Founded Freelance Programmers, staffed almost entirely by women working from home
Arrived in Britain as a child refugee, founded a software firm in 1959 with £6, and signed her letters 'Steve' so they would be opened.
Photograph: Lynn Hart · CC BY 4.0 · Wikimedia Commons
Shirley came to England on the Kindertransport in 1939. She began her career in computing and left because she could not progress, founding Freelance Programmers in 1959 with capital of £6, working from her dining room.
The business was built almost entirely from women programmers working from home — a workforce that was highly skilled and largely unemployable elsewhere at the time, because leaving work on marriage or childbirth was the norm.
Her business letters went unanswered until she began signing them Steve, at which point they were opened. She has told the story often and without self-pity, as a fact about the market she was selling into.
The company grew substantially and was eventually valued in the billions. She later gave away the great majority of her wealth, mainly to autism research and causes connected to her son.
Her entire competitive advantage was access to skilled people nobody else would employ. Wherever a market systematically overlooks a group, someone can hire brilliantly and cheaply, and it is the most repeatable lesson here.
Home working, flexible hours and project-based pay in 1962 were not a philosophy, they were what made the workforce available. If you cannot compete on salary, competing on how the work is arranged is a real alternative.
She put a substantial share of the company into the hands of its staff, and the eventual sale and flotation made a number of them millionaires. It is one of the clearest British examples of ownership altering how people treat a business.
She has spoken openly about the personal cost — the strain of building the company while caring for a severely autistic son, and her own breakdown. The story is frequently told as an inspiring one, and she tells it as a difficult one.
The model also had limits: home working before the internet meant couriered tapes and printouts, and coordination was a permanent drag on the business. What is now unremarkable was then genuinely inefficient, and she absorbed that cost to get the workforce.