Sharon K. Gillenwater is a tech entrepreneur who built and sold Boardroom Insiders for $25 million after 14 years of bootstrapped growth. When a private equity firm shut down the company in September 2025, some former customers and employees asked her to rebuild it—this time powered by AI. Sharon is launching ExecutiveIQ in January 2026, an AI-powered executive intelligence platform for B2B sales and marketing teams.

Sharon's non-traditional path to tech entrepreneurship is central to her story. The first in her working-class Southern California family to earn a college degree, she graduated from UC San Diego with a Bachelor's in Communications and a Master's from the School of Global Policy and Strategy. After moving to San Francisco, she discovered her passion for business at 30, working in startup sales and founding an email newsletter company before the 2001 dot-com bust.

As an independent consultant, Sharon worked with major tech companies including IBM, NetApp, VMware, Cisco, Oracle, Adobe and Google. At 43, she identified a universal client need and founded Boardroom Insiders in 2008, transforming her consulting services into a digital product. Under her leadership, the company earned a spot on the Inc. 5000 list of fastest-growing private companies before she sold it to Euromoney (now Altrata) in 2022.

Sharon chronicles her journey in her book Scaling With Soul: How I Built & Sold a $25 Million Tech Company Without Being an A**hole. She's also a startup advisor, investor, and content creator with over 80,000 followers across social media platforms.

Sharon lives in San Francisco with her husband and pets, and is a mother of two adult children. She enjoys traveling and is a competitive Mah Jongg player (American style).

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