Entrepreneurial Leadership Speaker Series
Sharing stories of success
London Business School's Entrepreneurial Leadership Speakers seminar is a monthly series that runs on the first Thursday of every month. It brings leaders from the technology community to campus to share insights into building high-growth, valuable ($500M+) global businesses in Europe. Videos of the talks are made available online shortly after the talks.
UPCOMING TALK
Thursday, 3 June 2010
Mike Hedger - event page 
Chairman of the Board, Mimecast and Founder, KVS
Angel investor
- Register
- Watch online
(avail Jun 4)
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
Details
- Reception at 6.30pm
- Seminar at 7pm
- Drinks and networking at 8pm
FULL 2009/2010 LINEUP
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
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
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.
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.
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
Thursday, 4 March 2010
Jos White
General Partner, Notion Capital and Founder, MessageLabs
Venture capitalist
SlidesJos 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
Thursday, 1 April 2010
Steven Brown
Co-founder and CEO, buy.at
Entrepreneur
Steve was one of the founders of buy.at and was both COO and CEO at the business, leaving shortly after the acquisition of the business by AOL for $125m.
During his tenure, the foundations for buy.at’s technical and commercial innovations were cast and executed upon. He then oversaw two financing rounds - a seed round and then investment from DFJ Esprit in 2006 - as well as the acquisition of Lightstate in 2007 and the final purchase of Buy.at by AOL in 2008.
Steve’s career started as a scientific researcher at an international facility in the UK following a PhD in Physics, followed by five years at KPMG from which he joined buy.at directly. He currently follows the technology start up scene and is interested as to where the sector’s next major innovations will develop.
Other recognitions for buy.at during Steven's leadership include:
- Travolution award for best affiliate marketing campaign (LateRooms).
- TechTrack 100 lists buy.at in the top 10 fastest growing technology companies in the UK.
- NMA lists buy.at as the fastest growing affiliate network in the UK.
- Highly commended affiliate network in the A4U awards.
- Per Techtrack 100 in 2007 buy.at was the UK’s largest, fast-growing, profitable technology company.
Event format
For the first time the event will consist of an interview, and we are pleased to announce that Nic Brisbourne will lead the discussion.
Nic Brisbourne
Partner, DFJ Esprit
Venture Capitalist
Nic has been in venture capital since 2000. In that time he has worked in London, Europe and Silicon Valley. His main areas of focus have been software and media. Prior to DFJ Esprit he was with Reuters Venture Capital.
Nic's investment experience includes buy.at (sold to AOL for $125m) and UltraDNS (acquired by Neustar - NYSE NSR). He currently manages DFJ Esprit's investments in Zeus, WAYN and Tribold.
Prior to joining Reuters Nic worked for Operis, a software and services start-up, and Cap Gemini. Nic also authors a blog commenting on the European technology and venture capital markets.
Please see www.theequitykicker.com
This will be a unique occasion to discover the story of a successful entrepreneur with the insights of his direct investor. The Q&A session will also give the opportunity to explore the "investor – entrepreneur" relationship for a deal that has been recognised as the VC Deal of the Year 2008 by the British Venture Capital Association.
Thursday, 6 May 2010
Hermann Hauser - event page
Founder and Managing Director, Amadeus Capital Partners
- Register
- Watch online
(avail May 10)
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
Thursday, 3 June 2010
Mike Hedger
Chairman of the Board, Mimecast and Founder, KVS
Angel investor
