Mike Denzel currently splits his time between looking for new investments
and working with the portfolio companies. Mike screens early-stage companies
and performs due diligence on prospects. After investment, Mike acts
as an advisor to the company or takes a board position, depending on
the needs of the company.
Prior to joining McKenna Ventures Management, Mike led a team of world-class
marketing professionals at Quantum Corporation, the world leader in
the ultra-competitive desktop hard disk drive market. At Quantum, Denzel
was responsible for P&L for the OEM business. In this role, he was
responsible for customer satisfaction at Apple, Acer, Compaq, Dell,
eMachines, Gateway, HP, IBM and NEC, as well as other leading PC manufacturers.
During his leadership, unit shipments almost doubled to a 20 million
unit annual rate representing $1.8 billion, expanding Quantum’s dominant
position in the desktop PC OEM business. Denzel’s team achieved unprecedented
levels of customer satisfaction combined with consistent profitability.
Prior to Quantum, Mike worked at Maxtor Corporation in a series of jobs
of increasing accountability in the Sales and Marketing areas, at a
time when Maxtor was the world’s largest hard disk drive company. Early
in his career, Denzel worked at Varian Associates, excelling in Engineering,
Manufacturing, Operations and Marketing in a rotation program for fast
track employees.
A native of Western New York, Denzel earned his BS in Industrial Engineering
at the State University of New York at Buffalo and his MBA at Santa
Clara University.