Nationality British | Known for Former COO at Skype | |
Occupation Engineer, entrepreneur and investor | ||
Michael Jackson is a partner at Mangrove Capital Partners, a venture capital firm set up by Mark Tluszcz, Gerard Lopez and Hans-Jürgen Schmitz in 2000. He also serves as a board director at bitcoin company Blockchain.info and was previously COO at Skype, one of the most successful internet companies to come out of Europe.
Career
Jackson worked in the telecoms industry for 25 years before joining Mangrove Capital Partners, an early backer of Skype, as a venture capital investor. He completed his graduate training at the BBC and worked as lead engineer at the first competitive phone company in the UK. He then moved to Denmark and launched 9 mobile operations and 2 ISPs across Europe with Tele2.
Jackson then joined the founding team at Skype and as Chief Operating Officer (COO) was responsible for turning a rapidly growing idea into a well managed multi-million dollar business. At Skype, he gained extensive knowledge and experience in distributed P2P networks and what is needed to gain mass adoption of disruptive technology from both legal and business perspectives. This included advancing the regulatory environment for telecoms services in Europe, forcing incumbent operators to open up to competition. Skype was acquired by US technology company eBay and remains one of the most successful internet companies to come out of Europe. Within a month it had been downloaded 500,000 times and when it was acquired bought by eBay it was attracting 150,000 downloads a day and had 54 million users. By 2013, one in three international voice calls were made using Skype.
Jackson now works as a venture capital investor at Mangrove Capital Partners. He is a regularly cited by the press on topics such as fintech and bitcoin.