MEG HOURIHAN

Place of Living: New York City, NY

Net Worth        :  $1.4 trillion

Meg Hourihan, 38, co-founded Pyra, the company that built Blogger and sold it to Google. Meg Hourihan, the company that launched the Blogger personal blogging software that was acquired by Google for for a 8 figure deal. Blogs are definitely changing the Internet, and one of the first people to realize this was Meg Hourihan, co-founder of Pyra Labs (the company behind Blogger) and author of ‘We Blog: Publishing Online with Weblogs’.

Being one herself, Meg surely counts as an inspiration for young women entrepreneurs. She is titled a “Young Innovator Who Will Create the Future” by MIT’s Technology Review magazine and is one of the People of the Year in the 2004 issue of PC Magazine.

In this very interesting lane of memories, Meg starts from the start and explains what dragged her into technology (that too at a very early age!), how she went on from working for a consulting firm to creating Blogger, and the obstacles she had to face and barriers she had to cross.

Being an English major, which explains the creation of Blogger, Meg digs into some of the more sophisticated on why blogging is what it is and how incidents like September 11th changed the way we look at blogging forever.

Along with the migration to Google servers, several new features were introduced, including label organization, a drag-and-drop template editing interface, reading permissions (to create private blogs) and new Web feed options. In a version of the service called Blogger in Draft, new features are tested before being released to all users. New features are discussed in the service’s official blog.

“We’re just so disconnected from the people who are actually trying to use this stuff,’” she recounts.

“More proactive encouragement of women in technology needs to happen,” she asserts. “At least now it seems like girls have more exposure to it at younger ages and the opportunity to be familiar with it from the beginning.”