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<div class="image-container float_right" style="width:395px"><div class="image"></div>Microsoft</div><keyword id="1753411" type="UNKNOWN" weightage="60" keywordseo="Debra-Chrapaty">Debra Chrapaty</keyword> just announced that she's leaving <keyword id="188699" type="COMPANY" weightage="60" keywordseo="Zynga">Zynga</keyword> to become the CEO of <keyword id="1753412" type="UNKNOWN" weightage="60" keywordseo="Nirvanix">Nirvanix</keyword>, a well-funded <keyword id="6356323" type="UNKNOWN" weightage="100" keywordseo="Enterprise">enterprise</keyword> startup backed by Square investor <keyword id="130474" type="COMPANY" weightage="60" keywordseo="Khosla-Ventures">Khosla Ventures</keyword>.
She was happy at Zynga, she told Business Insider, but left for two reasons. First, before she became CIO of Zynga in 2011, she had the career goal of becoming a CEO. And second, renowned venture capitalist <keyword id="76921" type="PERSON" weightage="60" keywordseo="Vinod-Khosla">Vinod Khosla</keyword>, an old friend, called her and personally recruited her for Nirvanix.
Khosla had been wanting her to become Nirvanix's CEO since November. That's when she agreed to join the company as its chairman. The CEO role seemed to be custom-made for Chrapaty. Nirvanix is a cloud-computing service provider for enterprises. It's claim to fame is storage, providing things like backups and archives. 
Chrapaty has a long history building out cloud-computing services, first at Microsoft and then at Zynga.
She's actually been a powerhouse tech executive since the late 1990s when she was CIO of E*Trade. She also spent about 18 months at Cisco, running its multibillion-dollar Collaboration business unit.
Here's an edited transcript of our conversation.
BUSINESS INSIDER: You're known these day for your role at Zynga but you spent far more time Microsoft, seven years. How did you get that job?
DEBRA CHRAPATY: I got a call from Gia Scinto, still a good friend, who was a recruiter at Microsoft and is now a recruiter for Andreessen Horowitz. She said, "Sometimes at Microsoft we have great jobs and find great executives. Sometimes we find great executives and find great jobs for them. You're a great executive and I'm going to find you a great job at Microsoft." And she did.
I was there seven years and I ran all their data centers and networks, billion of dollars of infrastructure at mass scale. I loved it but my partner <a href="http://www.linkedin.com/pub/ramona-pierson/4/627/197">[Ramona Pierson]</a> had created a startup. Her board wanted her in the Bay Area and we were really sick of the rain.
BI: So you moved to Cisco, right when it was having one of its roughest years ever? What was that like?
DC: Microsoft was definitely a technically-lead culture, unlike Cisco which is a sales driven culture. I enjoyed my time at Cisco. Chambers is a wonderful person and I really felt like when I joined Cisco I was part of a connected culture.
It was just a tough inflection point for the company at the time. I think that John needed to retrench and he did. When he did, I didn't feel I was right for the business. No hard feelings. 
I got the phone call saying, "Do I want to be CIO of Zynga?" and I did. I loved every minute of it.
BI: So why did you leave Zynga?
DC: Prior to Zynga, after Cisco, I thought that my next job should be CEO. But when I got the call for Zynga I thought, why would I want to miss that phenomenon? So I took the job.
I wasn't looking for a job. I knew [Vinod] Khosla for many years. He came back a few months ago and thought Nirvanix could use my leadership. I wasn't ready to make a change, so I took the job as chairman of the board. This is about personal growth. It's time for me to be CEO.
BI: You joined Zynga when it was super hot. It's been troubled since then. What can you tell us about that?
DC: People see Zynga as a mature company, now that it's public, but it's still a really young company, not quite six years old. Young companies have fits and starts. It's still really a startup. It had a dramatic rise, scaled up very quickly. Like at Cisco, it's retrenching.
We forget when companies are at $200, $300 a share that many companies go through these ups and downs. Great companies. Zynga is in that phase. We remember when Amazon was at $10 a share and now look at it.
I think that Zynga has great leadership and they'll figure it out.

