Lina Trivedi

Lina Trivedi is an Indian American who was born to a Gujarati-speaking Brahmin family in Chicago, Illinois. She lived in Addison, Illinois for most of her school-age and young-adult life. She attended DePaul University majoring in Sociology and it was during this time that her career at Ty, Inc. began. She was raised by entrepreneurial parents who cultivated her skills at computer programming at a very young age. In the early 1980s, Trivedi's family purchased an IBM Personal Computer 5150 and at 7 years old, Trivedi's mother made Lina read the PC DOS 1.0 manual three times. In second grade, Trivedi was writing simple computer programs in BASIC. ==Career at Ty Inc.==

In 1992, Trivedi became Ty, Inc.'s 12th employee. In 1995, Beanie Babies were escalating as a pop culture craze throughout the world. In early 1995, Trivedi approached Ty Warner, then president of Ty, Inc., and shared her thoughts that the product hang tags were boring, and that unique birthdays and poems on the inside of the heart-shaped tags would make the items more collectible and interesting. She shared an example poem that she wrote for Stripes the Tiger, which ended up having Trivedi's birthday. Warner assigned her the task of writing all the Beanie Babies poems and designing the inside of more than 100 product tags. The Beanie Babies Web site that Trivedi created was the first business to consumer web site designed to bridge the gap between business and consumers. The Beanie Babies web site was receiving over 1 billion visits per year and Trivedi is credited with cultivating the demand of Beanie Babies through the Internet. In 1996, Trivedi coordinated three private Boeing 747s to bring Beanie Babies to American retail locations in time for Easter. The snowball effect of the Beanie Babies craze and the rise of the Internet was not foreseen in advance. Although Ty, Inc. was very private about their sales figures related to Beanie Babies, Trivedi was quoted as saying that "sales were overwhelming." Trivedi also played a vital role in the design of Beanie Babies, as well as the new and retiring characters as they were announced. As part of her campaign to engage audiences, she coordinated fans to guide the creation of the 100th Beanie Baby character through the Internet in 1996. At the height of the Beanie Babies craze, 10% of all eBay sales were transactions related to Beanie Babies. ==Media appearances and contributions==

Source: She was portrayed as the first person to build a website for commercial purposes, as well as writing all the poems on the inside of Beanie Babies tags. According to the movie, Trivedi's character, Maya Kumar, was referenced as Ty's secret weapon and was offered "20 smackeroos per hour" and she told Ty Warner, "I'm not your secret weapon. I'm not a secret, and I'm not yours. I quit." ==Books==

Trivedi is the author of the following books: ==Political and social career==

In 2004, Trivedi worked for the Urban League where she worked on the Workforce and Economic Development Team to help individuals transition from disadvantaged backgrounds into the job market. Trivedi had been appointed to two public service positions in Madison, Wisconsin. She served as the Minority Representative in the Community Services Commission and on the Community Development Block Grant Commission from 2005 to 2008. ==Technology career==

In the midst of the Beanie Babies phenomenon, Trivedi worked closely with the Children's Advertising Review Unit to help build standards that relate to children's web sites in an effort to establish voluntary regulations designed to protect the privacy of children on the Internet. After her career at Ty, she promoted these regulations among other companies that promoted products to children on the internet, and spearheaded changes to the web sites of Chicago International Children's Film Festival and the Spice Girls to adhere to these privacy regulations. Trivedi transcended from her career with Beanie Babies and started her own web design firm in 1997 where she developed the first web sites for many notable entities, including the Sears Tower, Spice Girls and Mötley Crüe. Her innovations included broadcasting snapshots of the Chicago skyline from the top of the Sears Tower through their web site. Trivedi was also named one of the top 30 local talents in 1999 by the Chicago Sun-Times. Then in 2000, the Chicago Sun-Times named Trivedi one of the top 30 Chicago area entrepreneurs under the age of 30. According to NBC, her inventions have been used to enable people to become authors by "taking the mechanics out of publishing so that writers can focus on the messages they are trying to convey". Today, Trivedi is developing artificial intelligence with her new start-up company called Joii.ai. ==Personal life==

Trivedi currently lives in Beaver Dam, Wisconsin, where she is a single mother to a child with special needs. Trivedi's daughter was diagnosed with Goltz syndrome at birth. Fewer than 25 people in the United States are reported to have Goltz syndrome. As a result of the syndrome, Trivedi's daughter was born without a leg, missing fingers, and lacked muscles on one side of her face. To date, Trivedi's daughter has been through over 25 surgeries before the age of 5. She is also the youngest child in the United States to receive a prosthetic leg at 7 months old. According to her book, living life as a special needs mother puts the world into perspective and Trivedi has channeled her talents and business acumen to cultivate a sense of business and entrepreneurship within her young daughter, Nikhita. Before entering 3rd grade, Trivedi's daughter has been established as the President of a Wyoming Corporation that designs and sells bows through a business modeled after the enterprise run by Minnie Mouse in the TV series Mickey Mouse Clubhouse. == References ==