Michael Binko (aka "binko") sees entrepreneurship as the launchfuel for healthy local ecosystem development and is passionate about celebrating those with the courage to STRT1UP®. binko is a serial entrepreneur-founder, entrepreneur Ecosystem Builder, venture funder (angel+seed+VC), data scientist and brand-hound ideator. He has managed Corporate Ventures/Development, Analyst/Investor Relations and Corporate Sale/Marketing for public companies (PSINet, XYBR, Oracle Federal, Apple Federal, NEXT Software, SCO, Novell, TMP Worldwide) and raised more than $2 billion in equity funding via global capital markets.

binko's sweet-spot venture life cycle stages are late Bootstrap to Rampup/Speedup when founders and teams are typically evaluated under the scrutiny lens of "Prove It at Scale." binko has been a Mentor and Venture Development sherpa to thousands of entrepreneurs and founding teams around the country -- keeping a warm spot in his heart for the Mid-Atlantic and his home state of Maryland (The Free State).

binko CoFounded and is CEO of Startup Maryland® -- a regions initiative born out of Startup America. Core programs include the STRT1UP Roadshow, Raise Your Game Bootcamp for founding teams and Angel Academy (angel investor bootcamp). binko recently launched STRT1UP Ventures with current portfolio companies including: Quidient, American Gene Technologies (AGT), Fluent, AUTIX, Cohado, IES Life Science and Quantum Compliance. As an angel investor of kloudtrack® a cloud-based cybersecurity, governance/risk/compliance AI / data science company, binko currently serves as interim CEO | Board Chair.

binko is a CoFounder and member of the Board of Directors of the Startup Champions Network (SCN), the continuation of Startup America as the first organization established to support best-practices toward inclusive entrepreneurial ecosystems. Since founding SCN, binko has led initiatives related to Venture Deal-flow Mapping, Policy+Legislative Advocacy, Ecosystem Metrics, Branding and National Partnerships including direct relationships with Kauffman Foundation, Revolution Ventures, Google for Startups, Amazon AWS, Microsoft Azure, TRowePrice and others. He was CoFounder and CMO of LaunchFuel a venture studio in Northern VA focused on Data, Cloud and Cyber portfolios.

binko is an avid public speaker and serves on numerous corporate, industry and non-profit Boards of Directors. He also serve as an Advisor|Strategist to organizations around policy+advocacy, data modeling/analytics, ecosystem building+metrics, venture finance, economic development, equitable community|social development, inter-cultural unity (ICU), inclusive rubrics and technology venture building+curation+acceleration.

binko is an honors graduate with two BS degrees from James Madison University and is also a graduate of the Innovation Management program offered jointly by the University of Maryland Clark School of Engineering and Smith School of Business. He has instructed on venture building at UMD, George Mason University, George Washington University, University of Baltimore Virginia Tech and Johns Hopkins University. He is also a Business Evaluator for the National Institute for Standards and Technology (NIST) and an Accelerators contributor for The Wall Street Journal.