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- The Accelerator Conundrum
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robots and pencils
Serial Entrepreneur from Alberta, Canada: Michael Sikorsky, CEO of Robots and Pencils (Part 7)
Sramana Mitra: What do you do? Michael Sikorsky: I happened to be in New York. I was connected to lots of stuff around investing and crowdsourcing to venture capital. The iPhone comes out. I had that lightning bolt feeling when the Internet came out. Now, I’m a lot older. I’ve been through multiple companies. I even
Serial Entrepreneur from Alberta, Canada: Michael Sikorsky, CEO of Robots and Pencils (Part 6)
Sramana Mitra: I got it. How many people did you have in the company that you were essentially renting out? Michael Sikorsky: It was very fast. It went from 0 to 65 people in nine months. Sramana Mitra: Then you sold the company to whom? Michael Sikorsky: To my business partner. It was almost like
Serial Entrepreneur from Alberta, Canada: Michael Sikorsky, CEO of Robots and Pencils (Part 5)
Sramana Mitra: Give me the chronology of it. You didn’t mention raising money at any of these points. Michael Sikorsky: I raised right away as I started the company. Sramana Mitra: In Alberta? Michael Sikorsky: Yes, in Alberta. I presented to 11 investors when I was 22. Just to tell you a neat story there, the
Serial Entrepreneur from Alberta, Canada: Michael Sikorsky, CEO of Robots and Pencils (Part 4)
Sramana Mitra: This is a very common scenario in technologies trying to start their first ventures. They end up building technology, which essentially turns out to be a solution looking for a problem to solve. How did you maneuver out of that situation? Michael Sikorsky: As you’re in that situation, you can feel it but you
Serial Entrepreneur from Alberta, Canada: Michael Sikorsky, CEO of Robots and Pencils (Part 3)
Sramana Mitra: What specifically did you do as you started this company? Michael Sikorsky: I got the best term for it from Michael Gerber. I actually had an entrepreneurial fever and had no clue what I had to do next. I just decided to do it. It’s not something I would recommend. I had only
Serial Entrepreneur from Alberta, Canada: Michael Sikorsky, CEO of Robots and Pencils (Part 2)
Sramana Mitra: What kind of company did you join? Michael Sikorsky: It was a supervised control and data acquisition company. They sold software to pipeline companies that wanted to monitor what’s going on across all their pipelines. What is the pressure? What is going on? There is a visualization aspect, remote monitoring, and then there’s a hardware
Serial Entrepreneur from Alberta, Canada: Michael Sikorsky, CEO of Robots and Pencils (Part 1)
The story of a serial entrepreneur from an off-center place, this time Alberta, Canada. Sramana Mitra: Let’s start at the very beginning of your personal story. Where are you from? Where were you born, raised, and in what kind of background? Michael Sikorsky: I was born in Alberta, which is in Canada in 1972. I’m
