Casey Cowell

Casey Cowell is a Detroit native who earned an economics degree from the University of Chicago in 1975. In 1976, at age 23, he co-founded U.S. Robotics with a small group of partners (including Stephen Muka) — reportedly pooling $200 in a tiny room above an army-surplus shop on Chicago's Lincoln Avenue. The company was named after the fictional firm in Isaac Asimov's *I, Robot*.

As Chairman and CEO, Cowell built U.S. Robotics into the world's largest manufacturer of modems, growing revenues from roughly $50 million in 1990 (the year before its IPO) to billions by the mid-1990s, and helping bring the Palm Pilot to market. In 1997, U.S. Robotics merged into 3Com in a transaction valued at approximately $6.6 billion, then one of the largest mergers in high-tech and data-communications history. Cowell was named one of Business Week's "25 Top Managers" globally (1995) and Crain's Chicago Business "Executive of the Year" (1996).

Cowell and his family have lived in the Traverse City / Elk Rapids area of Northern Michigan since 1991. In 2016 he launched Boomerang Catapult, LLC (with Lowell "Jep" Gruman) to back entrepreneurs and build technology and healthcare companies in the region — its tagline is taking "local companies national and bringing national companies to Front Street." He is also a prominent philanthropist and civic leader, funding the Cowell Family Cancer Center at Munson Healthcare and serving on boards including Munson Healthcare, Interlochen Center for the Arts, and the Groundwork Center for Resilient Communities, plus advising Augment Ventures on the Northern Michigan technology landscape.

• Invests primarily at seed / early stage in technology and healthcare/biotech, frequently as a first-in institutional investor (e.g., GeoTix in 2017) and sometimes writing growth-capital checks to relocate companies to Traverse City (e.g., ATLAS Space Operations).
• Central strategy: build a "high value creation economy" in Northern Michigan by attracting "really smart and committed" entrepreneurs and remote workers, and by favoring companies that turn raw materials/ideas into high-value products shipped globally.
• Prefers founders who settle locally and contribute to community life, prioritizing "population health and cultural vitality as a competitive advantage."
• Explicitly rejects transitory, tourism-focused development, saying he'd rather "make the community great for the people who are here and want to live here."
• Brings deep operator credibility (scaling a hardware/data-comms company from a room above a surplus store to a multibillion-dollar exit) as an advisor, not just a check.