As if the panel wasn’t amazing enough already––Eileen Gittins, Founder, President, and CEO of Blurb has joined the ranks! Eileen, an internet legend, a photographer, and a dedicated librophile, has revolutionized self-publishing. Her brainchild Blurb has made it possible, and more importantly financially feasible, for each and everyone of us to have our very own book. Eileen and her team think we should all have the reward of flipping though our own pages––does it get any better?

Eileen says this is the most fun company she’s ever run, which is saying a fair amount as 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 (behavioral segmentation and analytics) and Verb (context search), and outside Board Director at Qbiquity and Popular Demand.

Eileen never stopped photographing since her days studying photography, and that’s how Blurb got started. She wanted to create a beautifully designed and produced photo essay book – something that looked like a book you’d buy at the bookstore – but she only needed 40 copies. This turned out to be remarkably painful, expensive, and time-consuming – and she thought that was just wrong. So she founded Blurb.

Eileen’s favorite quote: “First they ignore you. Then they laugh at you. Then they fight you. Then you win.� (Gandhi)

We are thrilled to have the amazing woman that is Eileen Gittins join us and you should be to! And, of course, Eileen is also on The List…

This entry was posted on Thursday, November 2nd, 2006 at 3:01 pm by Alice and is filed under Announcements, Hot Shots News, Panelists. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.