Female Hero of the Week: Gina Bianchini

Our female internet Hero of the week is Gina Bianchini, co-founder and CEO of social networking platform Ning and a true innovator on the web scene. Gina was among the 20 most influential women in web 2.0 named by Fastcompany this week, with other women including Leah Culver, founder of Pownce, Rashmi Sinha, CEO and co-founder of Slideshare, Dina Kaplin, founder of blip.tv, Marissa Mayer, Google’s first female engineer and many more. Feel there is one that should top them all? On thenextweb you can vote for one.

Thenextwomen’s vote goes to Gina, why? Because Gina was one of the entrepreneurs early on that realised that people want to participate, share and collaborate online. By offering these people tools to share information and experiences on their interests, she did what others were doing at the time, but better, by giving people the possibility to create networks themselves and take full control of them.

Gina actually started out in the financial sector, after pursuing a BA in political science and an MBA from Stanford University. She worked at a number of financial firms, including Goldman Sachs, before founding an ad analytics company called Harmonic Communications. After it was bought by ad agency Dentsu, she co-founded Ning with Marc Andreessen, a web developer and one of Harmonic’s board members.