Tinyhood Founder
“leaned into discomfort” to
launch a thriving startup!
Susan Beaudry Blinn, Breakthrough Student and Teaching Intern Alumna
“You hear a lot of kids saying, ‘I don’t want to go to school,’ but these
students look forward to going to Breakthrough because it’s a
learning experience that's filled with the fun of learning.
That’s a very hard thing to do and Breakthrough does it so well!”
-Susan
There’s a reason Susan Beaudry Blinn’s phone still has a favorite photo of herself as the student speaker at 1997’s Breakthrough Manchester (then known as Summerbridge) Celebration! (It wasn’t until she was a Teaching Intern herself that she retrospectively realized she had been chosen as the speaker because she was one of the shyest students.) The Breakthrough norm, “lean into discomfort” is what put Susan on her path to college, computer science engineering, and ultimately co-founding her own company.
Born in Peru, Susan and her family moved back to her father’s hometown of Manchester to be closer to his family when she was a baby. Susan and her sister Veronica both seized the opportunity to apply to Summerbridge and she still vividly remembers her Summerbridge summers. “The program really pushes you to come out of your shell and teachers are really vested in that,” she says: “I didn’t realize how amazing it was at the time, there’s something very magical about it.”
Susan recollects, “Summerbridge got me totally into learning. I felt like I was ahead of the game and that gave me a lot of confidence which I didn’t have before. There was something different about the group of people, how everybody was accepted, everyone was so humble and amazing. It felt like learning was cool. I learned to love learning - they instilled this in us. It was cool to have younger teachers that I looked up to. I remember a French song about ants, and learning about physics in middle school was wild. We dissected a chicken in Biology and I don't think I ate chicken for 2 years. Everyone there was so positive, not one negative thing!”
Planning to become a doctor, Susan enrolled at Tufts. She happened to take an elective in computer science, loved it, and transferred into the engineering school. In 2005, she was the only woman who graduated with a degree in computer science engineering! “At the time I was kind of like a lone ranger. Summerbridge has given me the confidence to pursue challenging things, so even if it’s not the normal path for women, it doesn’t matter.”
After college, Susan loved working at a number of startups and met her Tinyhood co-founder at one of those companies. When Susan and Becky were starting families of their own, they were appalled at the resources available for new parents, particularly moms. Technology was outdated, with Yahoo Groups and blog posts, so these millennials decided to build their own software to improve the available options. Tinyhood was born!
