Lee Lorenzen

Founder, CEO at Altura Ventures LLC

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Lee Lorenzen's Summary

Lee Lorenzen (www.altura.net/bio) is a successful entrepreneur with 35+ years of experience founding and/or funding numerous ventures and non-profit organizations. He is currently President, CEO of Altura Ventures Prior to Altura Ventures, he founded SHOP.COM (1997-2007) and as CEO led the company from a simple idea to its current place as one of the Top 10 most trafficked multi-vendor shopping sites on the web. Lorenzen's first start-up was Ventura Software (1985-1990) where he co-wrote Ventura Publisher -- the fastest desktop publishing system available on the PC. Xerox licensed it and achieved annual sales of $50+ million. Next, Lorenzen founded Altura Software (1990-Present) and created the Mac2Win software which was used to port 60+ Mac applications to Windows (including ClarisWorks, Macromedia Director and Fractal Design Painter). Over the years, Altura generated $18+ million in revenue, reached the Softletter's Top 100 list and had Sales Per Employee levels in the Top 10 of all software companies. Lorenzen also founded and built the management team of Fractal Design Corporation (1992-1996), which went public in 1995 before ultimately being acquired by Corel. Next, he co-founded PGSoft (1998-2001) which was sold to Novell after creating the Cody-award winning IFolder product. Earlier in his career, Lorenzen developed some of the world's first graphical user interfaces. After graduating valedictorian from SMU with a BS in Computer Science, he joined Xerox, where he developed an icon-based graphical desktop user interface called Lone Star in 1981 (just prior to the shipment of the IBM PC). Next, at Digital Research Inc. (DRI), he developed a graphical windowing system and user interface for the PC called GEM that was an early competitor to Windows and Macintosh. Lorenzen holds a patent as co-inventor of the Universal Shopping Cart. Specialties: start-ups, fundraising, complex business negotiations, conflict resolution and mediation, cold-calling