Kim Perell is an award-winning entrepreneur, bestselling author, CEO, and angel investor with a passion for people, technology, and progress. Kim went from being laid off at 23 to becoming a multi-millionaire by the time she was 30 years old, selling her last company for $235 million in 2014.
She is currently the CEO of Amobee, a global marketing technology company serving the world’s leading brands and agencies. Kim is also an investor in over 70 companies, 14 of which have been successfully acquired by some of the largest Fortune 500 companies including a billion-dollar IPO.
Kim’s career started in 1999 at Xdrive, an Internet start-up in Los Angeles that was a precursor to Dropbox. She quickly rose to Director of Marketing & Sales, managing a team of 20 plus and generating more than $10 million in revenue in nine months. When Xdrive went bankrupt, Kim found herself unemployed but had discovered her passion for the internet. She channeled that passion into starting her own company, Frontline Direct, a digital marketing firm. From its modest beginnings at her kitchen table in Hawaii in 2003, Kim grew Frontline to more than $100 million in annual revenue.
That success and Kim’s leadership abilities drew the attention of Adconion Media Group, a global digital media company, which acquired the company in 2008 and appointed Kim CEO in 2010. In 2014, Kim executed the sale of Adconion Direct to Amobee, a subsidiary of SingTel, a $50 billion dollar telecommunications company in Singapore. Yet throughout these changes, she dedicated herself to creating outstanding workplace cultures, a run that continues today. In 2016, Amobee was named one of Fortune Magazine’s Top 10 Places to Work in Marketing & Advertising.
Kim is passionate about women in business and writes, speaks, and is interviewed regularly on leadership, marketing technology, and entrepreneurship. Her achievements as a leader and entrepreneur have been widely recognized and covered in the media, including profiles in The New York Times, CNN Money, and Forbes. Her professional honors include being named Entrepreneur of the Year by Ernst & Young and Entrepreneur of the Year by the National Association for Female Executives. Most recently, she was named as one of Real Leaders’ Top 50 Keynote Speakers in the World in 2022.
Kim graduated magna cum laude from Pepperdine University with a Bachelor of Science in Business Administration. An avid traveler (more than 60 countries visited), she and her husband live in Solana Beach, California, with their two-year-old twins, Elle and John.
