In 1981, Nithya Ruff left Bangalore for Fargo, North Dakota, to study computer science. She traded 40°C heat for winters that hit -30°C, and she had never cooked a meal or dressed for cold weather in her life. There was no internet, no cell phone. International calls cost three or four dollars a minute. It forced her to build a new support system and helped her discover a level of independence she didn’t know she had.
She is now chair of the Linux Foundation board, after three decades running open source offices at Amazon, Comcast, and Wind River. Her father is a big part of why she got there. He talked to her about business as an equal from the time she was a child. And before she left for the US, he gave her one condition: she needed her own income and her own financial standing so she would not have to rely on a husband.
This advice shaped how she built a long career in tech and how she reads the 2% funding gap. She believes that closing the gap starts with getting more women into the room where funding decisions get made.
In our conversation, we talked about how her upbringing gave her the confidence she needed to enter rooms where she was the only woman. We also covered why the open source model is producing female leaders faster than the rest of tech, what AI is doing to coding that kept non-technical founders out, and what early-stage founders underestimate about the emotional side of building a company.
Hit play below to listen to the full conversation with Maaike and Sophie. Or keep reading for practical takeaways, highlights, and trends from the episode.
Practical Takeaways for Founders
Nithya Ruff spent three decades running open source offices, where every contribution and decision was documented and visible by default. That habit shows up directly in how she advises founders to build.
Document principles, not rules.
At Amazon, Ruff worked with leadership principles, not fixed rules. They’re tenets you test decisions against as circumstances change. She points to a live example: whether to prioritize humans or AI agents in a workflow isn’t settled once. You check the decision against the principle, and if the principle no longer holds, you revise it.
Treat peer support as a requirement, not a nice-to-have.
She is direct that founding is lonely, and that investors can’t fill that gap alone. Your investors should support and invest in you, she says, but you also need a system of peer founders alongside them. Community isn’t a soft add-on to the business. It’s part of how you stay in it long enough to build something.
Use AI as a debate partner, not just a task tool.
You’ll probably use AI to automate things. But Nithya points out that you can do so much more, particularly for solo founders. She does her own research and synthesis on Claude, using it to stress-test her thinking the way a colleague would. The value is in the pushback: a tool willing to challenge an idea catches what she’d have missed reasoning alone.
Each of these comes back to the same habit: writing your reasoning down and exposing it to challenge, instead of carrying it in your head alone.
Know a founder in FemTech who could benefit from these takeaways? Share the episode with them using the buttons below.
Or scroll down for magic moments.
Highlights and timestamps
| Time | Highlight |
|---|---|
| 00:00 | Introduction |
| 02:43 | Nithya’s Journey to the US |
| 11:17 | The Influence of Family on Confidence |
| 18:06 | Navigating Cultural Differences in Parenting |
| 27:24 | Challenging Gender Norms in Family Dynamics |
| 27:40 | The Funding Gap for Female Founders |
| 33:00 | The Need for More Female Investors |
| 36:31 | Empowering Women in Investment |
| 41:53 | The Startup Path for Women |
| 47:04 | Integrating Work and Life in Startups |
| 50:16 | The Open Source Model and Its Impact |
| 56:35 | AI: A Tool for Empowerment |
| 1:01:57 | Building Community and Support Systems |
| 1:06:38 | Underestimating the Go-to-Market Strategy |
| 1:11:58 | Governance and Flexibility in Startups |
| 1:18:19 | The Balance of AI and Human Connection |
The Episode In an Infographic
3 Magic Moments In The Episode
This episode runs on one underlying question: what changes when an old boundary stops holding. For Nithya, that shows up twice. Once in how she was raised, and the choices it gave her. And once in what she’s watching happen across her industry, as AI opens the door to people who were kept out of building before.
How her father set her up for success.
Growing up, Nithya’s father included her in conversations most parents kept for adults: what she thought the moon landing meant, what she thought was happening in India’s economy. He paid attention to her answers. She says that kind of attention from the first adult man in her life instilled a confidence that carried into every room she walked into afterward. It’s the rule that built her financial independence, and the one she now uses to answer a bigger question: what happens if more girls are raised this way?
“Parenting is gender neutral.”
When Nithya and her husband had to decide who would stay home with their daughters, they treated it like a business decision: they compared strengths and weaknesses, built it as a shared portfolio. He ran the household on a schedule and started introducing himself as “the founder of two startups called Alex and Tara.” Her line for it: parenting is gender neutral, even though the burden rarely falls that way in practice.
Breaking the priesthood of software.
Nithya calls traditional coding skills a “priesthood,” a specialized barrier that decided who got to build. She says AI is dissolving that barrier, letting people with domain expertise but no engineering background build and test their own ideas.
The pattern that ties these moments together is this question: What changes when the old boundary stops holding?
🗣 Which of these moments resonated most with you? Was it Nithya’s early life lessons, how she raised her daughters, or how AI democratizes building businesses? Or was there another magic moment for you in the episode? Drop it below or slide into the DMs on LinkedIn or Instagram!
The Quote from the Episode
"AI is a tool for women to express their ideas like no other tool in history."
— Nithya Ruff
Nithya said this about why women need to get into AI now, not later. She sees fewer women participating in AI than men. She's pointing to a closing window: a way to build and articulate an idea without needing anyone else's permission or skillset first.
If you know a founder who could use Nithya's inspiring words, use the buttons below to tell her about the episode.
3 Trends I’m Seeing Across Conversations
If there is one pattern that keeps coming back through the episodes, it is this: what looks like an individual choice or gap is usually downstream of a choice they made earlier. Three trends across previous episodes point to that as well.
