In today’s episode, we’re talking to Poornima Vijayashanker, a founding engineer at Mint—the

personal finance app that’d go on to be acquired by Intuit in 2009 for $170 Million dollars. As
one of the company’s first engineers, Poornima had a huge influence on building the product
and growing it with her college friend and founder, Aaron Patzer. As the daughter of an
engineer, Poornima began learning to code at a young age—and was a very early adopter of
the internet back when it was brand new. During her time working at Mint, Poornima was one of
just a small number of women who were vocal in the tech world. She started speaking,
advocating for women in tech, and in 2007 she started her blog, called Femgineer. Her blog
began as a side project—starting with the goal of sharing lessons learned helping to build Mint,
capturing all of her experiences as a woman in tech, and offering up actionable educational
content for her readers that wanted to become developers, themselves. Now, Femgineer has
grown into so much more—free resources, courses, books, videos, and her own podcast called
Build.