Sharon K. Gillenwater is a tech startup founder and executive who successfully built, scaled and sold Boardroom Insiders for $25 million in 2022. She chronicles this journey in her first book Scaling With Soul: How I Built & Sold a $25 Million Tech Company Without Being an A**hole. Today, her mission is to demystify what it takes to build, scale and sell a successful tech startup  making entrepreneurial success more accessible to all. 

Sharon’s non-traditional background as a San Francisco-based tech entrepreneur and founder is unique. Her parents were not college graduates or business people, and she did not come from generational wealth. She grew up in a working class family in Southern California - her father worked in the plating shop for PSA Airlines and her mother was a computer programmer for the U.S. Navy. Sharon became the first person in her family to earn a college degree, attending the University of California at San Diego (UCSD) and earning a Bachelor’s in Communications. She went on to earn a Master’s degree from UCSD’s School of Global Policy and Strategy, and moved to San Francisco shortly after receiving her degree.

Sharon discovered her love of business at age 30, and integrated herself into the tech and marketing world in San Francisco. Her first job in San Francisco was working in sales at a startup offering language localization services, and she went on to found a company specializing in email newsletters ahead of the 2001 dot com bust. Eventually, Sharon became an independent consultant and developed a successful business working for major tech companies including EMC, IBM, VMware, RSA, Symantec, Cisco, Microsoft, NetApp, VMware, Adobe, Oracle, Sun Microsystems, Siebel Systems, and Google.

In 2008 at the age of 43, Sharon founded Boardroom Insiders by identifying a universal need among her clients, and evolving her consulting services into a digital, self-service product. She designed and oversaw the development of Boardroom Insiders Signature, the company's original executive profile database, and the award-winning BI PRO software. She recruited a partner to join her in 2010, and spent the next decade plus building and scaling the startup into a company that she sold in early 2022 for $25 million to Euromoney (now Altrata). Under Sharon’s leadership, Boardroom Insiders was named to the Inc. 5000, the 5,000 fastest-growing private companies in the U.S. based on their revenue growth rate.

Sharon now consults as a SaaS startup advisor, as a mentor and coach for aspiring tech entrepreneurs, is a professional speaker, and has become a successful content creator with an audience of nearly 30K people across platforms (follow her on social media). 

Sharon lives in San Francisco with her husband and pets. She is a mother of two adult children. She enjoys traveling, strategy games (especially mahjongg), and discussing politics.

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