Lou Shipley is a Lecturer in the Entrepreneurial Management Unit at the Harvard Business School and an Executive in Residence at the venture capital firm General Catalyst. He is also a highly successful tech CEO, most recently at Black Duck Software.
Lou Shipley is a Lecturer in the Entrepreneurial Management Unit at the Harvard Business School and an Executive in Residence at the venture capital firm General Catalyst. He is also a highly successful tech CEO, most recently at Black Duck Software.
Lou specializes in tech entrepreneurship, sales/sales management, go-to-market strategies, and building effective leadership teams for startups and early-stage companies.
He teaches Entrepreneurial Sales in the MBA Elective Curriculum, a course aimed at demystifying sales as well as understanding how to sell and manage go-to-market functions.
Lou has led three tech firms. He was President and CEO of Reflectent Software prior to its 2006 acquisition by Citrix Systems, where he served as VP and GM of Citrix Virtualization and Cloud Products Group.
Following Citrix, Lou was President and CEO of VMTurbo (now Turbonomic) from 2011 to 2013.
In 2013, Lou became CEO at struggling Black Duck Software and transformed it into the global leader in open source security and management solutions. In 2017, Black Duck was acquired by Synopsys for $565 million.
At General Catalyst, Lou advises on B2B software and marketplace investments. General Catalyst supports founders who challenge the status quo, partnering with them to build companies that withstand the test of time.
Lou serves on the Board of Directors of Wasabi, CustomerGauge, Sentry1, Fairmarkit, Logz.io, and Trinity College, and is also lecturer at MIT Sloan School of Management.
Lou has an MBA from Harvard Business School and a BA in Economics from Trinity College.
Globe reporter Michael B. Farrell recently spoke with Lou Shipley, the newly appointed chief executive of Black Duck Software Inc., a growing Burlington open source software company. Here's what he found out.
If you wanted to hack a business, which one would you pick: A Fortune 500 company with a large digital-security budget and a team dedicated to protecting its cyberassets? Or a small enterprise that doesn’t employ a single IT security specialist? Security breaches at big companies such as J.P. Morgan, Sony and Home Depot dominate the headlines, but safety measures are crucial for organizations of all shapes and sizes.
It doesn’t make much sense: At a time when high-powered automated trading systems can execute stock sales in real time, some companies that rely on open-source software to help to run their businesses track their open-source use on spread sheets on paper.
Lou Shipley, chief executive of Black Duck Software, which sells products to manage and protect open-source software, says the most effective way for companies to understand what is in their open-source software and how to better control it is to use automated processes that scan applications for open-source code, create an inventory of open-source components and check those components against what is in open-source vulnerability databases.
Without question, entrepreneur, innovator and engineer Elon Musk is a controversial figure, but there is no disputing that his first-to-market Tesla electric vehicles are not only revolutionizing the high-end driving experience, but also disrupting the automobile industry in ways that would surely impress Henry Ford and Karl Benz.
Companies need consistently accurate sales forecasts — but unfortunately they are rare. That’s because many companies fail to align their sales and marketing departments, and that alignment is a prerequisite for forecast accuracy. Companies can achieve better alignment and avoid end-of-quarter angst by agreeing on what constitutes a “lead” that a salesperson will be able to close in the month, quarter, or year. This definition of lead viability needs to be ratified by the entire senior management team. And, just as important, the group needs to agree not to change the definition on the fly.
Tesla and its flamboyant, and sometimes erratic, innovator Elon Musk have turned the more than a century old industry upside down in a mere 16 years. Traditional automakers are ill prepared to compete in today’s software-centered world. Unlike nimble Tesla, they are big, bureaucratic, slow to respond to customers, dependent on providing customer financing for unit sales growth, and culturally different from a software company. Tesla’s speed in innovation in the market for high-end vehicles is more like a Google or an Amazon than an automaker. And its soaring market valuation is a clear sign to all automakers that they’ll need to develop more innovative, Tesla-like business models in order to survive.
This episode of Reveal brings Lou Shipley, investor, lecturer, and previous CEO of Black Duck Security. Lou details sales enablement's role in delivering sales excellence and an effective new hire onboarding experience.
The Disruptive Voice hits the road, heading to BlackDuck by Synopsys headquarters in Burlington, MA. We sit down with Lou Shipley (CEO), Patrick Carey (Director of Product Marketing), and Tim Kenny (VP of Culture) to hear how Competing Against Luck became a company staple, and how BlackDuck created their own Jobs to Be Done culture -- complete with war room!
