PROFESSORS IN THE MEDIA
Financial Times
Mike Grandinetti teaches entrepreneurship, innovation, marketing, and
management at Hult and is Managing Director of Southboro Capital
Group. Since he joined Hult in September 2011 he has been awarded
two global teaching excellence awards. He was also named the Financial
Times’ Professor of the Week in late April and asked to define the term
‘Super Angel’.
Mike says that the term ‘Super Angel’ refers to two very specific types of
angel investors. “The more common and traditional term refers to angel
investors who are prolific in their investment activities and who have made
seed investments in a large number of start-up ventures using their own
capital.” Mike provided examples of both low and high-profile Super
Angels, such as Keith Rabois, founder of Slide (acquired by Google), and
Reid Hoffman, founder of LinkedIn.
Mike continues ,“More recently, Super Angel has taken on a second
meaning. It refers to highly sophisticated and well-connected angel investors who have been uniquely successful as individual angels and who
have earned access to superior deal flow. In this case, they begin to either
pool capital with trusted colleagues or raise capital from friends and close
business associates.” As an example he gives us Peter Theil, founder of
Paypal, and his group, the Founders Fund.
Read more at: goo.gl/XxKe7
ZDNet
Mike Grandinetti was also recently featured in ZDNet, an online newspaper which keeps business technology professionals abreast of the latest
IT trends, issues, and events. The newspaper sought Mike Grandinetti’s
opinion on voluntarily delisting from the stock exchange to take a company private, in response to U.S. PC-maker Dell’s recent announcement that
it will go private.
Mike stated, “In a post-PC era, Dell’s PC products are no longer as significant contributors before, and it is behind competitors such as Lenovo in
terms of global shipments and innovation.”
As such, Dell has to completely reinvent itself and has “brutally hard decisions” to make. “This is difficult enough for any public company to do,
much less one in the insanely fast-paced world of high technology. Going
private, on the plus side will give Dell the opportunity to make the hard
decisions, which, if public, would cause them to be pummeled by the
capital markets. Real innovators have long ignored Wall Street and taken
the long-term view,” Mike said.
Read more at: goo.gl/fvr2Q
hult.edu
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