Bruce Deer is our current Entrepreneur-in-Residence. Bruce has been involved with Innovate Mississippi in several capacities in the past, including as a mentor and board chairman of the Mississippi Seed Fund. Bruce has also been involved with Innovate Mississippi as an entrepreneurial client, several years ago. He brings both an entrepreneurial perspective as well as corporate-management background.
Bruce currently provides executive consulting, program management and expert services for a variety of companies.
Bruce brings a diverse 35-year background ranging from hardware engineering, software engineering to executive level management as CIO, CTO, COO and CEO. He has an entrepreneurial approach with a very business-oriented perspective needed for the challenge of developing and supporting the desired technical and business solutions. He also has experience in different sizes and types of companies as he has worked for startups, mid-size companies and large multi-national corporations.
Bruce currently provides executive consulting, program management and expert services for a variety of companies.
He served as an executive for Spread Networks, a fiber optic network company specializing in low-latency high bandwidth telecommunications connections between the financial centers in Chicago, IL and New York. There he was responsible for the overall operations of the company with a focus on strategic planning and business development. He was instrumental in facilitating the sale of Spread Networks to Zayo Group in the Spring of 2018.
Previously, Mr. Deer served as President and CEO of SkyTel, the nation’s premier wireless messaging service.
Prior to SkyTel, Mr. Deer worked for Lockheed Martin in various technical and management responsibilities.
Bruce is an electrical engineering graduate of Mississippi State University and also has a Masters of Engineering from Southern Methodist University.
