Look Who it Was Random video

David Murphy, CEO, Better Worlds Books - IMPACT

471 views · Published 17 October 2011 · 1:04:12 · Indexed 22 October 2026

Channel: Georgia Tech · 2011 · Education

Watch on YouTube

David graduated from the University of Notre Dame with a degree in Economics (High Honors).  He also received his MBA from the Amos Tuck School of Business at Dartmouth College.  David worked 23 years in corporate finance, operations and mergers and acquisitions with firms such as International Paper Company; The First Boston Corporation; Hutchinson SA (multi-billion $ French subsidiary of the Total Energy Group). He has also started several companies as well as served as CFO, COO, and CEO for both privately held and publicly traded firms in the manufacturing, health care services and technology sectors.  Additionally, he has served on both corporate and non-profit boards and was a key mentor and advisor to Better World Books through the Gigot Center for Entrepreneurial Studies at Notre Dame, where he is still active in judging the Annual Social Venture Business Plan Competition.  David serves on the Board of Directors for the Ferst Foundation for Childhood Literacy and Indaba LLC and is also an Advisory Board Member for Books for Africa, the Prison Book Program, Globe Funder, and Sprout Learn-n-Grow.  David is also actively involved with several organizations in the Social Enterprise space.  

True to its mission, Better World Books has provided over $6.5M in funding to its non-profit literacy partners and libraries working on four continents (Books for Africa; Room to Read; The National Center for Family Literacy; Worldfund; Invisible Children; The Robinson Center for Community Learning; the Prison Book Program and over 90 other non-profit partners whose focus is literacy and education); has donated over 1.4M books (primarily textbooks to Africa as well as children's books to Native American families living on reservations); has saved over 27 million pounds of books from ending up in landfills; has realized over 9,000 tons of carbon offset through the carbon neutral shipping of books purchased from www.betterworldbooks.com; has provided over 200 jobs with meaningful wages, healthcare and widespread employee ownership through its Incentive Stock Option Plan (over 90% of all full-time employees now own ISO's in Better World Books).  The Company keeps track of a variety of social and environmental metrics to which it holds itself accountable and reports quarterly to its Board and investors.   

Better World Books is now running book drives on over 2,000 college campuses in North America and in the UK; is working with over 1,800 libraries in North America and in the UK; has collected over 25.6 million books; has over 4 million new and used titles for sale on www.betterworldbooks.com, housed in its 250,000 sqf distribution center in Indiana; has over 4.6M unique customers and has the highest number of feedback ratings as a seller of used books on amazon.com.   The Company is processing over 300,000 books per week and is selling, on average, between 10,000 and 20,000 books per day.  Since launching its own e-commerce site in December of 2006 (www.betterworldbooks.com), the Company has seen revenues on this site go from nothing to an annualized revenue of over $9M; .  In addition to selling about 3,000 books per day on its own site, Better World Books sells on 20 other marketplaces (i.e., amazon.com; amazon france/germany/UK/Canada/ japan sites; half.com; barnesandnoble.com; abebooks; alibris; biblio; etc.)   

In a very difficult retail environment over the past nine months, Better World Books is realizing year over year sales growth in excess of 50%.Better World Books is a founding member of the B Corporation community (www.bcorporation.net) and is the first B corporation in the state of Georgia.  Better World Books was recognized in December of 2007 as one of ten for-profit Social Capitalist winners by Fast Company Magazine.  In September of 2008, Better World Books received a national award for Literacy Leadership by the National Coalition for Literacy in Washington, DC at the Library of Congress.   In May of 2009, Business Week readers voted Better World Books as The Most Promising Social Enterprise; this honor was the first such annual award from Business Week.

See more IMPACT speakers at http://video.ile.gatech.edu/

More from this channel