How girls are conditioned around risk, before they ever pitch anything.
In episode 114, Catrine Rehnberg traces how childhood praise shapes women’s relationship with risk: girls are more often praised for being careful and getting things right, not for taking a swing and missing. Her framing: women aren’t risk-averse, they’re risk-conscious, because that’s what got rewarded early. It’s the same mechanism Nithya’s father used in reverse. He praised her opinions and pushed her toward independence, and she built a career that reflects it.
The funding gap is an investor problem, not a founder problem.
The funding gap comes down to mispricing risk, because women are underrepresented among the people making investment decisions. Azin Radsan van Alebeek put it plainly in episode 123: “Capital fuels ideas. And if we’re not fueling a cross section of ideas, we’re building a future that does not allow all of us to be our best self.” Episode 119, with Erica van Eeghen and Maud Vermeulen, made the same point: closing that gap means changing who holds the capital and how they assess risk, not asking founders to pitch differently.
The image of who gets to build is already out of date.
Victoria Lawson, founder of Wholepal, named this directly in episode 90: “If somebody says ‘developer,’ ‘engineer,’ or ‘CTO,’ immediately the image in my mind is masculine.” She built an AI-driven platform without fitting that image herself. Nithya makes the same point about open source leadership and AI: the skill that used to gatekeep who could build is no longer the barrier it was.
Three trends from different episodes with the same underlying question: who gets to hold the pen, whether that’s raising a child, allocating capital, or writing code, and what happens when that starts to change.
🗣️ How do you look at these trends? I’d love to hear from you in the comments.
Leave a Reply
Coming Up On Women Disrupting Tech
Karen Berg has heard this pitch many times: sleep better, try a meditation app, exercise more, and your health problems will sort themselves out. In this episode, she explains why that advice falls apart when it comes to women's health.
Karen is a partner at Healthy Capital, a venture fund that invests in digital health solutions. In episode 161, Karen and I talk about her path from law and investment banking into impact investing, why she's drawn to highly regulated markets, and why she thinks femtech needs to move past wellness apps and into real diagnosis and treatment.
In the clip above, Karen makes the case that treating women's health as a wellness problem lets serious, undiagnosed medical issues go unaddressed. Want to hear the rest of the conversation? Follow Women Disrupting Tech to get it in your feed.
Listen to the clip, and if you'd like to hear more, subscribe below to find the full episode in your inbox on 16 July 2026 at 8:00 CET.
What I Want to Leave You With
The 2% funding number gets discussed in almost every conversation about female founders, and it hasn't moved in 25 years.
But Nithya's answer isn't really about the number. She traces it back to a father who insisted on her financial independence before she ever needed it, and forward to a boardroom where the people deciding on funding still look mostly the same as they did decades ago.
Neither of those gets fixed by asking founders to try harder. One is a parenting choice made long before a pitch deck exists. The other is about who sits in the room when the money gets allocated. Founders can't pitch their way around either.
The clearest example of what changes when that starts to shift: the current president of the Apache Software Foundation came up through it doing marketing and event organizing, not code. Nithya's own path through the Linux Foundation followed the same route. The rule that used to decide who could lead a technical organization is already broken. Most people just haven't noticed yet.
Listen to the full conversation with Nithya Ruff on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, or YouTube. And if you are a female founder navigating a funding conversation, take a look at FundingCoach.ai.
About Nithya Ruff
Nithya Ruff has spent 30+ years building open source programs inside some of the largest technology companies in the world.
She ran Amazon's Open Source Program Office across AWS, Amazon.com, and its device teams, work she previously did at Comcast, where she advised more than 200 open source projects and set the company's overall open source strategy.
She currently chairs the Linux Foundation board. Before that, she drove over 100 percent year-over-year growth in Wind River's Linux product line and led the open source strategy work around Ceph, OCP, and OpenStack storage architecture at SanDisk.
She’s passionate about advancing open technologies, particularly in the AI space, and her goal is to break down the barriers that keep underrepresented groups, especially women, from contributing. She is actively mentoring women in tech and has been angel investing through Neythri Futures Fund and NEO for the past 10 to 15 years.
You can connect with Nithya on LinkedIn and via her Substack or her website.
Listen to Episode 160 on Spotify, Apple or YouTube
Why the Funding Gap Starts Before Female Founders Ever Pitch with Nithya Ruff | Ep. 160 - Women Disrupting Tech
Events that Women Disrupting Tech Must-Attend
Some great events take place this spring. Below are some that you definitely want to check out. For a full overview of all events, including links to buy tickets, please check the events page.
AI Summer School for Women Entrepreneurs
If you're an entrepreneurial woman sitting on an idea, wondering if you could build it with AI, this is for you.
On 13 July, the first 4-week online cohort of the AI Summer School for Women starts. It's organized by learning & development specialist Ilkem Kayican Dipcin with the goal to help women build real products and businesses using AI.
Here’s how it works:
→ Thursday evenings (20:00–22:00 CET): Live sessions: new content, demos, hands-on practice
→ Saturday mornings (10:00–11:00 CET): Group check-ins: weekly deliverables, peer feedback, Q&A
What you’ll build over 4 weeks:
• Week 1: Validate your idea with AI-powered market research
• Week 2: Build your brand voice, visuals & content strategy
• Week 3: Write proposals that convert + automate your first task
• Week 4: Demo Day pitch + 30-day personalised action plan
By the end of the summer:
You've built confidence that you can build with AI.
You'll graduate with a certificate as proof of what you've achieved.
You'll have an actual business asset that you can start to monetize.
Ilkem has space for max 12 women, and you can enroll here: https://ilkemkayican.com/summer-school
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