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Entrepreneurial Leadership Speaker Series

Helping entrepreneurs share their stories of success

London Business School's Entrepreneurial Leadership Speakers seminar is a monthly speaker series that runs on the first Thursday of every month and brings leaders from the technology community to campus to share their insights in building high-growth, valuable ($500M+) global businesses in Europe. Videos of the talks are also shared online and are made available shortly after the talks.

Thursday, 4 March 2010

Jos White
General Partner, Notion Capital and Founder, MessageLabs
Venture capitalist

Jos is a founding partner at Notion Capital, a venture fund and advisory business that focuses on early to mid-stage growth businesses in the Internet based services sector. Before founding Notion, Jos has co-founded three businesses helping to grow them all into market leaders each with revenues in excess of $100M.

In 1993 Jos co-founded RBR Networks, an IT distributor that specialised in Cisco. By 1998 RBR had become Cisco's largest distributor in Europe, with revenues in excess of $160M, and was acquired by Datatec in the same year.

At the same time, in 1995, Jos and Ben founded Star Internet as one of the UK’s first ISPs. Star is now well established as one of the UK's largest ISPs and has evolved into a more broad-based communications company.

In 2000 Jos and Ben co-founded MessageLabs, that became the market leader for messaging and web security services and a company at the forefront of the exploding Software as a Service (“SaaS”) industry. Towards the end of 2008 MessageLabs was acquired by Symantec for approximately $700M.

Jos' full profile: www.notioncapital.com/bio-joswhite.html

Details

• Reception at 6.30pm
• Seminar at 7pm
• Drinks and networking at 8pm

FULL 2009/2010 LINEUP

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Thursday, 1 October 2009

Robin Klein
The Accelerator Group (TAG)
Angel Investor

Robin built, run and successfully sold several companies. Robin is an investor and advisor in fast growth businesses specialising in consumer facing, branded, multi-channel retailers, digital media and internet services. He is currently chairman of The Accelerator Group, an investment and advisory company for early stage, internet services businesses and multi-channel retailers. Through Accelerator or Local Globe (family investment company) he has interests in the following businesses:

60frames.com, astleyclarke.com, amee.com, billmonitor.com, daylife.com, digivate.com, dothomes.com, dopplr.com, dothomes.com, fizzback.com, fotonauts.com, fuzzwich.com, glassesdirect.co.uk, graze.com, imagini.net, koodos.com, kublax.com, lookery.com, lovefilm.com, mashery.com, moo.com, moveme.com, mindcandydesign.com, mybuilder.com, netlog.com, openx.com, rjdj.me, seedcamp.com, slideshare.com, stardoll.com, snaptalent.com, spotrunner.com, songkick.com, wonga.com, zemanta.com, zoopla.com

Some of Robin's operational experience and highlights:

• Ran, built and successfully sold three companies: Berda Electric (1976), Salton (1985) and Innovations (1996).
• Previously Chairman and CEO of Innovations Group PLC, a multi-brand mail order business. The group included Innovations (household and technology gadgets), Hawkshead (clothing) and McCord (Housewares). In 1995, Innovations conducted the UK’s first secure Internet transaction with consumers- supported by NatWest bank and ICL. Sold Innovations in 1997 to the Burton Group (£45m) and subsequently to GUS.
• Co-founded a consumer data company (Consumer Access) in 1993. It was sold to Consodata (listed French Company) in 1998. £16m.
• Managing Director, Arcadia Marketing and Home Shopping ’96-’98.
• Founded fashion portal Zoom for Arcadia (March ’99) – sold 50% (£15m) to Associated Newspapers in August ’99.
• Created Dial, the home shopping joint venture between Arcadia and Littlewoods.

Robin's full profile: aboutrobin.blogspot.com
Blog:the-accelerator.blogspot.com
Twitter: twitter.com/robinklein

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Thursday, 5 November 2009

Stan Boland
CEO and Founder, Icera
Entrepreneur

Stan is responsible for the overall management of Icera Inc and is a member of the Board of Directors and a founder of the Company.

Prior to founding Icera, Stan was Vice President and General Manager of the DSL business unit of Broadcom Corporation (NASDAQ: BRCM) with responsibility for all DSL-related worldwide development and marketing activity. He assumed this role following the sale to Broadcom of Element 14 Inc, a start-up fabless semiconductor company focused on high density DSL chipsets, which Broadcom acquired for $640M in late 2000.

