Michael Carpenter

Mike Carpenter is a career enterprise-sales and go-to-market leader turned founder and investor. He grew up in Massachusetts, played football and wrestled at St. John's Prep, and began college at UMass Amherst as a psychology major before transferring to UMass Lowell, where he switched to accounting and graduated in 1997 with a bachelor's degree. He credits his accounting background — he helped with his father Gerald's small accounting business as a kid — for the analytical, planning-driven approach he later brought to sales leadership.

Carpenter spent roughly 13–14 years at McAfee / Intel Security, rising from public-sector sales leadership to President of the Americas (a post he reached around 2012), where he led a business of roughly $1.5 billion. He then became President of Global Sales and Field Operations at Tanium, driving the company's global expansion, before CrowdStrike appointed him to the same role — President of Global Sales and Field Operations — announced around December 2016. At CrowdStrike he scaled the sales organization worldwide and helped take revenues from startup scale toward and beyond $1 billion, culminating in the company's June 2019 IPO.

After leaving CrowdStrike, Carpenter transitioned into investing and entrepreneurship. He joined Lightspeed Venture Partners as a Venture Partner / Venture Advisor, where he works with the firm's enterprise portfolio companies on scaling their sales organizations and go-to-market execution. He is also the Founder, Chairman and CEO of XFactor.io, an AI-powered revenue-operations / go-to-market platform, and served on the board of directors of Armis (the asset-visibility/security company), appointed in 2021.

Carpenter is a published author — "Everything You've Never Tried: Breaking the Rules to Compete and Succeed Like a Sales Leader" — and a frequent speaker on scaling revenue organizations. He is open about having overcome learning disabilities early in life. He lives in Alamo, California with his wife Hope, and is an avid MMA practitioner and skier.

• Invests and advises primarily in enterprise software and cybersecurity, the domains where he spent 25+ years operating (McAfee, Tanium, CrowdStrike).
• Deep specialization in go-to-market and revenue operations — his repeated value-add is helping founders build "predictable, scalable revenue" and mature their sales motion from startup scale toward billion-dollar ARR.
• Works through Lightspeed's enterprise portfolio as a venture partner/advisor, meaning his exposure skews toward Lightspeed-backed early-to-growth enterprise companies plus personal board/advisory roles.
• His stated philosophy favors operational, process-driven selling over relationship-based selling — a founder who can articulate a repeatable, measurable GTM engine will resonate with him.
• Prizes founders who plan and forecast rigorously; in his own words, the discipline behind his career came "from my strong accounting background."