Brooke Linville, CEO, IonVR in Boise

When Brooke Linville’s home burned to the ground in 2008 during the Oregon Trail Heights fire, she didn’t know at the time that it would lead to a new business and a new outlook.

Linville, who was eight months pregnant at the time and was diagnosed with Lyme disease shortly thereafter, says she turned to blogging to help her through that difficult time. She taught herself a variety of online marketing skills to promote her blog, and turned that expertise into a company, Digavise, to help others learn how to spread their messages online.

“You don’t know what life is going to hand you,” she says. “I’ve taken some unfortunate life circumstances and thrived as a result.”

It was her online expertise that also enabled her to help prevent the shuttering of Sweet Briar College, a beloved all-female college in Virginia, which she attended for two years before transferring to George Washington University. When the college announced that the spring 2015 semester would be its last, Linville stayed up late that night to create a Web page, Saving Sweet Briar, which would become the hub for communication and donations among alumnae and the public. The group raised $12 million in 60 days, and the college announced on July 2 that it would not be closing after all.

Just one day later, IonVR, the virtual reality headset startup that she was quietly working on with her husband, Dan Thurber, was featured in Forbes. The company, while still very small, has since received quite a bit of attention from other media outlets and tech companies, no small feat for a company competing in the same space as Google and Samsung.

“When you’re in a startup it’s the same kind of concept as leveraging unfortunate events,” Linville says. “You figure out a way to get yourself out there and leverage what you have.”

IonVR’s product, a virtual reality headset meant to work with both Android and IOS mobile phones, stands out from the pack for its patented MotionSync technology, which minimizes the lag between movement and the displayed picture, preventing the motion sickness that often comes with playing virtual reality games.

Though the growing business promises to monopolize much of her time for the near future, Linville, who started a weekly newspaper while in college, hopes to finish her first novel this year. She also hopes to continue traveling and spending time reading with her two young sons.

“Brooke has an intuitive savvy and versatility that simply cannot be manufactured or contrived,” says fellow entrepreneur Susan Stockton. “In every venture … Brooke is undeniably, whole-heartedly, all in.”

Linville’s advice to young women preparing for a career today is to develop creativity, critical thinking skills and communication skills, all of which have helped her along her varied journey.

“Technology changes really quickly,” she says. “It’s hard to know what technical requirements will be needed in the next 10 years, but if you have those skills you can move with the changes and quickly adapt.”

Looking to the future, Linville says finishing a novel is on her list. For today, she says she enjoys spending time with family and reading to her two young boys, ages 3 and 7.