Greg Gianforte, CEO and founder of RightNow Technologies, will present the fall 2009 Harold and Priscilla Gilkey Executive Lecture at The University of Montana on Wednesday, November 18. The title of Gianforte’s presentation, scheduled for 6 p.m. in Gallagher Business Building, Room 106, is “Bootstrapping the Montana Economy”. The event is free and open to the public.

Gianforte founded RightNow, a leading provider of on demand customer relationship management (CRM) solutions, in 1997. He took the company public in 2004 with one of the year’s most successful initial public offerings. The company is headquartered in Bozeman and employs more than 700 people. Today, 1,900 consumer-focused companies around the world count on RightNow to deliver superior customer experiences while simultaneously reducing operating costs.

Gianforte is also the founder of Bootstrap Montana, a program designed to help entrepreneurs learn the principles of bootstrapping and provide micro-loans to rural Montana entrepreneurs. A serial entrepreneur, he is the author of Bootstrapping Your Business: Start and Grow a Successful Company with Almost No Money.

Gianforte holds a bachelor’s in electrical engineering and master’s in computer science from the Stevens Institute of Technology. He was inducted into the CRM Hall of Fame in 2007, received an Honorary Doctorate of Computer Science from Montana State University in 2007, and was named Ernst & Young Entrepreneur of the Year (Pacific Northwest software category) in 2003.