Michael Bell

Michael Bell and his college roommate Michael Wegmann founded Encore Software in a cement-floor basement in Venice, California in October 1994. Since the company’s founding, Encore Software has generated a profit every quarter, and 2000 revenues were over $35 million. In less than five years, Bell and Wegmann built Encore Software into one of the top twenty-five consumer software publishers in the nation.

As Chairman and CEO of the company, Bell guided Encore Software through an extremely competitive, consolidating industry and delivered financial results that exceed those of virtually every company in the software industry. This performance was recognized in 2000 by Inc. magazine, which included Encore Software in its annual list of America’s 500 fastest growing private companies, by the Software Council of Southern California, which voted Bell CEO of the Year, and by Soft-Letter, which listed Encore Software on its elite list of "Productivity Champions."

In Feb. 2007, Mr. Bell founded Software.com, an online marketplace for consumer software and related information, where he continues to hold the position of CEO.

Bell’s background combines a strong focus on entrepreneurial opportunities with experience in selling and marketing multimedia products to the consumer market. He spent the first several years of his career at high-technology start-up companies, where he got his first taste of the challenges inherent in entrepreneurial environments.

From there, Bell joined an entrepreneurial unit of NEC Technologies, where he forged strategic relationships that helped create the then-nascent CD-ROM industry. As a senior sales member of the Advanced Media division, Bell introduced CD-ROM technology and products to the retail marketplace and helped create some of the industry’s first successes in multimedia hardware and software.

In 1992, Bell was one of two individuals recruited by Paramount to build its interactive software division. Under Bell’s leadership, Paramount Interactive generated over $7 million in revenue in its second year, and launched several highly successful consumer brands on CD-ROM, including Richard Scarry and Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, titles that are still in existence today.

Bell holds a Bachelors of Arts degree from the University of Iowa.