Michael Clouser is an entrepreneur, former venture capitalist, venture consultant, advisor, and academic. He is an expert on raising early stage venture finance in the USA, UK and Canadian contexts and has practiced in this marketplace for 20 years. In his early career Michael was a hotelier, working for companies such as Four Seasons Hotels, before serving as a turnaround hotel general manager.
Michael led a weekend-long residential workshop on business angel investors and fundraising for GirGeeks Scotland recently. This organization is comprised of women technologists and technology company founders. He believes in the potential of women-led growth companies and has an understanding of at least some of the impediments, including the knowledge gap related to early stage financing and capital raising activities.
Michael is a Co-Founder Director of Nautilus Beam Limited (Tusi), GeeLearn Limited, Nosecone Ventures, and Dragon Trek. He advised Invoke as a venture consultant, and currently advises a range of new ventures including Longtale, Introjunction, Fabourg Paris, Innovation Academy, CourseDiver and others. He often plays interim CFO roles in new ventures and is adept at finance.
Michael has co-founded numerous companies in the past including New Era Strategies, LearnSpec, Gadder, iLodging, Market Diligence, CEO Research and others. He has raised angel capital for many of these.
In addition, in his role with Nosecone Ventures, a 2nd stage acceleration firm, Michael assists growing ventures in raising angel and venture capital from both local and international sources.
Michael has co-founded and ran incubators, such as TechCube, the first private tech incubator in Edinburgh, Scotland. Currently he is working on a similar project in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.
A former Silicon Valley-based early stage venture capitalist, Michael helped the firm’s seed-level portfolio companies raise “A” rounds from Sand Hill Road venture capitalists. He grew a strong network there of entrepreneurs, angel investors, and venture capitalists.
Following this engagement, Michael headed the Edinburgh-Stanford Link at the University of Edinburgh. This role involved collaboration not only with Stanford University researchers and teachers, but also with Stanford alumni who were angel investors, entrepreneurs, and venture capitalists in Silicon Valley.
Transatlantic connections were borne through teaching visits to Scotland by Silicon Valley-based players, as well as “Silicon Valley trips” where Scottish start-ups were taken across the pond for immersion in the world’s leading innovation ecosystem.
Another aspect of this role was Michael’s duties as an entrepreneurship academic. He taught technology entrepreneurship to masters students in the School of Informatics and creative entrepreneurship in the School of Architecture, Culture and Environment at the University of Edinburgh for 7 years. At the backend of his courses he administered an early stage funding program for his promising entrepreneurs known as the “Edinburgh-Stanford Link EIR program”.
During his three “executive” MBA years, Michael served as the CEO of Student Agencies Incorporated (SAI). This organization was completely student-run and was comprised of 14 operating companies including a real estate division that managed $25 million in assets; an incubator and a student venture capital fund.
Amongst other successes, CourseInfo (Blackboard – IPO), The Globe (IPO) were incubated as well as Jump! (Microsoft). Per its mission, all companies started within the walls of SAI were co-founded by Cornell University undergraduate students.
Current networking groups that Michael is a co-founder and organizer of include CoFoundersLab Matchup Scotland and the Scotland-Silicon Valley Link. Past groups that he co-founded and ran include the Edinburgh Entrepreneurship Club, the Edinburgh Entrepreneur Meetup, the Jupiter Entrepreneur meetup, Cascadia Angel Investor meetup, and the Hospitality and Tourism Technology Entrepreneurship Association (HETTA). Michael is currently assisting the start of two associations. He also serves on the Mayor’s Economic Development Advisory Board in Sooke, BC. Michael supports charities such as SightSavers and Child Family Health International in addition to universities such as Cornell, Syracuse, Edinburgh and UCF.
Michael earned the BS degree from the School of Hotel Administration and the MBA from the Johnson School at Cornell University; the MSc from the Business School from the University of Edinburgh and is a PhD Candidate currently on-leave from the same. His research focuses on entrepreneurship, innovation and policy, and in particular the supply of entrepreneurial risk capital in a region. He has published in top innovation and management journals, and maintains a blog entitled The Academic Entrepreneur where he writes about the financing of new ventures, supply of risk capital, policy, universities and related matters.
He lives between Scotland and British Columbia and travels frequently. Michael has two sons, a sister and two wonderful parents, and enjoys art, film, theatre, comedy, culinary arts, historic inns, cartography and antique maps.
