Jesse Lipson is an American

entrepreneur Entrepreneurship is the creation or extraction of economic value. With this definition, entrepreneurship is viewed as change, generally entailing risk beyond what is normally encountered in starting a business, which may include other values th ...

. He founded the enterprise file sharing service

ShareFile ShareFile is a secure content collaboration, file sharing and sync software that supports all the document-centric tasks and workflow needs of small and large businesses. The company also offers cloud-based or on-premises storage, virtual data ...

, which he sold to

Citrix Systems Citrix Systems, Inc. is an American multinational cloud computing and virtualization technology company that provides server, application and desktop virtualization, networking, software as a service (SaaS), and cloud computing technologies. C ...

in 2011. He was the corporate vice president and

general manager A general manager (GM) is an executive who has overall responsibility for managing both the revenue and cost elements of a company's income statement, known as profit & loss (P&L) responsibility. A general manager usually oversees most or all of ...

of Citrix Cloud Services until 2017. He is now working on a new project, Levitate, through his holding company RealMagic.

Early life and education

Lipson was born in

Iowa City, Iowa Iowa City, offically the City of Iowa City is a city in Johnson County, Iowa, United States. It is the home of the University of Iowa and county seat of Johnson County, at the center of the Iowa City Metropolitan Statistical Area. At the time ...

in 1977. He grew up in

Maryland Maryland ( ) is a state in the Mid-Atlantic region of the United States. It shares borders with Virginia, West Virginia, and the District of Columbia to its south and west; Pennsylvania to its north; and Delaware and the Atlantic Ocean to ...

and began a business selling

card tricks Card manipulation is the branch of magic that deals with creating effects using sleight of hand techniques involving playing cards. Card manipulation is often used in magical performances, especially in close-up, parlor, and street magic. Some ...

to magic stores when he was 14. He attended

Duke University Duke University is a private research university in Durham, North Carolina. Founded by Methodists and Quakers in the present-day city of Trinity in 1838, the school moved to Durham in 1892. In 1924, tobacco and electric power industrialist James ...

where he majored in philosophy. During college, he started several more ventures, including EasyCentral, a password and form manager. Following his graduation from Duke in 2000, Lipson worked for an internet start-up called FullSeven that developed branding for company e-mails during the first

dot com boom The dot-com bubble (dot-com boom, tech bubble, or the Internet bubble) was a stock market bubble in the late 1990s, a period of massive growth in the use and adoption of the Internet. Between 1995 and its peak in March 2000, the Nasdaq Compos ...

. He acquired web design skills in the position, which he then parlayed into his own web development business called novelProjects. The company eventually split into three businesses. In 2001, Lipson inherited his father's pharmaceutical market research company, Rapidata.net. Within two years he helped grow the company's revenue by 500%. The company was sold to Greenfield Online in 2005 and Lipson used the profits to help fund ShareFile.

ShareFile

Lipson built and launched

in November 2005 in

Raleigh, North Carolina Raleigh (; ) is the capital city of the state of North Carolina and the List of North Carolina county seats, seat of Wake County, North Carolina, Wake County in the United States. It is the List of municipalities in North Carolina, second-most ...

. The idea stemmed from requests by several of his website design clients to provide a password-protected area for file exchange. Lipson aimed to update traditional

FTP The File Transfer Protocol (FTP) is a standard communication protocol used for the transfer of computer files from a server to a client on a computer network. FTP is built on a client–server model architecture using separate control and data ...

methods with ShareFile. He bootstrapped ShareFile and focused immediately on procuring only business customers. By 2011, Lipson had grown the company to 4 million users with no outside capital. In 2011, ShareFile was acquired by Citrix Systems. Lipson became vice president and general manager of Citrix Systems' newly formed data sharing product group, including ShareFile. He helped inspire and oversee the expansion of a major Citrix office in downtown Raleigh’s Warehouse District, which opened in 2014. As of 2016, Lipson is the corporate vice president and general manager of Citrix Cloud Services. On February 21, 2017 Lipson announced he would be leaving his position as corporate vice president and general manager of the Cloud Services Business Unit at Citrix in March 2017.

Other roles

Lipson is a founding partner of the Raleigh-based HQ Raleigh, a

shared workspace Coworking is an arrangement in which workers for different companies share an office space. It allows cost savings and convenience through the use of common infrastructures, such as equipment, utilities and receptionist and custodial services, an ...

. He has served on the board of directors of

Yext Yext is a New York City technology company operating in the area of online brand management. It offers brand updates using its cloud-based network of apps, search engines and other facilities. The company was founded in 2006 by Howard Lerman, Bri ...

, a startup that maintains web listings for businesses, since 2012. In 2013, he started ThinkHouse, a

coliving Co-living is a residential community living model that accommodates three or more biologically unrelated people living in the same dwelling unit. Generally coliving is a type of intentional community that provides shared housing for people with s ...

space and accelerator, for entrepreneurs. Lipson, along with his wife, spoke at the

2016 Democratic National Convention The 2016 Democratic National Convention was a presidential nominating convention, held at the Wells Fargo Center in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, from July 25 to 28, 2016. The convention gathered delegates of the Democratic Party, the majo ...

about

entrepreneurship Entrepreneurship is the creation or extraction of economic value. With this definition, entrepreneurship is viewed as change, generally entailing risk beyond what is normally encountered in starting a business, which may include other values th ...

Personal life

Lipson lives in Raleigh, NC and is married to entrepreneur Brooks Bell.

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Lipson, Jesse American technology company founders American computer businesspeople Duke University Trinity College of Arts and Sciences alumni Living people Businesspeople in software People from Raleigh, North Carolina 1977 births