Kate Purmal is an entrepreneur and corporate executive with a successful track record of launching new companies and business ventures. She is the president of Kate Purmal Consulting, a firm that provides executive coaching and strategy consulting to CEOs and executives to support their performance and results in high-visibility business initiatives.

A serial entrepreneur, Kate has founded five companies and two non-profits, and has consulted with more than thirty start-ups and more than a dozen Fortune 1000 companies. She brings 25 years of operational experience working with leading executives and world-class companies including SanDisk, Palm, Computer Associates, Intuit, Hewlett-Packard, Handspring, Clorox, Adobe, CBS, and dozens of start-ups.

Most recently, Kate was SVP and General Manager of the Digital Content Business Unit at SanDisk, working with music, movie and television studios and content aggregators to deliver digital content and services across SanDisk products. Kate was previously CEO of U3, a software joint venture between SanDisk and M-Systems.

Prior to U3, Kate founded and ran Driver Group, a management and strategy consulting firm where she launched a Sales Management practice and established the “7-Touch” method for lead creation and management. With the 7-Touch method, clients increased their sales leads by as much as 200 percent and significantly increased revenue.

In 1992, Kate joined Palm Computing as a founding team member where she built and ran the Product Marketing and Strategic Alliance organizations. As part of the senior management team, she grew the company to more than 300 employees and $300M in revenue. Before Palm, she held senior roles in marketing, product marketing, business development, sales, and engineering at Interleaf, Grid Systems, and Computer Associates. She is a founder and former President of Women in Consulting, a non-profit organization for independent consultants.

Kate was voted one of San Jose Business Journal's Most Influential Women in Business in 2003, won a DEMOgod award at DEMOfall 2005 and in 2007, Kate was named to the Top 25 Women Redefining Success. She has been profiled in the Wall Street Journal, USA Today, New York Times, Inc. Magazine, Working Mother, Working Woman, and the San Jose and Business Journal.

Kate holds a BA in Applied Mathematics from the University of California, San Diego.