Hult Alumni Magazine Issue 3 | Page 17

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 17