“A story of Zero to a Couple of Billions of Dollars”
We had Michael Skok share some of the learnings from his Harvard iLab class on “Building Products into Valuable and Sustainable Businesses” at BoS 2014.
Slides
Video of Post Event AMA
Notes from AMA
Michael Skok
For the first twenty years of my career I built companies as an entrepreneur learning many lessons along the way. For the last eleven I’ve been helping entrepreneurs build their own startups. Today I’m lucky to work with an incredible group of founders and executives who I learn from every day.
Like a lot of entrepreneurs, I first fell in love with technology as a teenager when I taught myself programming and started building and selling applications before I went to University. That passion for solving problems through technology evolved in to a passion for business as I realized that innovations don’t get adopted without talented organizations behind them and a differentiated way to go the market with a business model that builds value.
Putting technology, people, and business strategy together became the foundation for the rest of my career. As an entrepreneur I founded / co-founded and worked with great teams to build a variety of different companies that spanned CAD/CAM, document management, workflow, imaging and collaboration, security, and analytics.
In 2002 I joined North Bridge as a partner and turned my focus to helping entrepreneurs build their own businesses. For me, VC investing is a continuation of what I’ve always loved: bringing together groundbreaking technology, amazing people, innovative marketing and game-changing business models.
At North Bridge I’ve focused on backing great entrepreneurs around market changing technologies such as Cloud Computing, and disruptive business models such as, Open Source. In these areas I’m currently focused on SaaS Applications in eCommerce, Mobile, and Big Data/Analytics. And I’m always building new investment theses based on trends like the shift from offline to online Marketing. But I’m the first to admit that if a great entrepreneur had an idea outside any of these areas, I’d be focused on their vision and potential above and beyond all else.
That conviction has given me the opportunity to work with a group of incredible entrepreneurs and executives at companies like Acquia, Apperian, Demandware (NYSE:DWRE), Salsify, Unidesk and others like Actifio and REVOlution Analytics where I am passionate about the team or space.
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