About Lou Shipley
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.
Lou Shipley could be described as any of the above. But what makes him unique is that he is all of the above.
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. He decided the best way to run the territory was to move to Japan to manage the region. He opened Avid’s wholly owned subsidiary, Avid Japan KK, and served as its President. After three years in Japan, Lou returned to the States and led Avid’s Americas and Pacific for two years. 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 departe 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 four years, he quadrupled the company’s growth in size of employees, transformed the company culture, and increased the company’s value by more than 300%. In 2017, Black Duck was acquired by Synopsys for $565 million.
Lou sits on the Boards of Directors of Wasabi, Alyce, CustomerGauge, GTreasury, Teamworks, and Fairmarkit. Lou is also a senior lecturer at Harvard Business School where he teaches Entrepreneurial Sales and an entrepreneurial field study course.
