Curiosity Expert: John Sculley

Serial Entrepreneur Mentor (former Apple CEO)

John Sculley is a Palm Beach resident and actively involved in helping serial entrepreneurs in South Florida build successful private companies through to a liquidity event.

As one of America's best known business leaders, Sculley will discuss why he considers the current economic environment a particularly opportune time to create shareholder value in private companies.

Sculley's recent liquidity successes include: MetroPCS, CreditX, Intralinks, & Cardionet.

His current private companies in South Florida are Openpeak, 3Cinteractive and Watermark Medical.

After graduating from Brown University, John Sculley earned a Wharton MBA. He joined PepsiCo moving up to Pepsi-Cola Company Marketing SVP where he oversaw the launch of the first plastic soft drink bottle giving Pepsi a major hit product in their competition with The Coca-Cola Company.

Later as Pepsi-Cola Company CEO, "Pepsi Generation" and "Pepsi Challenge" became two of the most successful campaigns ever, enabling Pepsi to pass Coke as the largest selling packaged soft drink in the U.S.A.

Recruited by Steve Jobs to Apple as CEO, Sculley helped Jobs launch the first Macintosh with the now famous "1984" TV commercial and introduce to the world, "Apple Desktop Publishing". Sculley's most successful hit product launch in the late 1980's was Apple's award winning design "Powerbook" enabling Apple to become the largest selling PC in the world.

After 10 years as CEO in Apple's early glory years in the 1980's, Sculley went off with his brothers to build private companies which they sold to private equity firms or took public.

Sculley's investment thesis is to find and mentor successful serial entrepreneurs in their next venture.

John is a highly experienced builder who very selectively only takes on opportunities where there is the potential for "game changing transformation."

Few entrepreneurs have been as successful across so many fields as John Sculley. His success stories include telecommunications, financial services, healthcare, high technology, Internet services, consumer marketing, and outsourcing services.

John's message is particularly relevant in our current deleveraging & spending meltdown.

While at Pepsi and later Apple, John Sculley was chosen as Marketing Person of the Year by both Advertising Age & AdWeek. He was also selected as Marketing CEO of Decade by Financial World magazine and Financial News Network and Man-of-the-Year by Financial World magazine.

John is a Brown University graduate; earned an MBA from Wharton where he also received the Joseph Wharton Leadership Award and holds a PhD from John's Hopkins University.