At Element 14, Stan was founder, President & CEO. Immediately prior to this, Stan was CEO of Acorn Group plc, a publicly-quoted electronics company which Morgan Stanley acquired in 1999 for $440M, and was a director of ARM Holdings plc (NASDAQ: ARMHY), an associate of Acorn. He had joined Acorn from ICL, an affiliate of Fujitsu Limited, in 1997 following 7 years with that company in a variety of business management roles, including CFO of two large operating divisions. Prior to ICL, he worked for 3 years with a large successful MBO, 1 year with Bell Resources and 6 years with Rolls-Royce, a leading aerospace company, where he trained as an engineer in electronics and engineering computing. He graduated in Physics from Cambridge University, is a Member of the IEEE and is qualified as an FCMA and a MCT.

Stan's full profile: www.icerasemi.com/team_stanboland.php

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Thursday, 3 December 2009

Stefan Glänzer
Entrepreneur and investor

Stefan Glaenzer, Executive Chairman and first investor of Last.fm until it got sold to CBS in 2007 for USD 280m, is one of the most active business angels in Europe's digital space. Currently he acts as Executive Chairman at the research community Mendeley.com and at RjDj.me. Stefan is a serial entrepreneur since he left university: in 1998 he founded ricardo.de, Germany's biggest online-auction company, which he took to an IPO at Neuer Markt in 1999. The company merged to QXLricardo in 2000 before got sold to Nasper in 2007, for USD 1.8 billion.

Stefan is currently invested in 25 plus companies; he was entrepreneur in residence at Benchmark Capital (2002) and is teaching entrepreneurship at the WHU University. He has won several awards, including the German Multimedia Award in 1999 and the Web-Leadaward in 2007. Stefan graduated from the University of Hamburg with a PhD in foreign exchange risk management and was a professional DJ for 15 years. Since end of 2000 he and his family enjoy living in London.

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Thursday, 14 January 2010
(please note the change in date)

David Axmark
Co-Founder, MySQL
Entrepreneur

David is one of the Founders of both the MySQL Project and the company behind it. David has been working with MySQL since well before it had a name.

Before MySQL took over all time David worked as a consultant for over 15 years. The things he did included A State of the art market research system (written in CommonLISP+CLOS+MySQL's ISAM) and a advanced business graphics package (back in the days when 32k RAM was all you had). He has written many lines of code in 6502 and Z80 assembler, Basic (Acorn BBC-B and ABC800), C, CommonLisp, (Bourne)-Shell and Perl (and lately even some Ruby).

During the MySQL years David worked with the business idea, strategy, commercial and business aspects, hiring. Early on also some real work doing code for portability, web site, installation, documentation. The last yers included a lot of talking about it all (conferences all over the world, tutorials, customer presentations, interviews etc).

Personal hobbies include mountain hiking, digital photography, disc-golf (the REAL golf!) and ultimate frisbee. David lives close to Windsor outside London with his Malaysian wife, 2 small kids, a large garden and of course a number of computers.

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Thursday, 4 February 2010

Bernard Liautaud
General Partner, Balderton Capital and Founder, Business Objects
Venture capitalist

Bernard Liautaud founded Business Objects in 1990 and was CEO for 15 years then Chairman until January 2008. With 6,700 employees, 45,000 customers and $1.5 billion of revenue in 2007, Business Objects was the world leader in Business Intelligence and one of the 15 largest software companies in the world. Business Objects was the first European software IPO on Nasdaq in 1994. In January 2008, Business Objects was acquired by SAP for $6.8 billion, making it the third largest software acquisition at the time.

Bernard is now a member of the SAP Supervisory Board and its strategy committee. He is also a member of Cap Gemini’s board and its strategy committee.

He has received a number of distinctions including “Chevalier de la Légion d’Honneur” in 2007 in France, Time Magazine Europe's Digital Top 25 and BusinessWeek Stars of Europe of 2002, Top 10 CEOs in North America by Chief Executive Magazine in 2001.

Bernard's full profile: www.balderton.com/our-team/#bernard-liautaud

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Thursday, 4 March 2010

Jos White
General Partner, Notion Capital and Founder, MessageLabs
Venture capitalist

Jos is a founding partner at Notion Capital, a venture fund and advisory business that focuses on early to mid-stage growth businesses in the Internet based services sector. Before founding Notion, Jos has co-founded three businesses helping to grow them all into market leaders each with revenues in excess of $100M.

