Michael’s journey as an entrepreneur was sparked by his passion to help people productize new technology, take those products to market and then create successful businesses. Similar to global trade, he believes that turning experts inside larger companies into founders of startups creates winning investment opportunities. His strong work ethic and no-nonsense personality has forged his way to becoming one of the most successful angel investors.

Due to his years of experience in managing and consulting, along with teaching courses in entrepreneurship and management at Stanford University, HM occasionally offers classes in business administration for up and coming venture capitalists. They offer a wide selection of content based on Michael’s past work.

Prior to Harrison Metal, Michael Dearing was a consulting associate professor at Stanford University’s School of Engineering, teaching classes in Mechanical Engineering, Management Science and Engineering. He also taught at the d.school, where he co-developed and co-taught courses including Creating Infectious Action, Creating Mass Market Experiences, Entrepreneurial Finance, and Launchpad.

Early Life

After earning a BA in Economics with a focus in Economic History from Brown University, Michael received an MBA with distinction from Harvard Business School. In addition, Michael is funding lawyers to help asylum seekers through a group called Project Ellis.

Michael Dearing spent over six years at eBay, working his way up to Senior Vice President & General Merchandise Manager. While at eBay, Michael and his colleagues were also responsible for the launch and growth of innovations such as Buy-it-Now, the listings upgrade business, eBay Stores, and ProStores. Before eBay, Michael worked at Industrial Shoe Warehouse (COO and CEO), The Walt Disney Company in Corporate Strategic Planning, Filene’s Basement managing operations in the Downtown Boston flagship store, and Bain & Company.

Remarkable Investments

Michael has a long string of highly successful companies, some of which include health tech’s Grand Rounds Health and PagerDuty, an incident response company set for an IPO (Dearing’s firm owns 5%), AdMob, a mobile advertising start-up acquired by Google, and web security company, Signal Sciences.

Michael also backed Aardvark, a social search engine that was also acquired by Google for $50 million 2010. Dearing had another triumph when Acompli, which developed a mobile email application, sold to Microsoft for $200 million in 2014. It had raised just $7.3 million from investors. Among his more active investments are companies such as Harry’s, later acquired by Gillette and Procter & Gamble, and educational streaming platform, MasterClass.