Librerialeo.com founder Jordan Gutierrez, who expects to sell more than $1 million worth of medical books in Mexico this year, has won Simon Fraser University’s student entrepreneur of the year award.
The honour will reward the online bookseller and fourth-year economics student with $1,500 worth of in-kind prizes. It also allows Gutierrez to enter SFU’s VentureLabs student incubator program, which provides business development assistance by experts and mentors.
“I saw the market for this,” said Gutierrez, whose father is a dentist in Mexico and whose mother used to run a publishing company. “Our family has been involved with books for 100 years.”
Gutierrez’ venture launched two years ago and generated sales of about $300,000 last year.
B.C. has a history of sprouting internationally renowned online booksellers.
Hannes Blum built JustBooks into one of Europe’s biggest online booksellers before merging it with AbeBooks in 2001 and moving to Vancouver Island two years later.
Once Blum settled on Vancouver Island, he started bookmarking acquisition targets for his company, which focused on selling used, rare and out-of-print books. (See “A healthy margin: European and U.S. acquisitions make Victoria’s AbeBooks a major force in the vast online marketplace for used literature” – issue 869; June 20-26, 2006.)
Blum grew the company to generate hundreds of millions of dollars worth of annual sales, although he was always shy about providing an exact figure.
Amazon.com bought AbeBooks for an undisclosed amount in 2008.