Background
Micah joined the Stanford faculty as a Consulting Professor in 2006 and returned to investing full-time in 2014. His engineering research focused primarily on finding commercial applications of new software and hardware technologies, such as scientific instrumentation, molecular biology tools and AI systems. From 2006 to 2013 he also taught the graduate-level course Business for Engineers (EE204). The EE204 course was directed to Engineering, Life Science, and Computer Science students at Stanford and covered the basic principles of business, from the engineer's perspective. Topics of EE204 included new product development, marketing, intellectual property, accounting and finance, with a focus on building profitable and well-funded technology companies based on high-profile academic research. Micah's students at Stanford have gone on to start a number of successful Silicon Valley companies such as Gusto, Notion, Visby Medical, Pulse (acquired by LinkedIn for $90 million in 2013) and Katango (acquired by Google in 2011).
Micah was the first investor in companies that have been acquired for more than $2 billion in cash. Micah is an active investor in new technology companies formed by students, faculty, and former students at the earliest stage (often before there is a company) through his private venture capital fund, C2C Ventures, where he is the sole Managing Director. He helps founders discover attractive markets for new technologies and secure rich customers who will move fast and pay a premium for a unique solution. A market on the path to a $1B potential allows for error and time for real margins to develop.
His passion is helping missionary entrepreneurs, professors and students commercialize the “Next Big Thing” in computational biology, enterprise software, scientific instruments and other technology platforms that generate complex intellectual property. A small number of companies are formed every year with foundational technologies that will change the world. Frequently these foundational technologies were developed at universities by academic founders with limited business experience. Micah aspires to identify those companies and partner with their founders at the earliest stage to become their trusted source of capital and advice.
Micah was an early VC investor in Stack Overflow (started in 2010, acquired in 2021 by Prosus for $1.8 billion in cash), Cellular Research (started at Stanford in 2013, acquired in 2015 by Becton Dickinson for $120 million in cash), Sentry (started at Disqus in 2013), BioImagene (started at UCLA in 2003, acquired in 2010 by Roche for $100 million in cash), Judicata (started at Stanford in 2012, acquired in 2020 by FastCase), Hadapt (started at Yale in 2011, acquired in 2014 by Teradata), and C2C Patents (started at Stanford in 2014). Earlier he was an investor in Affinity Engines (started at Stanford in 2002, litigation resulted in a license and settlement with Google in 2006), and Adapt Technologies (started at Caltech in 2004, acquired in 2008 by Webvisible, now a subsidiary of Vivial). These companies have raised more than $70 million in seed-stage venture capital and $525 million in follow-on capital from Accel Partners, Andreessen Horowitz, Bezos Expeditions, Founders Fund, Index Ventures, Khosla Ventures, New Enterprise Associates, Union Square Ventures, and other leading venture capital firms.
He began his career in 1993 working directly for Carver Mead to design early artificial intelligence (AI) systems in VLSI. In 1999, he and Craig Johnson, a well-known Silicon Valley lawyer, formed C2C Ventures. Micah is a techie and the co-inventor of several U.S. patents related to genetic engineering and software systems, and was recognized in 2009, 2010, 2011 and 2012 by Intellectual Asset Management Magazine as one of the world's 250 "Leading IP Experts" ("IAM 250"), and in 2003 by MIT Technology Review magazine, as "one of the top 100 innovators of the world" ("TR100 List"). He was born the eldest of six children and raised in Okemos, Michigan. He graduated with a B.S. from Yale University (Phi Beta Kappa, magna cum laude) and received a Ph.D. in Computation and Neural Systems from the California Institute of Technology.
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