At 26, Sky is an inspiration to her contemporaries who might be considering a startup. We know you will enjoy meeting her.                            

[link removed]

A recent college grad, Florida native Sky Gillespie was sitting in her Manhattan office musing that the people in the company who had real influence were the employees who had gotten in on the ground floor.

Sky, the latest entry into Independent Women’s Forum’s popular series of Champion Women profiles ([link removed]) , decided she wanted to get in on the ground floor of a startup.

Sky returned to Florida, and taking a risk, joined her brother, Rees Gillespie, in his startup, Ripple Safety, headquartered in Fort Lauderdale. It was developing a personal safety device that would allow people to ask for help from a 24-7 monitoring team, which could send emergency workers, or just stay on the phone with the caller.

“I was extremely passionate about being employee number two and helping to build a company from the ground up,” Sky says. She adds, “Today I am Head of Product at Ripple Safety and lead everything related to the customer experience and overall customer relations for both our individual and corporate accounts.”

Part of Sky’s job is raising capital, a dimension of her responsibilities she enthusiastically embraces. They started out by raising a $500,000 seed investment from local investors and quickly raised an additional $4 million after having proven the development of the product. Today, Ripple has raised over $5.5 million in capital and operates with a team of around twenty-five.

The original idea was that a Ripple alert button would help professionals, such as her mother, have instant access to the help they needed, but it quickly caught on with customers young and old, regardless of their own personal safety challenges. For obvious reasons, it’s popular with women, but also popular with active older people who enjoy the sense of safety Ripple provides.

She credits both her mother and her father with fostering an entrepreneurial spirit. Her father is an attorney, focused primarily on real estate and contractual litigation. Sky says, “My dad always instilled in us – if you want something for yourself go make it happen, it’s on you. He started from scratch and over time, he delivered on his opportunities when they presented themselves. It was that individual spirit, wanting to forge his own path and control his own destiny as much as possible, that I think we all got a piece of.”

At 26, Sky is an inspiration to her contemporaries who might be considering a startup. We know you will enjoy meeting her.
READ NOW ([link removed])
Sincerely,

Charlotte Hays
Cultural Director
Independent Women's Forum
[link removed] [link removed]
[link removed] https%3A%2F%2Fwww.iwf.org%2Fpeople%2Fsky-gillespie%2F [link removed] https%3A%2F%2Fwww.iwf.org%2Fpeople%2Fsky-gillespie%2F
[link removed] [link removed]

============================================================
** UNSUBSCRIBE ([link removed])
| ** UPDATE SUBSCRIPTION ([link removed])