For February, I am focusing my blog on really excellent people. Call it my Valentines to people who inspire me. I work at Purdue University, and I think one of the greatest gifts of working at Purdue University is all the great people I get to meet, and more specifically the great women that I get to meet. There’s some really badass females around this place that I have had the great chance to work with.

One such person is Amanda Thompson, Entrepreneur in Residence at the Foundry.

I first met Amanda while I was co-chair of the Purdue Faculty Association. She was a regular at many of our events around town. I didn’t really know her very well except socially, but I grew to know her more as I worked with many of the entrepreneurship initiatives around campus.

The thing that most inspires me about Amanda is how much she really values the people around her. Amanda is the sort of person who really has people’s backs. When I was working on a business plan competition, I needed someone to help me pick out a financial model for how the theoretical company would make money. I know that there were lot of better ways that she could probably have spent her time. Instead she walked me through the complicated areas of a financial model, asking me all sorts of questions that I had not thought to ask, in ways that I had not thought to ask them. Because of our meeting, I feel like I now know a lot more about the details that I would need in a business plan.

Amanda is also really inspiring to me because she never gives up. While we have spoken several times about the idea of failure and how it seemed to be much more catastrophic for women than men, but failure doesn’t seem to stick to Amanda. She’s a woman with a thousand hustles. She’s a mom, a professor of finance, a CFO, a rock climber, and an all-around go-to person in town. It seems at times like everyone knows Amanda, and with good reason. The woman is simply everywhere.

From Amanda I have learned many things. I’ve learned a little about how cool numbers can be. And I’ve learned how important it is to support people even when they don’t know anything about what you do.

She’s very inspiring to me and I feel glad to have met her.