Debra Chrapaty: Here's Why I Left My Job As Zynga's CIO To Run A Startup

<table class="image-container float_right" width="200"><tr><td><div class="image"></div><a href="http://www.piersonlabs.com/#team">Pierson Labs</a>Ramona Pierson</td></tr></table>Everybody has a story but few are as painful and triumphant as <keyword id="1747872" type="UNKNOWN" weightage="60" keywordseo="Ramona-Pierson">Ramona Pierson</keyword>'s.
Pierson is the CEO of a stealth startup, Pierson Labs.
She is also, quite possibly, the most inspiring tech founder in the Valley today. And that's saying something.
Business Insider recently met with her and her cofounder Nelson González at the startup's Palo Alto headquarters.
Pierson is lucky to be alive. She's also lucky to be walking, talking and thinking, much less be leading her second startup, developing big-data education software.
In 1984, when she was 22 years old, she went out jogging with her dog and was hit by a drunk driver. The car crushed her face, throat, heart lungs and legs. At the hospital, she fell into an 18-month coma. And then she had a heart attack.
Instead of killing her, the heart attack woke her up. She came to weighing 64 pounds, blind and unable to walk, talk, eat.
Doctors rebuilt her through more than 50 surgeries: a plastic nose, a new eye, lots of titanium used as bones and some bones taken from cadavers, too.
"Eventually, I started to look human," she says in her <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2pTy6NeX1E4">stirring 2011 Ted Talk</a> about the ordeal.
Today, she looks more than human. She looks like the attractive, fit, ex-Marine that she is. But it was a long road to recovery involving having to relearn everything.
In the marines, Pierson learned to code. Her experience lead to an interest in neuroscience so during her military service she wrote algorithms to diagnose brain injuries from the battlefield.
<div class="image-container float_right" style="width:400px"><div class="image"><a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2pTy6NeX1E4"></a></div>Business Insider/Julie BortNelson González, Ramona Pierson, and Tanqueray Pierson</div>That lead to an interest in how people learn and a job as director of technology for Seattle Public Schools. There she created a social network for students and teachers called "The Source."
And that lead to her first startup, SynapticMash, an education software company sold to Promethean World for $10 million in 2010.
But her injuries still plagued her. The cadaver bone in her leg randomly broke while she was running and needed to be replaced. Just last year, her toes needed to be fixed.
She became so good at living through surgeries that she actually negotiated the sale of SynapticMash from the hospital recovery room 15 minutes after an operation. She refused the pain medicine and instead popped open her laptop, hopped onto Skype and sold her company, she told Business Insider.
Despite her history, Pierson is a cheerful, hopeful, driven person with a big sense of humor and an enormous amount of charisma. A screenwriter for Moneyball is even writing screenplay about her life.
Her new company is likely to be more successful than the last one. Pierson Labs will exit stealth next month and the company already has some big customers, we've heard, and a partner at venture capital firm Khosla is her personal advisor.
The company is home to about 20 employees who are building a big-data platform called Declara. It's a combo analytics/social networking platform to help teachers create more personalized lessons for students. It can also be used by enterprises for training, González told us.
Plus the company is working on other interesting projects. For instance, Hall of Famer 49er's football player Ronnie Lott is an investor, Pierson says. He wants to make football safer and is looking at Pierson's tech for that. By attaching sensors to player's bodies, the platform can analyze bio-mechanic data and assess injuries.
Pierson is also half of a Valley power couple. Her partner Debra Chrapaty, Zynga's former CIO, <a href="http://www.businessinsider.com/debra-chrapaty-zynga-nirvanix-2013-3">just became CEO for Khosla-backed cloud-storage startup Nirvanix</a>.

