Eileen Gittins is the founder and CEO of Blurb, the creative publishing and marketing platform that enables anyone to design, publish, market and sell professional-quality books.
# Eileen Gittins went to UC Berkeley to study English and journalism.
# Gittins completed her undergraduate studies at the University of California at Berkeley and San Francisco State University and graduated magna cum laude with a B.A. in art (photography/digital imaging emphasis)
# She has also completed the Stanford Executive Management Program.
# She has lived and worked all over the world with Kodak and as VP at Wall Data before and after the IPO, CEO of Personify and Verb, outside Board Director at Qbiquity and Popular Demand, and even a stint at a boutique investment bank
# She was also co-founder and vice president of marketing at Pivotal Corporation and held various sales, marketing and management positions with Eastman Kodak’s Business Imaging Systems Division.
# Gittins was vice president and general manager at Salsa Products, a division of Wall Data, where she created a 100-person department and launched 17 product lines.
# As CEO, she has raised over $40m in venture capital throughout her career.
# “Running two successful start-ups taught me two lessons about being a CEO. The first was that you have to raise the money, and the second was learning how the minds of investors work and understanding the dynamics operating within a board of directors.”
# In 2009, Eileen was named by Fast Company as one of the top women in technology.
The Blurb story
In 2004, with the publishing world racing to embrace digital platforms as its ticket to the future, Eileen Gittins proposed a business plan that moved in the opposite direction. She wanted to give ordinary people the ability to design and produce their own bound, bookstore-quality books. Publishers and investors were skeptical. But seven years later, Blurb, the San Francisco–based company that emerged from Gittins’s contrarian vision, has grown into a runaway success. The company rang up $45 million in sales in 2009 and has published hundreds of thousands of titles by authors around the world. via Inc.com
# Eileen’s favorite quote: “First they ignore you. Then they laugh at you. Then they fight you. Then you win.” (Gandhi)
