This refugee aid app was a passion project. Now hundreds of nonprofits rely on it.

Shelley Taylor calls herself a Silicon Valley veteran. Veteran, she tells me, "means old."

Raised in Palo Alto, Taylor has an extensive tech background. She isn't an engineer, but she wrote the "bible of user interface" back in 1995 at the dawn of website creation, inventing a lot of the language still used to this day to describe websites and ecommerce. She's launched a bevy of startups and advised companies like AOL, Cisco, Microsoft, and Yahoo in their early days.

"My approach to being a technology founder, which I pretty much have always been, is starting with the user experience and then using that to do product design development," she says. Read more...