Sandra Lerner

Sandy Lerner, (born 1955) is an American businesswoman and philanthropist. She co-founded Cisco Systems, and used the money from its sale to pursue interests in animal welfare and women's writing. One of her main projects, Chawton House, is in England, but most of her work remains in the United States. Early life and education Lerner is a northern California native. She received her bachelor's degree in 1975 in international relations from California State University, Chico, a master's degree in econometrics in 1977 from the Claremont Graduate School, and a master's degree in statistics and computer science in 1981 from Stanford University. Cisco In 1984, while working as director of computer facilities for the Stanford University Graduate School of Business, Lerner co-founded Cisco Systems with her then-partner and now-former husband Len Bosack. Lerner and Bosack worked with Stanford students and faculty on a project to better connect all of the school's computer systems. They later adapted software used at Stanford into what would become the foundation for Cisco IOS. Lerner told the story of Cisco's startup on the podcast How I Built This in which Cisco's early days involved building routers in the living room, financing the business using credit cards. She emphasized the collaborative nature of the work and that despite communication protocols being public domain, developed largely from collaborative work at Stanford, Cisco was still able to produce products people wanted to buy.