Mike Scanlin

Mike Scanlin has been trading covered calls for 43 years, and has been CEO of Born To Sell since 2009.

His stock broker father taught him as a teenager that selling options was a better strategy than buying them. He is an active investor and has the majority of his own money invested in covered calls. He is a frequent writer and speaker on the subject of covered calls.

Prior to running Born To Sell, Mike had 3 distinct careers: software engineering, investment banking, and venture capital.

As a software engineer, Mike spent 12 years at several Silicon Valley startups. Two of them went public on NASDAQ: Storm Technology (1994) and General Magic (1997, they made a movie about it: General Magic movie).

After that Mike switched to investment banking at Garage.com (now Garage Technology Ventures) where he helped early stage startups raise money from angel investors and VCs. During his 4 years at Garage, Mike read thousands of business plans and was part of the team that helped over 100 startups raise over $300M.

Mike switched from investment banking to venture capital in 2002. He worked at two billion dollar VC funds, Sierra Ventures and Battery Ventures, as a direct investor -- putting $86M of LP money into high tech startups and serving on their Board of Directors. He is currently a Venture Partner at Ottawa's top venture capital firm, Mistral Venture Partners.

His passion has always been covered calls. In 2009 he became a full-time entrepreneur and started Born To Sell. The goal was (and is) to provide best-of-breed covered call software to self-directed covered call investors.

You can follow Mike on SeekingAlpha or LinkedIn.