Michael Dornbrook

Michael Dornbrook General Information

Description

Mr. Michael Dornbrook serves as Venture Partner & Investment Committee Member at Converge Venture Partners. He serves as Advisor at VirZOOM and Zelgor Games. Previously, he served as Board Member at SyncOnSet Technologies and Modulate. He served as an Advisor at Play Labs. He also served as Board Member & Advisor at OtherSide Entertainment. Mike brings his entrepreneurial spirit to Converge Venture Partners, where his background in marketing, operations, and product management provides valuable insights into the development and launch of products. Mike completed his undergraduate studies at MIT. As a student, he very successfully ran the campus film and lecture series, the largest student activity on campus, earning him a "business" reputation. When his friends developed Zork, one of the earliest computer games at the computer game pioneer Infocom, they enlisted Mike to help them out. This marked the beginning of Mike's long and successful career in gaming. Among his responsibilities at Infocom, Mike dealt with customer issues and, again tapping into his business spirit, saw an opportunity to build paid support services for the game players. While he was at business school at the University of Chicago, the company contracted with him to create the Zork Users Group. Mike published the highly successful New York Times mail-order newsletter to sell the game maps and InvisiClues hint booklets he created. After business school, Mike sold his company to Infocom and rejoined them as head of marketing. He launched over forty Top-10 bestsellers and is particularly proud of championing The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. After Activision's acquisition of Infocom, Mike pursued a series of startups of his own, first in consumer products, and then in cellular services, before re-entering the computer games business as co-founder and president of Boffo Games. Eventually, Mike was recruited to Harmonix Music Systems where he served as COO and was responsible for Harmonix's Finance, Administration, Legal, HR, Business Development, and Marketing. Harmonix's most famous product, Guitar Hero, became a huge hit, earning critical acclaim and breaking the record for the fastest videogame franchise to hit $1 billion in sales (it went on to sell $3 billion). Rock Band, Harmonix's next franchise, broke this record by hitting $1 billion in sales in just over one year. Mike handled the major deals for the company, including the game publishing contracts, the Chinese manufacturer of all the drums and guitars, and the sale of the company to Viacom for over $700 million, including earnouts, one of the highest prices ever paid for a game developer, yielding the investors up to 220X.