In 1993 Jos co-founded RBR Networks, an IT distributor that specialised in Cisco. By 1998 RBR had become Cisco's largest distributor in Europe, with revenues in excess of $160M, and was acquired by Datatec in the same year.

At the same time, in 1995, Jos and Ben founded Star Internet as one of the UK’s first ISPs. Star is now well established as one of the UK's largest ISPs and has evolved into a more broad-based communications company.

In 2000 Jos and Ben co-founded MessageLabs, that became the market leader for messaging and web security services and a company at the forefront of the exploding Software as a Service (“SaaS”) industry. Towards the end of 2008 MessageLabs was acquired by Symantec for approximately $700M.

Jos' full profile: www.notioncapital.com/bio-joswhite.html

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Thursday, 1 April 2010

Eric Baker
Founder & CEO, viagogo.com
Entrepreneur

Prior to viagogo, Eric co-founded StubHub.com, the leading U.S. online secondary ticketing company for live events. Eric took StubHub from an idea on a sheet of paper to a rapidly growing, profitable business that revolutionised the way that fans buy tickets in the secondary market and was acquired by eBay for $307M. As President, Eric was primarily responsible for sales/business development, strategic planning, financing, and public relations.

Prior to StubHub, Eric was an associate with Bain Capital, a private equity firm based in Boston. At Bain Capital, Eric focused primarily on technology leveraged buyouts. Before that, Eric worked at the management consulting firm McKinsey & Company, where he focused primarily on the Internet and electronic commerce issues. Eric graduated Phi Beta Kappa from Harvard College ('95) and received his MBA at Stanford Business School ('01).

Eric has been quoted in publications including The Financial Times, The Guardian The Sun, The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Time Magazine, Business Week, Music Week, Billboard and The Sports Business Journal, and on international news services such as Bloomberg and Reuters . Eric has also appeared on broadcast outlets including CNN, MSNBC, CNBC, ESPN, Fox, BBC World Business Report, BBC Radio 4, Sky News and National Public Radio in the US and the UK.

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Thursday, 6 May 2010

Hermann Hauser
Director, Amadeus Capital Partners
Venture capitalist

Hermann co-founded Amadeus Capital Partners in 1997 with Anne Glover and Peter Wynn. In his long and successful history as an entrepreneur and venture capitalist, he has founded or co-founded companies in a wide range of technology sectors. These include Acorn Computers, Active Book Company, Virata, Net Products, NetChannel, and Cambridge Network Limited. He was a founder director of IQ (Bio), IXI Limited, Vocalis, SynGenix, Advanced Displays Limited, Electronic Share Information Limited and E*Trade UK.

At Amadeus Hermann has been a non-executive director of many investee companies including CSR, which provides single chip wireless solutions supporting communications over short-range radio links, and Entropic Research Laboratory, a company that developed voice recognition software, which is now the voice recogniser in Microsoft Word. Entropic was sold to Microsoft in 1999. He is a non-executive director of Plastic Logic, which has developed a process for producing flexible plastic transistors for use in computer displays, and Solexa, which is developing ultra-high throughput DNA sequencing technology.

Hermann holds an MA in Physics from Vienna University and a PhD in Physics from the Cavendish Laboratory at King's College, Cambridge. He is a Fellow of the Institute of Physics and of the Royal Academy of Engineering and an Honorary Fellow of King's College, Cambridge. Hermann holds honorary doctorates from the Universities of Bath, Loughborough and from Anglia Polytechnic, and was awarded an Honorary CBE for ‘innovative service to the UK enterprise sector’ in 2001. In 2004, he was made a member of the Government’s Council for Science & Technology.

Austrian by birth, Hermann speaks German, English, Italian and French.

Hermann's full profile: www.amadeuscapital.com/team/hermann.php

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Thursday, 3 June 2010

Mike Hedger
Chairman of the Board, Mimecast and Founder, KVS
Angel investor

Mike Hedger has a track record in building market-leading companies. Previously CEO of market leading email archiving company KVS from its inception in 1999 to its successful sale to Veritas for $225 million in 2004 (now Symantec Enterprise Vault).

His former experience includes a four years as EVP worldwide operations at Forte, building the European business before moving to head up Worldwide Operations which culminated in a successful acquisition by Sun for $700 million.

Mike's earlier career included positions as VP Marketing Operations EMEA for Oracle, Managing Director UK and Northern Europe for INGRES/ASK and successful sales careers at both WANG and IBM.

Mike's full profile: www.mimecast.com/about-us/board-of-directors