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Ramona Pierson The Most Inspiring Person 2
<html><body>Everybody has a story but few are as painful and triumphant as Ramona Pierson'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.
recently met with her and her cofounder Nelson Gonz lez 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,The Disgraceful Episode Of Lysenkoism Brings Us Global Warming Theory_7, 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 about the ordeal. Today,cheap beats, 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. Business Insider/Julie BortNelson Gonz��lez, Ramona Pierson, and Tanqueray PiersonThat 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,wholesale beats by dre Beats By Dre Mixr, 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 and sold her company, she told Business Insider,cheap beats by dre. 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, Gonz lez 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, 's former CIO, .</body></html>
SpaceShipTwo lights up its rocket for first time and goes su
<html><body>Branson wasn't the only one watching: Rocket aficionados flocked to viewing areas near the airport to see the blastoff. Until Monday, Mojave-based Scaled Composites, which is building and testing the plane for Virgin Galactic's eventual use, had tested SpaceShipTwo only by dropping it from its WhiteKnightTwo carrier airplane and having its pilots guide the plane back through unpowered glides back to the runway. The engine, powered by a rubber-based solid fuel and nitrous oxide, had been fired only on the ground.Monday's test was radically different: WhiteKnightTwo released SpaceShipTwo from its traditional drop zone, at an altitude of around 47,000 feet,The Beastie Boys Are Writing A Memoir,beats by dre. But after the rocket plane glides clear from the mothership, its pilot lit up the engine and pointed SpaceShipTwo upward into the sky, reaching a maximum height of 55,beats by dre cheap,000 feet. The plane coasted back to a landing back at the Mojave airport, a little more than 10 minutes after blastoff.Test pilots Mark Stucky and Mike Alsbury were at SpaceShipTwo's controls for Monday's flight, Virgin Galactic said,cheap beats by dre. Afterward, the company said that the pilots confirmed "SpaceShipTwo exceeded the speed of sound on today's flight!" The reported maximum velocity was Mach 1.2.George Whitesides, Virgin Galactic's president and CEO, said in a that the flight test "went as planned, with the expected burn duration, good engine performance and solid vehicle handling qualities throughout."</body></html>
