Women of Innovation: Zoe Barry

Zoe Barry is the CEO and Founder of ZappRx, a company that uses an online platform to manage specialty prescriptions. Founded in 2012, ZappRx allows a provider to write an e-prescription that is instantly sent to the patient’s smartphone thus removing the waiting and miscommunication that so many people experience when getting prescriptions filled at a pharmacy.

The company has recently raised $1M in seed funding and has partnerships with large healthcare industry players. ZappRx has been written about in the Wall Street Journal, TechCrunch, Forbes and many others.

Zoe, has a B.A. in Anthropology from Columbia University and mentors undergraduates in the Columbia College Women in Business Society. She formerly worked for AthenaHealth and was a Fellow in the Boston Startup Leadership Program but began her career originating and executing high-return strategic investments at Dawson Capital in New York.

Attributes of Success

Zoe attributes her success to the tough love from her mother who cultivated an entrepreneurial spirit in her when she was very young. Zoe remembers when she was 8 years old and asked for a toy. Instead of giving her the toy or letting her earn it by doing household chores, her mother told her to be creative and come up with a different way of earning the toy. This is just what Zoe did and at age 8, she sold balloon animals in central park.

This experience taught Zoe about products, margins and marketing. She had to figure out the cost of balloons and how much to sell them for in order to make money. She had to learn what product demand was all about in that certain colors would sell more than other colors, and, that it was necessary for her to buy more balloons then she intended to use in order to meet the demand for certain colors. She also learned how the difference in quality or in price affected sales.

Zoe, the eldest of 8 children says that this experience gave her the knowledge and confidence to start her own business later in life. Zoe thanks her mother for this (her mother is also an award-winning blogger at Homeschool Happymess).

Tips and Secrets of Success from Zoe

• Never let age and gender get in the way of pursuing a dream or business idea, whether you are 5 or 40 years old. Zoe reminds us that statistics show that most entrepreneurs are in their 30s or 40s when they start a business.
• Get out and do the thing you want to do. Go big and if you want to be a mother and have a business, become the owner, be a CEO. If you want to be indispensable to a business, start that business.
• Start right away. Don’t wait until you have all the answers because you will never have all the answers. Zoe shares that venture capitalists have told her that the biggest difference between men and women who pitch an ideas to them, is that women wait too long, believing that they need to perfect the idea before presenting it. They have also found that women do not ask for enough money. Zoe says, don’t be that woman. You can sell yourself if you have confidence.

Jim Nico

Jim Nico is CEO and Founder of SNI the parent company of The Social Network Show®, and The Social Network Station® which presents cutting edge, actionable information for social network owners and managers and is a one stop source for social networkers worldwide. SNI provides a quick reference guide on its website by featuring over 500 social networks on parade. Jim believes the future is niche social networks and he continues with strategic partners to catalyze core principles and best practices of Service, Safety, and Sustainability as guidelines for social networks world wide. He can be reached via email at [email protected].

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