The Long Bio

Betsy Burroughs has over 25 years experience as a Silicon Valley executive in branding, advertising, sales and publishing.

Betsy has done branding work for products and services ranging from Sun-Maid raisins, Zee paper towels and Purex to global software and semiconductor companies—working in account management at leading consumer packaged goods advertising agencies such as Foote Cone & Belding and D’Arcy-McManus Benton & Bowles; and at the largest ad agency in Silicon Valley, TFB/BBDO.

She has held sales and sales management positions at leading tech media companies, International Data Group (IDG) and CMP.

At both her branding agency and innovation consultancy, her clients have included Google; The Discovery Channel; Redken Haircare; Meritage Skin Care; The United Nations Millennium Project; The Tech Museum of Innovation; Tivo; Rovi, CNET; TechRepublic; Blurb, and Linguastat.

Dwell Magazine & Media; The City & County of San Francisco; Gensler, the largest architecture firm in the world; and many more.

She has held corporate Chief Marketing Officer roles at a number of companies including leading tech magazine, InfoWorld; customer-service tech leader, Satmetrix; and co-working pioneer, Gate 3 WorkClub.

In addition, Betsy’s other background and experience has influenced her approach to innovation and new ways of thinking:

She has served on the Board of the Waldzell Meeting, A Global Dialogue for Inspiration, a small invitation-only conference that was held in Austria and chaired by Fast Company Magazine's co-founder, Alan Webber. Speakers there included architect Frank Gehry, His Holiness the Dalai Lama, Warren Bennis, artists Christo and Jeanne Claude, authors Isabele Allende and Paulo Coehlo, many Nobel Prize winners and more.

She was a founding member of the San Francisco Board of Playworks, a national nonprofit that transforms recess for hundreds of thousands of elementary school children every day across the U.S. She's also served on the Advisory Boards for Linguastat, a revolutionary semantic Web company, and The Luncheon Society,` and is a Fellow at Mmindd Labs.

Leading design magazine, Dwell. asked her to be their representative in a 9-person delegation to visit charity:water wells in remote villages in northern Ethiopia, as guests of Soma Water.

In 2013 she was invited to be a speaker at TEDx where she took over 350 people through one of her signature written techniques from her book, FOCUS. The Catalyst for Innovation, during her talk on “The Milky Way Brain: How To Get More Aha! Insights.”

She is known in Silicon Valley for founding the iconic FocusCatalyst Brainstorming Salon, held every first Thursday of every month for over 12 years in Betsy’s San Francisco South of Market loft from 2004 to 2016.

She’s been a member of the World Future Society and of the Silicon Valley Node of the Millennium Project—a United Nations-affiliated think tank that produces the annual International State of the Future Report.

As Chief Marketing Officer for the leading tech magazine at the time, InfoWorld, she created the InfoWorld Futures Project and recruited an Advisory Board for it that included some of the leading futurists and thinkers in the country including Paul Saffo, then Director, Institute for the Future; John Seely Brown, then Director of Xerox Palo Alto Research Center (PARC); Jaron Lanier, considered the “Father of Virtual Reality;” best-selling author of the Silicon Valley classic, Crossing the Chasm, Geoffrey Moore; and David Kelley, who is both the founder of Silicon Valley’s leading global design company, IDEO, and co-founder of the Stanford d. school; and more.

Also at InfoWorld, she negotiated their sponsorship of Paramount Pictures’ $100 million Star Trek:The Experience attraction in Las Vegas. She cites as one of her greatest thrills going on the set of Deep Space Nine—twice.

Betsy Burroughs is a graduate of the University of California at Davis with a BA degree in English.