From Developer to Serial Entrepreneur: Michael Morris, CEO of Torc (Part 1)

Michael has not only transitioned successfully from a developer to an entrepreneur, but he has also built communities of developers and 2-sided marketplaces around them over and again. Torc is his third run at this overall mission of enabling and empowering developers to have great careers.

Sramana Mitra: Let’s start at the very beginning of your journey. Where are you from? Where were you born, raised, and in what kind of background?

Michael Morris: I’m from a little suburb outside of Boston, Massachusetts. I’m the youngest of seven. We had an incredible family life. I’m still very close to all my siblings. I had an Irish Catholic education. Growing up in Boston, it’s not very surprising. I ended up at Boston College High School where I figured out what I wanted to do. I got the bug early on.

My older brother who’s 13 years older than me had been studying Computer Science at UMass Lowell. He was doing his Master’s degree. I started playing around with his computers. I got to high school and I got the chance to play around more with computers. I graduated high school in 1993, but I already realized that I wanted to do computers and physics.

I went to college. I said, “I’ll focus on physics and dabble in computers.” I was a Physics major for the first two years. I went to Boston College. I remember one distinct conversation with my advisor. He said, “Are you 100% sure that you want to keep Physics as your major? You’d be qualified to do two things when you graduate. You’d be qualified to go back to school or teach.”

I thought about that. My plan was always to get my Masters in EE. My brother had now moved to Silicon Valley. He worked in several companies. I had seen from the outskirts what he had been doing. In my junior year, I switched to computer science and never turned back. When I graduated, I knew I wanted to get a job in a software development company and hone my skills. I had my brother saying, “Don’t jump out of a technology position too quickly. Keep your technical edge.”

I graduated in 1997. It was a phenomenal market for anybody who wanted to be a developer. I had all these offers from these big companies. I just happened to run into this small consulting company at a career fair. I just loved the people. I didn’t think I was going to end up there. I went to a recruiting event with them. At the end of the event, I could really see myself working with this group of people. It’s a totally different field. It’s smaller tight relationships – more fraternity-like I guess. I went to this small company.

Sramana Mitra: This was still in Boston?

Michael Morris: They’re out of Hartford, Connecticut. I stayed in Boston. I started coding and traveling all over the US and doing different projects. I absolutely loved it. I worked for Barnes & Noble when they just launched barnes&noble.com. We were competing with Amazon. That was phenomenal. I learned a lot about financial services and supply chains in a short period of time. The company I joined grew from 80 to 650 in three years’ time. It was acquired for over a billion dollars. That’s when the light dawned on me.

I realized that all this stuff is phenomenal but the real opportunity is to figure out the talent game. If you can figure out the talent and provide a solution around that, that is hugely valuable. Can you do it in a way that’s scalable? We grew from 80 to 650, but I didn’t want that. I wanted it to grow from 80 to 10 million. That’s when my mindset changed. The rest of my career was going to be around identifying, aggregating, and attracting great technology talent.

This segment is part 1 in the series : From Developer to Serial Entrepreneur: Michael Morris, CEO of Torc
1 2 3 4 5 6