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Neil D. Kane
Mr. Kane is a co-founder of Illinois Partners Executive Services, LLC, a venture advisory and investment firm specifically focusing on commercializing technologies emanating from major research universities and federal laboratories in the Midwest. As a consultant he has evaluated the commercial potential of advanced technologies for The University of Chicago and Argonne National Laboratory.
Earlier he was Regional Business Development Manager for Microsoft Corporation in Chicago. In a business development role, he worked with early-stage companies by crafting cooperative relationships with Microsoft. These activities frequently included joint marketing, joint PR, technical information sharing and early stage financing. In this role he identified, negotiated and closed a $25 million equity investment in an Illinois-based software company.
In a previous role at Microsoft he was Program Manager for TechNet, a technical marketing program that provides a series of "how to" training seminars to information technology professionals. Over 40,000 IT professionals attended Midwest TechNet events in 1998. In this role he spoke publicly as an evangelist for Microsoft on dozens of occasions. Earlier Neil was the Microsoft liaison to Internet service providers, web developers and entertainment companies. He worked with them to drive adoption of Microsoft's then nascent browser and web server software.
Prior to joining Microsoft he was Chief Operating Officer at Go2What'sNew, an Internet-based magazine of consumer information.
Prior to that he was branch manager and vice-president for the Food and Beverage Information Exchange, a B2B exchange for foodservice distributors and operators. He was a founder of a predecessor company that raised seed capital from Heinz and Nabisco.
Neil began his business career at IBM where he held a series of increasingly challenging marketing and technical roles. In his last position, he was a Business Consultant focused on furthering the technology penetration of IBM products at several major accounts in the process and consumer packaged goods industries. Before that, he was the IBM liaison to Andersen Consulting and helped create the strategic business alliance between IBM and Andersen Consulting that became the model for the industry. In this capacity he earned membership into IBM's Golden Circle. He began his IBM career as a manufacturing engineer in IBM's San Jose, California disk drive facility where he designed robotic tooling.
Neil holds a Bachelor of Science degree in Mechanical Engineering from the University of Illinois at Urbana (high honors) and a Masters of Business Administration (finance and policy studies) from The University of Chicago. He has attended graduate school in Australia and received a scholarship from JETRO
to do graduate study in Japan. He is the founder of a gourmet barbecue sauce
business, and is an advisor to many early-stage companies. He has been an angel
investor since 1992 and several of his early-stage investments have gone public.
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