<a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.theguardian.com&#x2F;technology&#x2F;2008&#x2F;jan&#x2F;11&#x2F;computing" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.theguardian.com&#x2F;technology&#x2F;2008&#x2F;jan&#x2F;11&#x2F;computing</a><p>&gt; What is known about her life is that she grew up in Annapolis, on the coast of Maryland, in a house on the shores of the Chesapeake Bay. Her father was an engineer and her mother a teacher. It was on the north-eastern seaboard that she developed a passion for water sports, especially sailing and later windsurfing. She helped to organise the first windsurfing world championship in 1974 and two years later won the women&#x27;s national double-handed dinghy championship.<p>&gt; Her love of the sea influenced her choice of college education after she studied mechanical engineering at the University of Vermont. She moved to MIT to study naval architecture before a brief spell working for an oil consultancy based in San Francisco. She left that job relatively quickly to go to Hawaii to design windsurfing equipment, but returned to the US a few years later to study computer science at Berkeley. She worked for a succession of Silicon Valley stalwarts: Sybase, Silicon Graphics and Tandem. But her first big break came with the founding of her own media streaming business, VXtreme, in the early days of the dotcom boom. It was sold for a rumoured $75m in 1997.