy Millman is one of the inspirational women who co-founded Springboard Enterprises, a non-profit venture catalyst which sources, coaches, showcases and supports women-led companies seeking equity capital for product development and expansion. Springboard (SB.co) has assisted hundreds of women entrepreneurs in raising billions in investments. The successes of Springboard entrepreneurs include 10 IPOs, legions of high value M&As and a community of accomplished serial entrepreneurs. Amy is helping female entrepreneurs further their businesses and achieve their most ambitious goals.

Who is Amy Millman?

A former colleague dubbed me a ‘short pushy broad’ but I prefer obsessive-compulsive connector and teller of stories (often embellished for emphasis).  My tech gene was developed while a student at Carnegie Mellon University at the dawn of the tech revolution and after decades of non-tech career choices (read: lobbyist) in Washington DC I found myself back to my roots as one of the chief groupies of women tech entrepreneurs.

What are you trying to do in your work?

The vision in launching Springboard was simply to ‘change the poster’.   We set out in 2000 to build an expert network of women who’d ‘been there, run that’ so that people would recognize many more than three women as business and thought leaders.  We wanted to see thousands of Kay Koplovitz’ (women entrepreneurs who built multi-billion dollar businesses) recognized as the face of the CEO.  In 13 years, we’ve made substantial progress in elevating the profile of some of the most talented women entrepreneurs and creating the marketplace for women-led ventures.

What does innovation mean to you?

Disrupting Interrupt Recreate Think Big (now think bigger). As Cathie Black once told me, “Proceed until Apprehended”. I’m a 60s kid and have no patience with fitting into a mold that someone else built. It’s my personal goal not to get stuck in a rut of ‘ this is how we’ve always done it’ but to think ahead to how we want things to work.

Why .CO?

I am a history major and deeply respect the individuals that created the initiatives that now drive our entrepreneurial ecosystem. But that doesn’t mean we can’t improve on those models. .CO offered us a substantial value add to the vanilla domain offerings and appealed to our desire to engage in win-win relationships with our supporters, partners and affiliates. The .CO proposition resonated with us big time and we have not been disappointed.

What’s next for you?

There is no better cat bird seat to be in than hanging around with highly motivated entrepreneurs and I hope to be able to keep up with them for the foreseeable future if I can keep up my stamina.