Mike Tippett

Our speaker for November is Mike Tippet, a two time Emmy nominee and successful entrepreneur for almost two decades. Tippett is recognized an as international expert on early stage business innovation and emerging media models. He is currently the CEO at Ayoudo.

As a speaker, he has presented through out Europe, Asia and North America. In 2011 he served as the first Executive Director at GrowLab, an technology start up accelerator in Vancouver. He manages the Made in Vancouver startup directory, is on the Provincial Steering Committee for Startup Canada also donates his time to run Vancouver’s Startup Weekend.

In 1995, Tippett founded The WebPool Syndicate, one of Canada’s first Internet companies. The company was sold and became part of of Telus.

After the success of the WebPool venture, Tippett worked in New York when he was recruited by Theglobe.com to advise on acquisitions and marketing strategy prior to The Company going public. Theglobe became one of the most trafficked websites in the world (#20 according to Comscore).

Tippett then joined Afternic.com as one of the first employees, to run The Company’s marketing. Within 18 months The Company had been sold to Register.com where Tippett became the General Manager.

In 2005, Tippett co-founded NowPublic. The company has been named one of the top five most useful new sites on the web by The Guardian and Time magazine named it one of the Top 50 Websites for 2007. The Company was sold in 2009 to The Anschutz Corporation in Colorado.

Tippett is a member of the University of British Columbia’s Continuing Studies Advisory Board as well as the School of Journalism Advisory Board as well as the UBC Digital Strategy Advisory Committee. He is also on the Professional Communication Program’s Advisory Committee at Capilano University. He is also a board member of CABINET, a Vancouver-based arts organization.

Tippett is also involved in the visual arts. In 2004 he collaborated with Kate Armstrong to produce Grafik Dynamo, a net art piece that loads live images from blogs and news sources on the web into a live action comic strip. Grafik Dynamo was a commission of Turbulence, made possible with funding from the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts. The piece is now included in the Rose Goldsen Archive of New Media Art — curated by Timothy Murray — in the Division of Rare and Special Collections at Cornell University.

Tippett graduated from Queen’s University with a degree in Philosophy. He and Kate Armstrong were married in the middle of the Nevada desert next to Double Negative.