Innovate State is a collaboration between the Burgess Institute for Entrepreneurship & Innovation and the MSU Innovation Center.

Hosted in the Entrepreneurship Lab, Innovate State welcomes successful Spartan alumni back to campus for a fireside chat. Guests share their perspectives on everything from launching startups to experiencing success and failure to building dynamic and nurturing work cultures.

A native of Williamston, Michigan, Mike Miller is a lifelong Spartan. After graduating from MSU with degrees in physics and philosophy, his undergraduate research at the Cyclotron opened the door for a PhD in Particle Physics from Yale and faculty positions at MIT and UW. Along the way he developed a taste for capitalism, co-founding the Y Combinator-backed company, Cloudant, which helped create the noSQL and Database-aaS market before being acquired by IBM in 2014. Through a strange twist of fate, Miller then co-founded Silicon Valley’s most active seed-stage venture capital firm with Joe Montana and Michael Ma. Since 2015 the partners have invested in over 250 companies with a combined valuation of nearly $10B, putting them at the epicenter of the Bay Area’s tech scene. Outside of work, Mike is the proud father of two sets of young twins with his wife Laura, and they enjoy hiking, sailing, skiing and climbing from their Pacific NW home base.