From ASME E-Fests:

She is known to her fans as “Ladyada.” She is the first female engineer to grace the cover of WIRED. She is a not-so-traditional-looking MIT engineer, who grew up in a hacker scene in Boston and founded an open-source electronics company. She is Limor Fried, the CEO of Adafruit, a maker of DIY open source engineering and electronics kits, accessible for consumers of any age or skillset. Fried believes that everyone has an engineer or a maker inside them and that introducing electronics early on will lead to more young people choosing STEM careers down the road.

Q1. You founded Adafruit to create electronics kits for DIYers shortly before getting your master’s in electrical engineering from MIT’s Media Lab. What was the inspiration behind establishing your own company?

L.F: Back when I was still in school, around 2005, I was having a lot of fun building electronics. I had been learning about microcontrollers as part of my undergraduate internship and it was tons of fun. Once I built some projects, I would publish them on my website. People loved the projects like my Mini MP3 player and emailed asking if I would sell them a kit of parts. Eventually I got so annoyed by all these emails, I started kitting up some simpler projects for sale. They were so popular, it became my life.

Read more