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Mike
Anderson
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My history would include something around
16 years of
business and product development,
technology, operational and finance experience in large corporate and early-stage,
entrepreneurial type environments. My last "corporate" position was with Washington Mutual Venture Capital, a $150 million venture fund where I served as Vice President until December, 2004. My responsibilities included sourcing, negotiating and managing private equity and limited partner investments. During the Fall of 2004 I decided I had the itch to take on some different challenges and get involved in business segments that I knew little about. One thing I've always wanted to do was to design, manufacture and distribute a physical consumer product from scratch. After some research, Fly Fashions was founded to produce products for the underserved high fashion cell phone accessory market. Long story, short version, the company has manufactured and shipped over 85,000 products to date. It was during Fly Fashions development when I received a phone call from the COO of a startup that was creating a new TV series called HomeTeam (now on NBC & WGN) which had an innovative business model blending broadcast and an internet based backend business model. I came aboard as interim VP of Business Development, navigating another business segment (Television / Media) where I was a "fish out of water". All in all, a fantastic challenge and learning experience. It was just after HomeTeam went on air that I was asked by daredevil professional, Russ Wicks to co-produce a TV special called American SpeedKing. The storyline for the series is all about setting and achieving far reaching goals in life. Overall, the shows are based the adventures of setting world speed records in a number of motor sports. We finished filming the first segment of the show July 4th, 2006 and set a new Guinness land speed record in a NASCAR. SpeedKing was an absolutely exhilarating experience to see months of hard work come together in the form of Russ driving the stock car down Bonneville Salt Flat at over 237 mph with a film crew (and a helicopter) chasing after him. It was very rewarding to be part of a very small team turning a vision into reality. Now it's all about getting it on the tube, another significant challenge. So, that has been the last 1.75 years. Creating from the ground floor a consumer product company and two TV shows. What a wild ride and I can now say that I've satisfied my desire to accomplish something that was completely out of my realm. The long version on my background can be found here on Linked In.
Currently I'm spending
my time researching and thinking about new opportunities.
I also serve on the advisory board for a few startup companies and stay
actively involved on the Alliance of Angels
investment board. In the past, I've also been involved in the
creation of other forums including:
WSA Wireless
Special Interest Group and the WSA Tech Future
conferences. |
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