Re-engineering the Book Business: Blurb CEO, Eileen Gittins (Part 5)

SM: How did you penetrate the market and get early traction?
EG: Word of mouth driven by a great and viral product and turbo charged with amazing PR.

SM: What stage are you at now? Revenue? Profitability? Traffic? Titles? Any other metrics you track?
EG: Blurb expects turnover between $5-10MM in 2007, its first full year of product availability. We are doubling in size every 4-5 months.

SM: How did you finance the different phases of the company? Seed? Angel? VC?
EG: We’ve taken two rounds of venture capital funding from Canaan and Anthem Venture Partners.

SM: What financing stage are you at right now? Will you be raising more money? What timeframe? What is your ideal investor?
EG: We closed a $12MM B round in October last year, plus a $2MM debt financing earlier this year. We have no plans to raise additional financing this year.

SM: Describe some of your team building experiences. Is your management team complete now?
EG: We have built an awesomely talented, cohesive, committed and seasoned management team. With the recent addition of of our SVP Marketing and Business Development earlier this month, our executive team is complete, given our stage of company.

SM: What are your thoughts about exit?
EG: I really believe that while one must always be mindful of potential outcomes when making strategic decisions on financing, product strategy and market development, at the end of the day our job is to create awesomely great value for all our stakeholders – and if we do that, we create lots of options for the company – a very good thing.

SM: What are some of your key learnings from this journey so far?
EG: Team is everything.

[Part 1]
[Part 2]
[Part 3]
[Part 4]
[Part 5]
[Part 6]

This segment is part 5 in the series : Re-engineering the Book Business: Blurb CEO, Eileen Gittins
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