Lou Shipley

Lou Shipley serves as an executive-in-residence at General Catalyst, sits on the Board of Directors of Wasabi, CustomerGauge, SentryOne, Fairmarkit and Teamworks, and is a lecturer at MIT Sloan School of Management and the Harvard Business School, where he instructs, mentors, coaches the next generation of entrepreneurs.

A multi time successful tech CEO. An inspiring teacher. A sought after board member. A trusted mentor. A popular tech-market commentator, writer and speaker.

A born entrepreneur, Lou’s first taste of betting on himself and his vision for success involved a 100% commission-based summer job during college selling encyclopedias door-to-door. But after graduating from Trinity College with a degree in Economics, he spent his first few years in the working world on Wall Street. After earning an M.B.A. from Harvard Business School, he joined an exciting startup, Avid Technology, in 1990 as a consultant.

Lou managed a variety of US sales territories, then was offered the opportunity to run Avid’s Asia-Pacific business. After seven years of rapid growth at Avid – the company had reached sales of $450 million at the time of his departure, he joined WebLine Communications, a customer contact center start-up, as employee number five. Serving as VP of Sales at WebLine, he grew the business from zero to $15 million in three years before it was acquired by Cisco Systems for $325 million in 1999.

Leaving the start-up world for a spell, he worked as an entrepreneur-in-residence at Highland Capital Partners before taking on the role of President and CEO of Reflectent Software. After its acquisition by Citrix Systems, Lou served as VP and GM of both the Citrix Management Systems Group and the Citrix Virtualization and Cloud Products Group. He departed Citrix to serve as President and CEO of VMTurbo (now Turbonomic). Under Lou’s leadership, VMTurbo grew from 25 customers and 30 employees to 420 customers and 100 employees in two years.

In 2013, Lou joined Black Duck Software, where he is credited for transforming it from a struggling open source compliance-focused company into the global leader in open source security and management solutions. In 2017, Black Duck was acquired by Synopsys for $565 million.