Betsy Burroughs has over 25 years experience in marketing, advertising, sales and publishing. She has marketed products ranging from Sun-Maid raisins, Zee paper towels and Purex to global software and semiconductor companies—working in account management at leading advertising agencies including Foote, Cone & Belding; D’Arcy-McManus Benton & Bowles; and TFB/BBDO. She has held sales and sales management positions at International Data Group (IDG) and CMP.
At both her own advertising agency and at her consultancy, her clients have included Google, Dwell Magazine, Gensler, Linguastat, The Discovery Channel, Rovi, Blurb, CNET Networks, Broadcasting & Cable Magazine, The Millennium Project, The Tech Museum of Innovation, Meritage Skin Care and Redken Haircare.
She has held vice president roles at a number of companies including InfoWorld Magazine, Satmetrix and co-working pioneer, Gate 3 WorkClub.
She has served on the board of the Waldzell Meeting, A Global Dialogue for Inspiration, held in Lower Austria from 2003 to 2008. 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.org, a national nonprofit that transforms recess for hundreds of thousands of elementary school children every day across the U.S. She also serves on the Advisory Boards for Linguastat, Inc. a revolutionary semantic Web company and The Luncheon Society.
In April, 2013, she was part of a 9-person delegation to visit charity:water wells in remote villages in northern Ethiopia.
In June, 2013, she was a speaker at TEDxLivermore where she took hundreds of people through one of her FocusCatalyst Brainstorming Techniques during her 18 minute talk on “How To Get More Aha! Insights.” As soon as the video of that TEDx talk is available, it will be posted on this site.
She is the author of FOCUS. The Catalyst for Innovation. Guided Brainstorming for Innovators and founder of the FocusCatalyst Brainstorming Salon. The Salon has been held every first Thursday of the month in Betsy’s San Francisco South of Market loft since February, 2004.
She is a member of the World Future Society and a member 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 Vice President of Marketing for InfoWorld Magazine, she created the InfoWorld Futures Project andrecruited 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 PARC; Jaron Lanier, considered the “Father of Virtual Reality;” best-selling author of Crossing the Chasm, Geoffrey Moore; and IDEO founder and co-founder and head of the Stanford d school, David Kelley and more.
Also at InfoWorld, she negotiated their sponsorship of Paramount Pictures’ Las Vegas Star Trek attraction. 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.