Felipe Cano, Strategic Advisor
Serves as adviser to the CEO of General Microgrids, Inc. After completing his studies in Boston, Massachusetts, Mr. Cano moved back to his native country of Colombia to work as vice-president for Latin America Regions, a business development of DRILLEXCO (a family owned drilling oil & gas company). During his history at Drillexco, Felipe mastered closing land concessions (leases) with multiple Latin American governments and private parties, garnering him with the expertise in complex polices, form-outs and lobbying. During Felipe’s involvement, the company acquired over 1 MM hectares of land with a contract to drill 250 wells.
After the 5-year experience in the oil, gas and energy industry, Mr. Cano moved back to the US to manage Sterling Securities, an equity market hedge fund. Sterling Securities managed private wealth portfolios for Latin America, Caribbean and Europeans clients as a registered broker-dealer regulated by the SEC (Security Exchange Commission). As CEO, Felipe Cano oversaw the raising of investment capital; transaction control of trading desk reports; compliance issues; aspects of technology and connectivity transactions; and trading floor management.
This experience provided Felipe the entry point to the creation of Eurolink Network in Madrid, Spain.
In 1998 Mr. Cano moved to Spain to take a new step forward, having the vision to connect and unify both European and United States stock exchanges under one platform and protocol, targeting to create the smart grid of the equity market and stock trading in a bilateral, single network. In 2000 Mr. Cano co-founded ECN Access Europe S.A. in partnership with Island ECN, today, a Reuters company. ECN Access was the first technology hub in Europe to route the first block of institutional order flows from a European Bank directly to the NASDAQ electronic exchange without intermediaries: “the first smart grid ever built”.
The ECN (Electronic Communication Networks), of the 90’s were and are today, places in which traders of all levels, (private and institutional), match equity and other financial products within their own order books. This was the democratization of the stock exchange. Today, in a similar manner, General MicroGrids Inc. is building “the inter-grid ” of the clean energy field.
In 2003, Eurolink Network Inc., (an ECN Access Europe S.A. spin-off), was acquired by NYFIX (NYFX), a leading Wall Street listed company with a market cap of 1.2 billon dollars. Eurolink’s network order flow account handled more than one billon shares per day, equivalent to 30% of the total volume of the institutional European equity order flow to the USA markets, all built under one platform and the “FIX” protocol: (Financial Information Exchange).
From 2004, after the monetization of Eurolink, until today, Felipe has been investing his time and resources on the evolution of the Eurolink concept: the creation of a two-way electronic routing network which permits the transaction activity of electrons, from the sell-side to the buy-side, converting people and infrastructures from consumers of energy to “prosumers ” (producers of energy): a straight through process Smart Grid.
While sharpening his learning curve, in 2007, Greenline Industries (a California based modular biodiesel technology manufacturer) hired Felipe to re-define their global strategy.
Felipe’s goal as adviser to the CEO of General MicroGrids, Inc. is to ensure Eco&Urbana and General MicroGrids mission statements are consistent and complementary. Mr. Cano is targeting to achieve this goal by aggregating the most talented team in the industry to co-develop company products and services which integrate smart energy education, smart mobilization and smart finance, in combination with energy software, hardware and network solutions, specifically, microgrid schemes: an open and transparent transformation of the energy industry.
Felipe graduated with honors from Valley Forge Military Academy, later acquiring an M.S. (Master of Science) from Cambridge College in Boston, Massachusetts. He had the opportunity to live in a dozen cities around the world, making him an extraordinary visionary with a real pulse of the planets social, environmental and economic behavior, as well as its future needs.