Harvard Business School had a portrait gallery for International Women’s Day. I chose to write about someone I had the great privilege of working with over a decade ago, and becoming friends with:

Silvia Pfeiffer is one of most accomplished women I know. She is a rare female serial entrepreneur in the tech world, having started three successful companies in the past decade; has been an editor of the HTML5 spec that powers the World Wide Web and the Internet; led research on many of the underlying video & audio technologies that underpin YouTube and streaming media today; and has a Ph.D in Computer Science and an MBA.

She was my manager and mentor for over two years after I first graduated from college. I watched her excel in the male-dominated field of academia & industry research, and she did all of this after immigrating to Australia from Germany in her late twenties—rebuilding networks, making new friends and familiarizing herself with a very different culture—and raising her then-newborn son until his teens as a single mother before she met her life partner.

I still don’t know how she managed to do so much with an eternally cheery and optimistic attitude, and feel privileged to call her my mentor and friend. Thank you for being a huge inspiration to me and so many others, Silvia.

Shouts out to you, Silvia!