Mike Grandinetti

By Neill Occhiogrosso

Mike Grandinetti has a unique cross-disciplinary background in the field of innovation and entrepreneurship. He has deep operating experience as a serial venture capital – backed entrepreneur, was involved as an early team member in the launch of several successful new businesses within Hewlett-Packard, held a long-standing faculty appointment at MIT’s Sloan School of Management and holds a faculty appointment at the Technical University of Denmark Center for Technology, Economics and Management. He has been deeply involved in regional and national economic development, with a distinct focus on global entrepreneurial coaching and enablement, as well as advanced technology commercialization and tech transfer, in the US, Canada, and Europe. He also served as a senior management consultant with McKinsey, the world’s premiere strategy consultancy.

As a serial entrepreneur, Mike has helped lead five venture-backed companies to successful exits for his investors. Until recently, he served as Chief Marketing Officer for Virtual Iron, a leading provider of data center virtualization software solutions. Virtual Iron raised $65M in venture and strategic capital from top US VCs as well as Goldman Sachs, SAP and Intel.

Prior, he was SVP & CMO for Yantra, a leading provider of Supply Chain solutions. He was part of the executive leadership team that was responsible for selling Yantra to ATT for 6X trailing revenues. Other companies that Mike has helped lead to a successful exit include Viewlogic (IPO, subsequent acquisition for roughly $500M), Raptor Systems (IPO, subsequent acquisition for roughly $250M), and Connected Corp (acquisition for $120M.) Mike co-led the IPO road show at Raptor, which raised $70M and had a 100 per cent investor success rate. He has also been involved in M&A from the buy side, both while a McKinsey consultant and as an operating executive, as several of his companies acquired young ventures to expand their solution set and fuel their growth.

Mike has been consistently successful launching emerging technology companies & scores of new products & in creating several new product categories. He has been an executive in some of the fastest growing US companies in their respective industries. Prior, he worked at McKinsey, where he consulted with executives on a broad range of strategic engagements, including M&A analysis; and at HP, where he managed a national corporate account sales program for General Electric and was responsible for selling computer –aided engineering software solutions to GE businesses across North America. While Mike is best known for his world class entrepreneurial Go-to-Market skills he has also held roles including VP Business Development, where he was executive sponsor of relationships with Global Strategics including Accenture, Intel, IBM, HP, Microsoft and others. As GM of a Professional Services P&L, he grew a highly profitable consulting business within a software company, achieving $10M in revenues in less than one year. Mike’s primary operating expertise is in enterprise software (business apps, IT infrastructure, security, engineering and manufacturing – leveraging SaaS, cloud, open source and traditional models), semiconductors & systems.

Mike is very active in working with US and global entrepreneurs on many levels, as a lecturer, coach and board member. He held an appointment as Senior Lecturer at the MIT Sloan School of Management in the Entrepreneurship Center for ten years, and has been a Core Member of the MIT Global Entrepreneurship team. He is also a veteran judge of the MIT $100K global entrepreneurship competition where he served for ten years. He has also served as a judge and mentor in the Global MBA Sales Competition, which includes representatives from the world’s top graduate business schools. He has served on numerous emerging company advisory boards, facilitating one company’s successful acquisition by Cisco, for example.

He has extensive experience coaching and teaching non-US entrepreneurs and advising international economic development agencies. He has been a core member of MIT’s Global Entrepreneurship team. Internationally, he holds a faculty appointment at the Technical University of Denmark, where he teaches in their international Corporate Entrepreneurial Leadership program. In this capacity, he works with Denmark’s largest health care, nutrition, energy, industrial and service companies on issues around innovation and growth. He is a faculty member in the Danish - government sponsored program for the country’s most promising start-ups.

He has mentored and lectured in many entrepreneurship programs, including TechStars Boston, SEEDCamp London, IBM SmartCamp, Founder’s Institute Boston, Summer@Highland, TiE Growth Forum, CEIM Go-to-Market, , Quebec Technology Growth (CQT), Gazelle Growth Denmark, Going Global Scotland, IGNITE, Propulsion, Venture Leaders and the MIT Global MIT Sales Competition, among others. He recently was on the Organizing Committee and moderated the first ever TiE CIO Forum, a program which connects start-up CEOs in social media, mobile apps and cloud computing with Lighthouse customers, and was on the Organizing Committee and was a keynote panel moderator at the Quebec City Conference on Global Public Policy in Venture Capital. He was Senior Adviser, moderator and keynoter at the State of the Cloud Executive Conference. He is a Charter Member of TIE, and has been active in moderating keynote panels at several recent TiE Con East Annual Conferences.

He was recently appointed an Academic Fellow at Sitekit Labs in the UK which focuses on research in medical IT and has a long-standing appointment on the Corporate Executive Council of WGBH – where he co-chairs the nominating committee.

He received his BS in Engineering, magna cum laude, from Rutgers, where he was unanimously elected to both the National Engineering Honour Society and National Engineering Honour Fraternity. He also received his MBA from Yale, where he was named the annual Jess Morrow Johns Memorial Scholar & was the recipient of Procter & Gamble’s prestigious Marketing Leadership Award and a Yale Teaching Fellowship.

Neill Occhiogrosso is a Principal at Highland Capital Partners