Venture Capital and how to find, approach and work with VC firms

Scott Caruso of Flywheel Ventures will be on the investor panel that will help evaluate the company pitches at the 23rd Annual Investors Choice® Venture Capital Conference in Salt Lake City.

Scott L. Caruso

General Partner

Mr. Caruso brings to the Flywheel Team over twenty years of software, networking, and Internet industry experience in the Land of Enchantment as an angel investor, entrepreneur, and engineering professional. Since 2000, he has been an active mentor and angel investor in ten technology ventures, most of which are located in the target geographic region of the Fund and one of which is a co-investment with Flywheel Ventures.

During his career, Scott has also been a New Mexico-based founder and executive of two successful start-up companies. Prior to joining Flywheel, Scott founded his second venture, HotSpare, an IT systems business based in Albuquerque, New Mexico. The company has achieved profitability without external capital investment and continues to be owned by Scott. Prior to HotSpare, he co-founded Compute Intensive (now NTT/Verio) with former colleagues from SUN Microsystems. The company was an Internet Service Provider (ISP) and IT consulting business that eventually grew, without any external capital investment, to a firm of 80 employees with national customers including FedEx, NASA, Taco Bell, and Wells Fargo Bank. Verio, a national ISP based in Denver, Colorado, acquired the company for stock in 1997. Scott stayed on for two more years to direct Verio’s national consulting business and to manage internal IT projects for the company as it executed a national roll-up acquisition and expansion strategy. During this time, Verio executed a successful initial public offering (IPO) valued at over $750 million, and was subsequently acquired by Nippon Telephone & Telegraph Corp (NTT) for over $5.5 billion in cash. As a result of this exit, Compute Intensive produced up to $140 million in liquid market value for its shareholders.

Prior to founding HotSpare and Compute Intensive, Scott spent 5 years as a systems engineer and sales support engineer at SUN Microsystems from 1989-1994, and participated in the dramatic growth of that company along with the growth of the entire computer networking industry. His focus at SUN was on commercial and government accounts deploying large database and GIS environments. Before SUN, Scott was a member of the technical staff at New Mexico State University in Las Cruces, where he was involved with projects including the connection of NMSU to the Arpanet (the predecessor of today’s Internet) and the first campus wide email system. Scott holds a BS and a minor in Computer Science from New Mexico State University. He lives with family in Albuquerque, New Mexico.