The following excerpt is from an interview I conducted with Cathy for my last book Female Innovators at Work. During this conversation, we discussed her background growing up in Australia, how she got into coding and advice she has for other founders.
Cathy Edwards co-founded and was Chief Technology Officer of app search engine Chomp, which she started with Ben Keighran in 2009. After raising just over $2.5 million, Chomp was acquired by Apple for a reported $50 million in 2012.
At Apple, Cathy was the Head of Search for iTunes, the App Store and Maps, before becoming Director of Evaluation for Maps.
Cathy previously worked as senior mobile product manager at social networking web site Friendster, as product manager for messaging startup 3jam, and in strategy and research roles at telecommunications company Telstra in her native Australia.
Cathy left Apple in 2014 and founded a stealth startup in 2015 with some ex-Chomp colleagues, code named Undecidable Labs, which was acquired by Google in 2016, pre-launch. After which, she became the Director of Image Search (at Google) and ran both Product and Engineering there.
Cathy has a degree in Linguistics, Computer Science, and Pure Mathematics from the University of Western Australia.
Danielle Newnham: What were you like as a kid and when did you first show an interest in math?
Cathy Edwards: When I was nine, I was lucky enough to go to a school that had a mandatory weekly programming class through year 10. I also really enjoyed math classes and my teachers encouraged me to participate in a variety of extension activities like national and international math competitions. I am grateful to this day for that exposure; it was rare for a school — let alone an all-girls school — to have such a strong computing focus back them. I think without it I probably wouldn’t be where I am today.
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