Michael Clouser
https://www.linkedin.com/in/michaelrclouser
Michael is an academic entrepreneur and a former venture capitalist in Silicon Valley with Dot Edu Ventures. He has over 23 years of experience in the e-Learning field, starting with the incubation of CourseInfo (Blackboard), which was cofounded by 7 undergraduates from Cornell University in 1997. A couple of years later he built courses in hospitality finance for a Palo Alto-based startup he CoFounded, and later built online masters-level business courses for Lynn University. Following this, Michael joined eCornell and worked with this spinout for Cornell University for more than a decade.
Michael is business professor and has taught at various universities including Edinburgh, Stanford, Lynn, Royal Roads and Cornell. He led the Edinburgh-Stanford Link’s entrepreneurship programme for 7 years, which put him in the Bay Area 25% of the time when he wasn’t in Scotland. Michael taught technology entrepreneurship and digital marketplaces for 7 years at the University of Edinburgh. Prior to his Silicon Valley experience, he was the CEO of Cornell-affiliated Student Agencies Incorporated, based in Ithaca, New York. The miniconglomerate has a business learning mission and is the oldest student-run corporation in the USA as it was established in 1894. The organization has also incubated many successful student startups over its long history, including large exits and even IPOs. Michael is an alumnus of Cornell University’s Hotel and Johnson Schools (BS/MBA), and the University of Edinburgh Business School (MSc/PhD). His research focused on the triple helix of university-government-industry interaction in the realms of entrepreneurship and innovation. Michael has accumulated approximately 14 years of experience as a business studies and research student, and an additional 20 with as a business educator in both online- and face-to-face modes, where he has utilized a wide range of pedagogies.
Michael is a serial entrepreneur and has cofounded over a dozen companies, including his first as an undergraduate university student in his teenage years. Michael’s first “win” was an internet-based hospitality and travel company he cofounded in 1994 (back in the “early days”). He has even started companies with his students, including Gadder, a data mining firm, in 2007.
He worked as a venture capitalist for a Stanford-related Dot Edu Ventures in Palo Alto in the early 2000’s. The firm was cofounded by the infamous late Professor Rajeev Motwani, who led Larry and Sergey to answer the question “Find a better way to search the internet”. Dot Edu was an early investor in not only Google, but numerous other Stanford-related companies as well, and benefitted from relationships that Michael nurtured with the leading funds on Sand Hill Road.
GeeLearn was cofounded by Michael and Chunhui Zhang in 2011, and formally established and incorporated in 2014. Its focus is designing, developing, funding and distributing online education in the continuing professional development and adult learning space. Zeminar was formalized as a new e-learning product and strategic business unit of GeeLearn’s in 2020.
Michael is also a cofounder of a new social enterprise whose mission is to help the d/Deaf and hard of hearing communities through better communication; and he is involved with other non-profit and social efforts in addition, spending a portion of his time pro bono for “Business as a Force of Good” type causes. He is interested in the efforts of B-Labs, and the growth of B-Corporations and related new corporate forms in jurisdictions around the world.
Michael’s early career years were spent in the hospitality industry as a pastry chef, then a manager for Four Seasons Hotels and Hyatt Hotels. After this he worked for a private equity fund as a turnaround general manager for multiple limited service brands, and later became a franchise sales director. In addition to online education he remains passionate about the hospitality and tourism industries, and especially online travel and distribution.
Chunhui Zhang
https://www.linkedin.com/in/apple-zhang-75476a27/
Chunhui is a videographer, digital designer and eLearning specialist. She has been designing and developing eLearning courses with subject matter experts at the top universities and institutions in the UK.
Chunhui completed her MSc in Design and Digital Media at the University of Edinburgh, also MLitt in Publishing at Tongjing University in Shanghai, China.
Britt Santowski
Corporate Secretary