Startup Founder Ramona Pierson Has Survived Worse Things Than Most People Can Imagine

<div class="image-container float_right" style="width:400px"><div class="image"></div>Business InsiderPaula Long (left), Debra Chrapaty (right)</div>Between <a href="http://www.businessinsider.com/sandberg-controversial-quotes-2013-3">the uproar over Sheryl Sandberg's new book</a> and <a href="http://www.businessinsider.com/women-in-tech-2013-3">SendGrid's Donglegate</a> scandal, one thing is clear: It's not always easy for <keyword id="624" type="ORGANIZATION" weightage="60" keywordseo="Women">women</keyword> working in the tech industry.
We recently spoke with two powerful women tech CEOs about <keyword id="6390075" type="UNKNOWN" weightage="60" keywordseo="sexism">sexism</keyword> and what they did to overcome it: <a href="http://www.businessinsider.com/exclusive-paula-longs-new-42-million-startup-is-an-ingenius-way-to-do-big-data-2013-3">DataGravity cofounder Paula Long</a>, known for her previous storage startup, EqualLogic, which Dell bought for $1.4 billion in 2008; and former Zynga CIO <a href="http://www.businessinsider.com/debra-chrapaty-zynga-nirvanix-2013-3">Debra Chrapaty, who just became CEO of Nirvanix.</a>
Both of them tell Business Insider they have faced their share of sexism. Now they coach other young women how to get past it. Some of this is good advice for men, too.
1. If you're the only woman in the room, jokingly make the room aware.
"Some of the issues with [sexism] in tech is just the numbers," Chrapty says. "I've sat in rooms for most of my career where I'm the only woman. I make light of it. I intentionally put it out there."
2. If your coworkers tend to yell at meetings, bring an empty coffee cup with you. Tap it on the table to cause the room to grow quiet before you speak. That's a tip Chrapaty learned from her mentor, former Microsoft CMO, <a href="http://www.linkedin.com/pub/mich-mathews/26/873/436">Mich Mathews</a>.
3. Being a risk-taker has nothing to do with being male or female. Don't let anyone tell you otherwise. The more your risks prove successful, the more willing you are to take risks. You have to be willing to take risks to advance your career, Long says.
4. Don't be afraid of failing. You will learn more from failure than successes, says Chrapaty. She worked on a couple of <keyword id="6362513" type="ORGANIZATION" weightage="60" keywordseo="Startups">startups</keyword> that didn't pan out. That's when she learned how to be a leader. "It's easy to motivate people when the company is soaring," but it requires skill to motivate people when it's not doing well, she says.
5. If you can't find a job you love, start your own company, Long says. "If you want to become a CEO of a big company, roll your own. You can build that big company."
6. Negotiate a fair wage. Talk to people and read salary reports to find out what the norms are, ask for something in the fair range, not too high, not too low, Long says. Expect to be fairly compensated and you will be.
6. Always do the best work you can. "The best way to battle any bias is to be the best you can be in your field. Be the best. Make that your rallying cry," Chrapaty says.
7. Have a thick skin if some of your male coworkers underestimate you. One stereotype for women techies is that they don't work on hard tech problems, Long says. Solving those hard problems will change their minds.
8. Be a role model and mentor to other women. The sexism problem will diminish when more women are working in the field. Role models encourage girls to enter the field, both Long and Chrapaty say.
9. Report sexual harassment. There's a difference between someone giving you a "prove it" attitude and someone threatening you.
"If it's a pure case of sexual harassment (and that's happened to me but I won't talk about it), you report it," Chrapaty says. "That's your obligation to the company and to other women. If it's a case of sexism, be the best you can be and continue to make your mark in industry."

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Debra Chrapaty: Here's Why I Left My Job As Zynga's CIO To Run A Startup

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Startup Founder Ramona Pierson Has Survived Worse Things Than Most People Can Imagine

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Two Women CEOs Explain How To Squash Sexism In The Tech Industry

Julie Bort

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