When American tech entrepreneur Michael Baum Bought a prestigious winery in France’s Burgundy region it caused a trans-Atlantic spat.
“[French newspaper] Le Figaro covered the announcement on its website, and there were about 2, 716 comments on the article, “says Michael, ,
“You could split the comments right down the middle. Half of them were ‘damn foreigners stealing our heritage’ ‘. the other half were’ if it was for Americans you’d all be eating sauerkraut right now. ‘
This was back in 2014, when Michael purchased Chateau de Pommard and its (hectares) (acres) of vines for an undisclosed sum in the many millions.
It is complicated stuff, but in simple terms, its software allows firms to monitor their data and security systems . With annual revenues of $ 1.8bn (£ 1.6bn), Splunk’s customers are many of the world’s largest companies. They include 320 of the Fortune a list of the biggest 300 businesses in the US by annual turnover.
Michael and his two co-founders launched Splunk back in
Today, in addition to running his French winery, or domaine, he sits on the board of eight other companies in the US and Europe, and he has a multitude of additional business investments. He is also the founder of a mentoring and funding scheme for young entrepreneurs called Founder.org.
“I like to keep busy,” he says. “Certain people, call them entrepreneurial or creative types, are just wired that way. For me work is about creativity, it is about building things. That is what is exciting to me.”
Born and raised in Philadelphia, Michael says he had little interest in computers until his second year at the city’s Drexel University in the early s). Then, following a visit to the college by the late Steve Jobs, everyone purchased an Apple computer.
All of a sudden my brain went ‘how do these work? ‘, “says Michael. “So I went headlong into software.”
Switching his main university course from electrical engineering to computer science, it set him on an entrepreneurial career path in tech sector.
After graduating, Michael’s first business venture was a software system for investors that studied past stock market conditions to try to predict future performance. Called Reality Online, it was ultimately purchased by the Reuters business information company.
Then armed with a master of business qualification from the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School, he moved to Silicon Valley .
Other businesses he successfully grew and sold included a software system for early handheld computer devices, called Pensoft, and online money exchange firm Dotbank.
“I didn’t think I liked wine when I was a younger man, because I didnt like the American stuff, “he says. “It is more often too heavy, too sweet, too alcoholic.
” Then I went to Europe for the first time when I was 28, and tried French wine for the first time. And it was a huge revelation. “French wine is far more elegant, far more mineral, far more traditionally made. It is night and day.
“Then in 2009 We [my wife and I] moved to Paris for a year, just to take a hiatus, and I started looking more intensely at doing something in wine in France. We went to Burgundy, and I was like ‘this is it, this is ground zero, this is the benchmark’. I fell hard for Burgundy wines. ”
Home to some of the most expensive, and highly-prized wines in the world, Burgundy predominately produces white wines made from chardonnay grapes, and reds made from pinot noir. The wineries and vineyards are often very small, with some producers owning just a few rows or plots of vines here and there.
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