My name is Mike Smerklo. I’m an entrepreneur and investor. I am Co-Founder of a Venture Capital firm in Austin, Texas called Next Coast Ventures. Prior to this, I bought a small technology services company, ServiceSource, and ran it for 12 years, taking it from small startup to public company with over 3,000 employees around the world. I was also one of the first employees at a pioneer cloud services company called Opsware (then Loudcloud), that also went public. Before becoming an entrepreneur, I had (and thoroughly hated) jobs in investment banking and public accounting.
This blog is focused on helping other entrepreneurs reach their goals by sharing what I have learned along the way. It is focused on the non-obvious things I learned along my journey. I call it “TOS,” which is short for The Other Sh*t. Lessons that you can’t learn in standard business books, big company jobs or in a classroom. TOS comes from being an entrepreneur, taking risk and making mistakes.
My goal is to share my learnings about TOS so I can help other entrepreneurs be successful. I’m primarily focused on leadership, growth and helping companies scale. And I hope that you will laugh at least once when reading my posts, even if just on the inside.
The entrepreneur’s journey is really, really hard work – but there is no other job like it in the world. So now I’m focused on investing in and working with exciting growth companies – especially helping amazing entrepreneurs grow and scale their businesses.
If you want to read a little more about my accomplishments and check out my shorter blog posts, visit my Linkedin profile.
You can also follow me at Twitter or email me at info@mikesmerklo.com with general questions or observations.