Background
Micah joined the faculty of Stanford in 2006, and is currently a Consulting Associate Professor in the Department of Electrical Engineering. His laboratory focuses on developing and improving practical technologies for large markets undergoing rapid growth or change. He co-teaches EE204 (aka "Business for Engineers"), which is an operationally-focused course on New Product Development, Intellectual Property, Marketing and Finance for Stanford's Engineering and Computer Science graduate students. Prior students of EE204 have included the founders of Google, Yahoo, Junglee (sold to Amazon.com for $180 Million) and Ketango (sold to Google).
Micah has pursued dual careers in industry and academia. He is an active investor in companies formed by Stanford students, faculty, and former students at the earliest stage (often before there is a company) as an individual and through a private fund. As an individual, Micah was a founding investor and adviser to BioImagene (spun out of UCLA in 2003, acquired in 2010 by Roche for $100 Million in cash), Stack Exchange (spun out of Fog Creek Software in 2010), and Hadapt (spun out of Yale in 2011). Previously, he was the founding investor and board member of Affinity Circles (spun out of Stanford in 2002, technology license acquired in 2006 by Google), Adapt Technologies (spun out of Caltech in 2004, acquired in 2008 by WebVisible), and an IP litigation partnership (2004, exited successfully in 2006). These companies have raised more than $70 Million in seed-stage venture capital.
From 1999-2010, Micah was a Managing Director at C2C Ventures, a seed-stage venture capital firm he co-founded in Palo Alto. His emphasis at C2C was on sourcing and financing seed-stage technology companies out of universities. He is currently at Intellectual Ventures, a large investment fund (total capital > $5B) dedicated to patented and patentable inventions (over 30,000 patents and applications), where his team focuses on executing growth-stage venture capital investments that involve patents; for example, acquiring and building patent portfolios requiring between $5M and $15M of capital and investing those patents into venture capital backed technology companies to increase their enterprise value prior to a merger or acquisition.
Micah began his career in 1993 working directly for Carver Mead. In 1999, he and Craig Johnson formed C2C Ventures. He is a techie and the co-inventor of several U.S. patents related to electronic advertising and genetic engineering, and was recognized in 2003 by MIT's Technology Review magazine, as "one of the top 100 innovators of the world" ("TR100 List") and in 2009, 2010 and 2011 by IAM Magazine as one of the world's 250 "Leading IP Strategists" ("IAM 250"). He was born the oldest of six children and raised in Okemos, Michigan. He graduated from Yale University (Phi Beta Kappa, Magna Cum Laude) with a B.S. in Electrical Engineering and received a Ph.D. from the California Institute of Technology.
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