“Alex Mashinsky was born into communism, reared under socialism, and is currently thriving under capitalism. He is a prominent Israeli-American entrepreneur who has founded several companies over the years, including GroundLink, Transit Wireless, Elematics and Arbinet.
Alex’s success as an entrepreneur stems from his acute ability to identify winning trends and assemble world-class teams. Two of his companies, Arbinet and Transit Wireless achieved a monopolistic hold in their respective industries and pioneered new business models and technologies used today.
Alex has a long history with tech, in fact, evidenced by his powerful intellectual property portfolio. He has authored over 50 patents that cover aspects of the Smart Grid, Ad exchanges, Groupon, Twitter,
Due to his extensive experience as a prolific inventor and a business strategist, Alex has been a featured speaker at over 120 international conferences. He has also made numerous TV appearances on talk shows.
He has received numerous awards, notably the prestigious Albert Einstein Technology Medal in 2000, the Technology Foresight Award for Innovation (presented in Geneva at Telecom ’99) and Crain’s Top Entrepreneur Award in 2010. He has also been nominated for E&Y’s Entrepreneur of the Year Award in 2002 and 2011.
After years of entrepreneurship, Alex subsequently gravitated towards investing in startups, founding his early stage venture capital firm, Governing Dynamics. Over the years, Alex has raised over $1 billion in a venture and private equity funds to help position his startups as leaders in their fields. Arbinet’s fundraising efforts were even documented in an HBS case study in 2001.
Currently based in New York, Alex serves as a Managing Partner of Governing Dynamics. The firm has a keen interest in helping Israeli startups scale-up in the United States. The immense growth potential of the “startup nation” and its advances in high-tech – particularly in AI, biotech and cybersecurity – interests Alex greatly, who has a strong affiliation with Israel.
Having grown up, attended college and served in the military there, many of his ventures started out based in Israel – which he then went on to scale in the US. Thus, he has been fostering Israeli-American business ties for years, and he hopes to continue to do so with his work at Governing Dynamics.
Alex has invested in over 60 startups over the years, recording many successes and an equal number of failures. As a prominent figure in the New York entrepreneurial scene, he has previously been a member of the YPO’s NYC chamber. He believes that “the secret to success is finding something to do in which your skills can exceed your ambitions.”
Link to website www.mashinsky.com
Link to LinkedIn http://linkedin.com/in/mashinsky