Michael Blake

Background

About Michael Blake

Michael J. Blake's career spans six decades as a CPA, venture capitalist, senior financial executive, business and tax adviser to HNW individuals, and member of numerous stock and futures exchanges. Michael spent five years at firms such as PricewaterhouseCoopers before joining Donaldson Lufkin & Jenrette. At DLJ, he advised on the tax aspects of multi-national merger and acquisition transactions, as well as on the partial sale of DLJ itself, to American Express. After DLJ, Michael spent twelve years at Saul Steinberg’s Reliance Group Holdings. As Reliance’s Senior VP, he developed the company’s corporate takeover and worldwide tax planning. At that time, Reliance was at the forefront of employing the technique known as “greenmail”. At Reliance, he was a GP of Reliance Capital Group (RCG), a private equity company. During that time, RCG acquired Days Inns, then a privately owned 350-unit motel chain, and took days public. At about the same time, RCG assembled a group of TV stations to form Telemundo Group, and took that Spanish language TV network public. After Reliance, Michael became an independent venture capitalist. During this period, he co-founded Medintell Systems which acquired a license from the Mayo Clinic for its Mayo Medication Management system. Medintell was successfully sold by Blake and his co-founder two years later to a subsidiary of Columbia HCA for publicly traded stock. Blake co-founded Netselector, an Internet technology company, and sold it for cash to Apple Computer. He was an early investor in, and advisor to, Wedding Registry, an online bridal company, that was sold for cash to Primedia. Blake co-founded BDS Communications. BDS was in the forefront of the consolidation of the radio and TV tower industry. After making several acquisitions, BDS was acquired for publicly traded stock of American Tower Corp. Blake and his partners then applied their TV tower expertise to acquire bankrupt New England TV stations that they sold for cash to larger broadcasters. Michael was vice-chairman of the Minneapolis Grain Exchange, and was also a member of the Chicago Board of Trade, NYMEX, the KC Board of Trade, and the Philadelphia Stock Exchange. He was in the forefront of the movements to both implement electronic trading at exchanges and encourage mergers of various exchanges. At present, Michael is actively involved in startup companies, and continues to advise both corporate and individual clients on sophisticated tax and financial strategies. He is currently the Chairman of Cloud Lets Go, Inc, a Cloud migration company.