Mike Steep
Founder & Executive Director
Stanford Disruptive Technology and Digital Cities Program
Education
University of Pennsylvania Wharton Business School
B.A., American Civilization
1976University of Virginia Darden School of Business
M.B.A.,
1980Podcasts
0:30:4227: Why Disruptive Tech Needs Skilled Networkers & Psych Majors With Mike Steep, Stanford University [Main T4C episode]
Mike Steep is the Executive Director of the Digital Cities Program at Stanford University and an adjunct professor. He works in the field of disruptive technology where he analyzes innovation in the tech industry and its ability to change and improve life in urban centers. Mike received his M.B.A. in General..
Career Path
Interview Highlights
“If you’re not spending at least 20% of your time per week, connecting with other people who are in competitive companies, but also in other types of companies that have related technology, you’re just not going to be able to build a network that’s sustainable long term.”
Best Career Advice
“Be able to adapt to change in technology. Reassess your assumptions about what you think of how things work every couple of years. In this case, every couple of months.”
Career Challenge
“I had a venture at a very young age, I raised over what today would be six to $10 million in Series A venture capital from Harvard University. And we started a company that was right in the center of desktop publishing. We couldn’t have picked a better time for it. And I thought that I had picked the right co-founder. During that whole experience what I discovered was I had the wrong engineering partner. By the time that we had gotten the product ready for launch in the marketplace, we had a huge switch in the industry standard away from what then was OS/2, IBM’s operating system, to Windows. And so our product was irrelevant because we’d have to recode, it would have taken three years to do it. So the VCs decide to basically kill the company off.”
Skills
Strategic Partnerships, Strategy, Start-ups, Business Development, Entrepreneurship, Cloud Computing, Program Management, Competitive Analysis, Management Consulting, Big Data, Solution Selling, Cross-functional Team Leadership
Professional Interests
Satya Nadella, Ian Bremmer, Guy Kawasaki, Stanford University Chevron, Citrix, IvyLife-SF, Harvard Business Review Discussion Group, Private Equity Investment Group, University of Pennsylvania, University of Cambridge, Harvard Business School
