Sean Ammirati

Sean Ammirati is a Professor of Entrepreneurship at Carnegie Mellon University’s Tepper School of Business. In addition to teaching, he is also the Co-Founder and Director of the Carnegie Mellon Corporate Startup Lab (CSL). The CSL is a Swartz Center initiative that has conducted research and developed tools to help companies better adapt and integrate entrepreneurial best practices into their own innovation processes. The frameworks and tools have helped innovators become more successful entrepreneurs and helped leaders better encourage entrepreneurship and manage their innovation portfolios.

The CSL also developed a unique project course on corporate entrepreneurship, in which diverse teams of graduate students partner with large companies to test and develop real startup ideas brought by the corporations.

In addition to his work at CMU, Sean also joined Birchmere Ventures as a Partner in 2012. Birchmere focuses on seed-stage SaaS and marketplace startup investments. The firm is headquartered in Pittsburgh with a second office in San Francisco.

Prior to joining Birchmere, Sean spent 12 years founding, building and selling businesses in the software and media industries. He was Chief Operating Officer of ReadWriteWeb acquired by the private-equity rollup SAY Media to strengthen its technology channel. Prior to that, Sean was the co-founder and CEO of mSpoke, which was LinkedIn’s first acquisition. His first startup was Peak Strategy, which was acquired by Morgan Stanley.

He recently completed his first book The Science of Growth, which was released by St Martin’s Press in April 2016 and was subsequently translated and published in Korean and Mandarin.

Finally, Sean is also the host of one of the most popular podcasts on corporate innovation – Agile Giants which you can find on your favorite podcasting platform.