When Jonna Ward was starting her tech career, there weren’t any scholarships to help with her tech education, much less female tech leaders who could offer mentoring. So the founder and president of Visionary Integration Professionals in Folsom, Calif., started a scholarship fund in ‘08 for women pursuing tech-related degrees. Jonna tells us the program has been so successful that the company is overwhelmed with applications this year, growing from 110 last year to 257. The company will award $20k in scholarships.

We met Jonna this week while she was in town visiting the company’s Alexandria, Va.-based federal team. Early in her career, she took a job in information systems at Andersen Consulting (now Accenture) in Sacramento, Calif. Jonna, 23 at the time, knew she could fall back on accounting and finance if this whole tech thing didn’t take off. Clearly it did, since Jonna is now running a 700-employee, nine-digit-in-revenue company that provides tech and consulting solutions, as well as integrated learning and performance management software to government and commercial customers. She says the most valuable lesson an entrepreneur should know is the basics of business survival and having the right people on the bus.