Audio File:& Download MP3Transcript:& Interview with Asmau Ahmed Lucy Sanders: & Hi this is Lucy Sanders, the CEO of NCWIT, the National Center for Women and Information Technology and this is an interview and a series of interviews that we're doing with just wonderful entrepreneurs, who have started technology companies. With me is Larry Nelson, w3w3. Hi Larry. Larry Nelson: & Hi I'm so happy to be here. One of the great things we've been on the Internet Radio Show business for fourteen years and we're running into NCWIT and Lucy Sanders and their whole team. This has been absolutely been fantastic. I've got four daughters, so I'm very very moved. Lucy: & Wonderful. OK. This is the first time in over seventy interviews that I believe we're interviewing a chemical engineer. Larry: & Oh, that's it. That's right. Lucy: & It's awesome and with experience in color quality assurance no less. So stay tuned as to why this is so important for her company, Plum Perfect. Today we're interviewing Asmau Ahmed. She is the founder and CEO of Plum Perfect and it's just this fantastic site where you can go and you can upload a picture of yourself and magic happens, and it will find through color detection the right kind of make‑up for you. Now, Larry if you're not going to really look up at make‑up yet, OK, they're going to expand in other verticals around clothing or maybe furniture so you could send a shot of your sofa and you would know what colors you could use to decorate your house. Welcome Asmau. We're really happy to have you here. Asmau Ahmed: & I'm thrilled to be here. Thank you for having me. Lucy: & So tell us a little bit about what's going on at Plum Perfect. It's just an astoundingly beautiful site as well. Larry: & Yes, yes. Asmau: & Thank you. Thank you. What we've built really is a technology that enables end‑users to use mobile, social and online photos to shop. That really is the base line of our technology. Think about, what you said Lucy, taking a photo of your face and instantly in seconds, we would scour the web and all of the brands that you know and love to find you the one lipstick that would look great on you, the one eye shadow that would look good on you for that night out. Take a photo of a dress that you already own and we're going to find the perfect accessories to go with that dress or couch, to find the perfect throw pillows or paint colors. What we've really built here isn't just a beauty product or a fashion product or a home product. It is the ability for users to take photos, which we all do now, right? We literally have cameras everywhere we go on our phones, on our computers, so the ability to utilize that and we share it everywhere too as well right on Twitter, Facebook, Pinterest, Instagram. We're really in this culture of photo sharing. What Plum Perfect does is leverage that culture of photo sharing and uses that to drive e‑commerce powered by really, really strong technology. Lucy: & I can already see a successful exit for you. Larry: & My wife would be there tonight. Asmau: & I would be happy to take any introductions. Lucy: & I may be visiting this company when I go to California the end of this week. Asmau: & Oh, that would be great. Lucy: & Why don't you tell us how you first got into technology? You're a chemical engineer and here you are now starting a tech company. Asmau: & Absolutely. So where do I start? I love innovation. It's just been part of life, part of how I grew up. I remember growing up and reading my father's ‑‑ I'm aging myself now ‑‑ at that point, computers as common as they are today ‑‑ but reading my father's encyclopedia and just always being amazed by technology, particularly chemistry. At a young age, my parents changed our laundry room into a chemistry lab for me. [laughing] Asmau: & You know they did. So that was just the beginning. I kn