Newsweek – Women Entrepreneurs / Women Entrepreneurs to Bet On (featuring @adafruit) #makerbusiness

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Women Entrepreneurs Fight for Their Piece of the Pie.

Limor Fried of Adafruit: MIT electrical engineer Limor “Ladyada” Fried founded Adafruit Industries to bring the world of electronics to anyone willing to learn. Ever think you’d be able to be a robotics hobbyist? Or build circuits into your clothing and light your suspenders up with LEDs? The company sells do-it-yourself open-source electronics kits and educational materials for makers of all ages and skill levels. Adafruit has never needed to take loans or investments of any kind, Fried tells Newsweek…

Adafruit has more than 1,800 products for sale and is engineering new ones all the time. It recently launched a new children’s show about electronics called Circuit Playground. An investor might consider all those diverse focuses “outside the core business” of shipping out kit orders, but it’s just how Adafruit does things, Fried says.

“Had we taken investment and not constrained growth, we could have made some mistakes with hiring and space. It’s given us more flexibility to not have the pressures of a return on investment from an outside group. We’re growing at our own pace and on our terms,” Fried says. “There hasn’t been a challenge that a cash infusion could solve. And we know that taking on investment and investors would take one important thing away that cash definitely cannot solve: time.”

It’s a lesson women and men could take to heart. 

Read more & more & Women Entrepreneurs to Bet On.


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Stop breadboarding and soldering – start making immediately! Adafruit’s Circuit Playground is jam-packed with LEDs, sensors, buttons, alligator clip pads and more. Build projects with Circuit Playground in a few minutes with the drag-and-drop MakeCode programming site, learn computer science using the CS Discoveries class on code.org, jump into CircuitPython to learn Python and hardware together, TinyGO, or even use the Arduino IDE. Circuit Playground Express is the newest and best Circuit Playground board, with support for CircuitPython, MakeCode, and Arduino. It has a powerful processor, 10 NeoPixels, mini speaker, InfraRed receive and transmit, two buttons, a switch, 14 alligator clip pads, and lots of sensors: capacitive touch, IR proximity, temperature, light, motion and sound. A whole wide world of electronics and coding is waiting for you, and it fits in the palm of your hand.

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