Women Who Inspire Us
Internet

Karin Wertheim

Karin Wertheim is former CEO and current VP e-Business Services of Foodservice.com, the leading business-to-business ecommerce site created for the $354 billion food service industry, which she co-founded.

Wertheim began her career on Wall Street where she realized firsthand that inefficient markets were ripe for technology from her daily use of the Bloomberg machine. The right business opportunity came along when she invested in some local New York City restaurants and witnessed the inefficiencies of the foodservice industry.

After fourteen years as a vice president of fixed income sales on Wall Street, she left in December of 1997 to pursue her initial concept of creating an online electronic procurement system that would allow foodservice operators to purchase online from multiple suppliers. Realizing the timesavings and the cost efficiencies of a system of this magnitude, she began production of an online system for the foodservice industry. At the beginning of 1999, she turned Foodservice.com specifically into a B2B community for the foodservice industry.

Wertheim dropped out of college and began her Wall Street career at age 19 selling stocks at Merrill Lynch. By age 22, she joined UBS Securities where she spent the next eight years as a vice president of corporate bond sales. She spent two years at Paine Webber before moving to Oppenheimer as vice president of high yield & distressed securities. She left Oppenheimer in November 1997 to continue development of a many-to-many procurement system. She holds Series 7 and Series 63 licenses.

Wertheim lives in Manhattan, commutes frequently to the company headquarters in Alpharetta Georgia, and although not married, is happily involved in a long term relationship of 7 years. She loves to travel, workout, play golf, ski, do yoga and watch forensic science documentaries. She plans on helping other businesses find their path on the internet over the next several years.