Maciej Kranz

Maciej Kranz (born November 22, 1964, in Warsaw, Poland; dual Polish-American citizen) is a technology executive, New York Times bestselling author, and angel investor. He studied at the SGH Warsaw School of Economics and earned an MBA from Texas Christian University. Early in his career he held product-management roles at IBM and 3Com, where he helped grow the company's Ethernet network interface card business into a roughly $1 billion product line.

Kranz spent about two decades at Cisco Systems (joining in 1999), rising through leadership roles in enterprise networking, wireless, and the Internet of Things. He led marketing for stackable Ethernet switching and Cisco's Wireless Networking Business Unit, drove the "Borderless Networks" initiative, ran the Connected Industries Group as General Manager, and ultimately served as Vice President of the Corporate Strategic Innovation Group, incubating new businesses and running Cisco's global network of Innovation Centers. In that period he wrote the NYT/USA Today bestseller *Building the Internet of Things* (2016) — named by Fortune as one of "10 business books every entrepreneur should read in 2017" and translated into ~10 languages — plus a 2018 companion workbook.

After Cisco, Kranz became Executive Vice President and Chief Technology Officer and a member of the Executive Board at KONE, the Finnish elevator and escalator company, responsible for R&D, IT, and technology innovation (the source of the KONE contact details in the stub). More recently he has served as General Manager, Enterprise at Pure Storage, focused on enterprise data infrastructure and AI. He is also a faculty member at Singularity University and a contributor to the Forbes Technology Council.

Alongside his operating roles, Kranz is an active angel investor and startup board member, backing early-stage technology companies and serving on boards including IoTecha (EV charging / IoT) and, previously, the Alchemist Accelerator.

• Invests as an individual angel at the seed stage, typically joining priced seed rounds alongside other investors rather than leading.
• Gravitates toward enterprise software, IoT, and fintech — reflecting his career-long focus on connected industries, networking, and digital transformation.
• Draws on deep IoT / edge / AI operator experience; his public writing argues IoT succeeds when it solves concrete business problems and is deployed with an ecosystem of partners rather than as standalone tech — a lens he likely applies to founders.
• Invests internationally (U.S. and European startups), consistent with his global executive background at Cisco and KONE.