Lawrence Wright

Lawrence is the founder and director of Startup Academy @ Moscow School of Management Skolkovo (skolkovo.ru), Russia's premier business school, Skolkovo(not to be confused with the government funded Skolkovo Foundation). He is also the Zimin-endowed chair for entrepreneurial leadership and professor of practice. In the 90s, he pioneered US-Russian tech cooperation by founding the country operations of a Fortune 300 IT systems integrator and leading it until 2000 (SAIC.com). Lawrence pioneered technology commercialization (2002) at $1B tech fund (ISTC.ru) working with top Russian nuke, chem, bio, and materials research institutes. He led a few startups (Xlerate Technologies, Solid Power Batteries, New Realm Investments), raised $14M, had a lot of fun, and helped others raise capital. He learned a lot through success and failure about how startups work and don't.