From Clean Sheet of Paper to Booming Businesses: Our captivating conversation with Jacqueline Corbelli, Founder, CEO, Change Agent, and Philanthropist
- laurenburke316
- Mar 31
- 6 min read
Updated: Mar 31
To round out our Female Founders series for Women’s History Month, our founder and CEO, Lauren Burke, sat down with Jacqueline Corbelli of Brightline, to talk about a multi-faceted career of leveraging transferable skills to help businesses — and communities — thrive.
Jacqueline (known as Jacquie) is full of passion for what, or should we say, all, that she does. This genuine passion is palpable throughout our interview, and leaves us not only wanting to learn more, but wanting to learn from her. From a single conversation, you can tell that Jacquie cares immensely about leaving a positive mark not only on industries, but on the world.
True story: right after our conversation, Jacquie was off to Europe to meet with the pope to fulfill her duties as a leader in the Vatican’s Ethics in Action forum. Jacquie truly does so much that we suggest you read her full bio here to truly understand the breadth of her skills and impact.
We could have talked for hours about Jacquie’s illustrious career. For this talk, however, we focused on gleaning the most valuable insights from across her career journey, specifically as it relates to women in the adtech and media industries. Jacquie shared that in our interview she wanted to “tell the parts of my story that might resonate and help other women achieve their dreams, even if they don't know what those are quite yet.”
Television + Adtech
Jacquie founded Brightline, an adtech company focused on innovative TV advertising formats, in 2003. This was the early days of adtech and Jacquie pioneered the space as one of the first female founders in the industry. Jacquie says she went into it with a “if not me, then who?” mentality.
Fast forward to today, Jacquie explained that “Brightline is a software that is integrated into all of the apps that you watch on your television. Wherever there is ad-supported content, our software development kit (SDK), is providing an enhanced advertising experience, whether it’s extra content, gaming, shopification, “like” interactions with branded content, and so on.”
Where adtech today is generally associated with digital or online solutions, Brightline has dominated the TV adtech space for decades. “When connected TV took off and streaming exploded, we watched the race toward innovation, and we were able to benefit from that,” said Jacquie.
A 12-year long moment
We wanted to understand Jacquie’s journey to founder and CEO of Brightline. Jacquie said that throughout her career she has experienced “a lot of things” that were important to building this business, so naturally, we were dying to know what those things were.
Jacquie explained that her defining moment was “12 years long,” and that her story to adtech founder actually started in the finance industry in change management. She was employee number one in a boutique firm whose job was to restructure banks “from top to bottom,” Jacquie explained. The majority of the value she provided was through her deep understanding and application of technology: she knew how to apply technology across businesses to fasttrack strategy delivery.
After successfully doing this for many years for the firm, Jacquie realized that this model was highly scalable and “applies not just to financial institutions.” Jacquie suggested to the owner to “go wider.” Ultimately, Jacqie ended up venturing off on her own (after providing 3 years notice) and her former manager became Brightline’s first investor. Jacquie created a “perfect transition” not only for her employer, but for herself, as she seamlessly moved into her new role as founder and CEO of Brightline.
The biggest question mark for her at the start was whether or not she would be able to “secure sufficient capital” to make this a viable business, especially as a woman in her early thirties. She said about the process, “it wasn’t scary, but it definitely kept me up.” She found parallels in this experience to early days of motherhood, “like when you have your first child, you know it’s going to be a challenge, but you don’t quite know what you’re in for.”
Jacquie credited her relationships from the financial services industry for the success of her business, “if I didn’t build those relationships, I wouldn’t have gotten it done.” Ultimately, those contacts invested in Brightline because they were willing to invest in her. She drove success for their businesses, so naturally, she would drive success in her own business.
The adtech landscape of today
As a seasoned adtech executive, we asked Jacquie what she sees on the horizon for Brightline and the industry as a whole. Jacquie mentioned the rise of advertising across premium streaming platforms as a game-changer which has contributed to Brightline’s double-digit growth: “we (Brightline) are in a cool position from the standpoint of our continued success is really connected to that migration that is occurring and the increased volume of streams delivered by all of these premium content providers.”
About adtech in general, Jacquie said that the “biggest question besides data is programmatic.” “We're out of the pure digital advertising growth trajectory,” Jacquie added, so “programmatic companies are now ultimately banking on connected TV.” There are a lot of questions in adtech right now, like “does the upfront look the same,” but overall Jacquie feels positive about the future of premium content.
From a clean sheet of paper to a sustainable future
We wanted to learn more about Jacquie’s other passion-focused endeavors. We then pivoted to her purpose-driven project SustainChain, which is “a public service platform purpose-built to unite the efforts of investors, innovators, government and non-profits to rebuild supply chains and make adequate progress towards reaching a sustainable future.”
Despite the current atmosphere, “SustainChain is seeing a lot of momentum.” Flashback to 15 years earlier, Jacquie started doing work in economic development with the United Nations. Given her vast business experience and expertise in technology, she was approached with an opportunity to help create something that would help drive sustainability globally and advance economic development efforts in impoverished nations.
Jacquie’s early experiences in change management made her well-poised to create something new and impactful. “Sustainchain was designed in the very same way that Brightline was designed, the very same way I did it in the banking industry, off of a clean sheet of paper,” said Jacquie.
Jacquie initially questioned whether she was qualified for this: “I was flabbergasted. And of course, I first said no. And I was like, I can't do it. I can't do it,” but ultimately she did and is so thankful for the experience.
Jacquie emphasized the bigger picture of sustainability that drives SustainChain forward, “sustainability at the core comes down to securing our basic needs as humans. It's not about the planet going away, it's about us going away.” By enabling business, SustainChain addresses food security, water security and energy, which “bridges business with bigger problems,” Jacquie said.
While SustainChain sounds complicated, Jacquie said that it’s “actually simple, it doesn’t work unless it’s simple.” If any of us want to take part in supply chain sustainability, “regardless of your industry, regardless of where you fit on a supply chain or what you're trying to accomplish, you're able to come into SustainChain where AI is connecting what you do with what you need and who's available to provide it best practices, resources, and funding the initiatives,” advised Jacquie. “Whether it takes off or not, what’s most important for me is that it exists,” she emphasized.
Action items for aspiring leaders
We were truly blown away by Jacquie’s career and long list of endeavors. Jacquie attributes her ability to accomplish so much to “conditioning, compartmentalization, the ability to focus, and meditate,” early advice she received that has stuck with her throughout her storied career.
The main action item Jacquie wants to leave us with is to “believe.” “Believe that you can do it, believe that you’re smart enough, believe that you have the tools,” she said. “No one has a monopoly on beauty, or intelligence, or money,” that truly anyone can do what “makes you happy.”
On that note, we leave this interview inspired, uplifted, and happy. If women like Jacquie can create so much for so many, why can’t we?
Watch our full interview here:
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Get in touch with Jacquie (and read her book!)
For readers/viewers who want to learn more about Jacquie, simply Google her (her advice, she just asks that you don’t look at the pictures!), or find her on LinkedIn. Also, check out her companies’ websites Brightline and SustainChain.
Finally, get ready for Jacquie’s book launch later this year. Called Changemaker, the Modern Playbook for Personal Impact and Transformational Change, it provides a playbook to building businesses in the same way Jacquie has done throughout her career, which we discussed in this article.
That’s a wrap on Women’s History Month and our Female Founders series!
Thank you to our six female founders for imparting their wisdom, sharing their expertise, and leaving us emboldened to take the next step in our careers. Through telling their stories, they help us write ours. We look forward to spotlighting more inspirational leaders and touching on important business-related topics in future series.
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