Mike Scanlin

Mike Scanlin has been trading covered calls for 45 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 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.