Michael Grandinetti

Serial Entrepreneur

Managing Director, Southborough Capital

Senior Lecturer, MIT Sloan School of Management

Core Member, MIT Global Entrepreneurship Team

Mike Grandinetti has a unique cross-disciplinary background. 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, holds long-standing faculty appointments at MIT’s Sloan School of Management and the Technical University of Denmark Center for Technology, Economics and Management and 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, Mr. Grandinetti has helped lead four venture-backed companies to successful exits for his investors.  Until recently, he served as Chief Marketing Officer for Virtual Iron, a leading provider of  virtualization  solutions. Virtual Iron raised $65M in venture and strategic capital from top US VCs as well as Goldman Sachs, SAP and Intel. Virtual Iron was recently acquired by Oracle.

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.

Mr. Grandinetti has been consistently successful launching several 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, open source and traditional models), semiconductors & systems. He also has significant experience as a coach to companies in medical devices & equipment, Health 2.0, Hospital IT, bioinformatics, enterprise search, patent search software, wireless broadband, Web 2.0 / 3.0, 3D visualization, renewable energy,  IT (business application & data services) consulting, aircraft engines, factory floor equipment,  and nutrition.

Mr. Grandinetti is very active in working with US and global entrepreneurs on many levels, as a lecturer, coach and board member. He holds an appointment as Senior Lecturer at the MIT Sloan School of Management in the Entrepreneurship Center, and is a Core Member of the MIT Global Entrepreneurship team. He is a veteran judge of the MIT $100K global entrepreneurship competition. He also serves as a judge 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 is 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 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, and is an Advisory Board member to SEED Capital in Copenhagen.  He is a faculty member and coach in Quebec’s ongoing Pilot Program for high potential entrepreneurial companies.  As a highly rated coach in Quebec, he helped one of his recent companies facilitate a high multiple trade sale, another establish strong strategic relations with major industry players and raised capital & a third significantly increase its market presence and revenues while also raising fresh venture capital.  One of his companies was recently (October 2008) named one of Canada’s Top 10 Companies by the Ottawa Center for Research and Innovation. Another recently announced a $10M venture financing from the Blackeberry Partners Fund and others (Jan 09). He has extensive experience in Scandinavia, primarily Denmark. One of the Danish companies which he has coached for the past three years grew from 10 to 100 people, expanded revenues by 10X while becoming highly profitable and was recently named Microsoft’s Global ISV Partner of the Year. He leads a Scottish government funded - program coaching high potential entrepreneurs on global Go-To-Market strategies. He is a frequent keynote speaker, panel moderator & seminar leader at industry events and has been quoted in hundreds of business and technical publications and blogs. He has delivered keynote or plenum addresses on regional and national innovation and commercialization at the recent Danish Engineering Leadership Forum, Techno Policy Conference on Regional Innovation Strategies, the Red Herring Conference on Venture capital, The Indus Entrepreneurs Annual Technology Conference, The Danish American Business Summit, the Scottish Fusion Conference on Innovation, The  Summit on Best Practices in Global Sales and Marketing,  the Northzone Venture Partners Annual Limited Partner meeting, the Technical University of Denmark Workshop on Global Go-to-Market,  and the Danish Technical University Corporate Entrepreneurial Leadership Alumni night. Locally, he has delivered keynote or plenum addresses or moderated panels for the MIT Sloan School Global Sales Conference, the MIT $100K Competition Founders Workshop,  the Mass Technology Leadership Council, TieCon East and the NECINA Brown Rudnick Business Plan Competition, among many others. He leads executive retreats for US and international VC firms and their portfolio company executives as well as senior executives of large corporations.  He is on the faculty of Highland Capital Partner’s Annual Summer Entrepreneurship Program. He is on the Entrepreneurial Advisory Board of Barcelona, Spain and serves as an advisor to the HIE on Innovation and Entrepreneurship.  He is a Charter Member of The Indus Entrepreneurs(the largest entrepreneurial group in the US), where he  serves as an Advisor to high growth member companies through his leadership role in the TiE Growth Company Forum.  He serves as a faculty member / mentor in SEED Camp, which focuses on EU - wide advanced technology entrepreneurship coaching and enablement, sponsored and supported by some of Europe’s leading venture capital firms. He is a mentor in Tech Stars Boston. He is a long serving member of the Corporate Executive Board of WGBH, the flagship Public TV and Radio operation within the US PBS.   

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.