The time has come for Mind Of My Own to expand its Board of directors, to encompass the broader range of talents and expertise needed to steer the company through it’s next phase of growth. For Jill and Yvonne this growth represents another step in our vision for all children’s voices to be heard, wherever they are. To achieve this we have to continue to innovate and always stay close to our users as we grow and extend the Mind Of My Own reach. With all this in mind, our first appointment to the board, marking our new accelerated growth, has to be a very special person.
Mary McKenna is a well known Irish technology entrepreneur and angel investor. She co-founded successful e-learning company Learning Pool following a long UK public sector career and a spell as a Silicon Valley dotcommer, exiting the business in 2014 so that she could return to working with earlier stage startups and scaleups. Mary is interested in helping start and grow indigenous UK and Irish tech companies and especially in working with female entrepreneurs.
She has invested in 6 early stage tech startups to date, 3 with female founding teams. She is one of the Entrepreneurship Experts with the Entrepreneurship Centre at Saïd Business School (University of Oxford), Entrepreneur in Residence at Catalyst Inc (the Northern Ireland Science Park in Belfast), an advisor to several governments, an EU Horizon 2020 judge, a trustee of the Centre for Acceleration of Social Technology and the first ever entrepreneur in residence at St Mary’s College, an all-girls secondary school in the Creggan area of Derry.
Mary was awarded the MBE by Her Majesty the Queen in the 2014 New Year’s Honours for services to digital technology, innovation and learning.
“I’m excited to join Mind Of My Own’s Board and team as the organisation begins to scale globally. Mind Of My Own has created technology that makes a real difference to people’s lives, it has awesome female founders and a world class team and Mind Of My Own’s values and objectives complement many of my other projects and interests in terms of tech for good, co-production, healthtech and social care. Watch this space!”
