Michael Scheele began his career simultaneously with the birth of competitive telephony by working on the original anti-trust case at GTE Sprint in 1985. Mike performed every significant field and corporate product and sales job during his 6 year tenure at GTE Sprint; GTE Sprint repeatedly promoted Mike at 6 month intervals after he mastered each successive position. Mike's mentors today are still his original supervisors at Sprint in 1985. Beginning in 1991, Mike spent 2 years in Coopers and Lybrand's managerial consulting practice, specializing in telecom regulation. In 1993 Mike accepted a senior sales position at Teleport Communication Group, and consistently ranked in the top 5% of TCG sales personnel. At TCG Mike witnessed the creation of what would become the CLEC industry as we know it today.

His entrepreneurial career started in 1995 when he left TCG and started his own consulting firm M.J. Scheele and Associates, which remained active until 2000. Mike honed his market knowledge and analytic skills by conducting ground breaking primary research on international issues such as callback, bypass and refile. MJ Scheele and Associates published over 5,000 pages of primary market research, much of which can be found today on the Internet (Google MJ Scheele). Before closing shop in 2000, M.J. Scheele and Associates' retained client list included each and every one of the top 20 international carriers.

In 1996, Mike founded New Global Telecom, which quickly became a dominant player in the international wholesale arena. In his capacity of VP of Sales and Marketing, utilizing his sales and marketing expertise and extensive contact base developed at M.J. Scheele and Associates, NGT's revenues quickly grew from $0 in 1996 to over $125M in 1999. Mike successfully exited NGT in a re-capitalization that included AT&T, his primary customer from M.J. Scheele and Associates.

In 1997, Mike recognizing an industry need to improve the efficiency of international minutes trading, Mike promptly launched RateXchange by raising the necessary capital and selecting the management team. Mike and all of RateXchange's investors earned approximately 50X on their initial investment within a 14 month period concluding with RateXchange's sale to a publicly traded company.

In 2002, Mike founded IP Deliver, now Infiniroute. Again, he recognized the need to mediate the carrier signaling world of TDM to IP and quickly established IP Deliver as a leading edge network component provider that successfully sold adjunct network components to several large telecommunications companies including Sprint, AT&T, and Vodafone. He exited IP Deliver in late 2003 during a re-capitalization.

In 2002, he founded Telecom Assets Management Group (which became a leader in asset reallocation) to capitalize on the global re-alignment of assets flowing through the numerous Chapter 11 proceedings. In 2003 he sold a portion of his shares back to management and continues to hold a modest equity stake in the company today.

His newest and largest single investment to date is Talkfree. Founded in early 2004, Talkfree is extremely well-positioned to grow explosively along with the proliferation of IP in the developing world. Talkfree's lowest cost customer acquisition model will scale quickly to become a global household name in the developing world.

Michael Scheele is an opportunist and, upon recognizing an opportunity, he quickly architects a winning business model and hand picks a management team that is best suited to capitalize on the opportunity by drawing on his vast array of contacts developed over his extensive career.

A chronic risk taker at heart, Mike combines the gifts of a work ethic that reflects his Kansas upbringing, fierce determination, resourcefulness and creativity that allows him to remain on top of any competitive marketplace.