Archive for category: Advisers

Asheville, NC & Asia: Founder and principal of Pegasus Capital, a Singapore-based financial advisory firm focused on Southeast Asia and India, Richard is a corporate finance specialist with four and a half decades of professional experience in Asia, Latin America, Africa and the Middle East. Now based in the US, he lived and worked in Southeast Asia from 1973 to 2007 with the World Bank, Private Development Finance Company of Indonesia, Private Investment Company for Asia, Elders Finance Group and Asian Oceanic Group before launching Pegasus Capital in 1991. A pioneer in Asian private equity, he co-founded Elders PICA Asian Ventures, one of the region’s earliest funds, and later established AOG Mitra Capital Finance, the first in Indonesia. He has served on the boards of more than 30 manufacturing, food, banking, securities and energy services companies in seven Asian countries and has been an adviser to Salomon Brothers, Deloitte Corporate Finance, EMP Global, Darby Asia and Acadian Asset Management. He serves on the Advisory Committee for Biotechnology in Western North Carolina and is a member of the regional Inception Micro Angel Fund. Richard lived in East Africa and worked as a development economist in Vietnam, Thailand, Colombia and Iran before joining the World Bank in 1970. An electrical engineering graduate of Penn State, he has a master’s degree from the Sloan School at MIT, where he also studied nuclear engineering under an Atomic Energy Commission Fellowship.

Silicon Valley & West Jefferson, NC: Henry serves as Chief Strategy Officer and Executive in Residence with T2VC, a Silicon Valley-based venture capital firm. In that role, he supports the growth and overall development focus of the firm.  He also serves as Executive in Residence for the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences at UNC – Charlotte. In this role Henry has the opportunity to coach and mentor students, contribute to curriculum improvements, expand the global reach of International Studies, and support faculty in special projects. Henry is also a graduate student in Renaissance studies in the UNCC English Department.

Henry has over twenty-five years of business experience in banking and telecommunications and extensive volunteer leadership experience in non-profits. His primary background is in financial services sales practices, data mining, TQM and consumer research.  He has extensive experience in all disciplines related to sales leadership, with deeper experience in sales force automation, data mining, modeling and customer insight. Henry has led, or been involved in, a number of small business restructurings, start ups and early stage ventures.

Asheville, NC: Matthew Raker serves as the Vice President of Entrepreneurship and AdvantageGreen at AdvantageWest, a regional economic development partnership in western North Carolina. As director of AW’s entrepreneurship efforts, Matt works closely with regional partners to ensure WNC is home to a thriving entrepreneurial ecosystem.  Building on his considerable work at the intersection of economy and environment, Matt also heads the AdvantageGreen program, an initiative to capitalize on WNC’s exceptional natural assets and opportunity to be a leader in sustainable industries. Through AdvantageGreen, Matt works with startups, existing industry and regional partners to advance WNC economic clusters in clean energy, green building technologies, natural products, sustainable agriculture, outdoor sports and climate science. Matt holds degrees in Economics and Natural Resources Management from UNC Asheville.

Bent Creek Institute, Inc., based in Asheville, NC, is a non-profit business incubator conserving and developing WNC’s unique plant biodiversity assets by anchoring our nation’s emerging integrative wellness economy through science in botanical quality and safety. BCI will collaborate with Asheville’s extraordinary integrative healthcare community to make our region synonymous with safe, effective, and affordable botanical therapies as a primary wellness support system backed by ethical life sciences, sustainable cultivation practices, and thousands of years of traditional use worldwide.

Shaun Paul is the Chief Executive Officer of Ejido Verde, a Mexican forestry company formed through a partnership of the Mexican pine chemicals industry and indigenous communities in Michoacan to establish 12,000 hectares of commercial plantations for pine resin extraction.  Shaun recently assumed this role in November 2015 building from his 25 years of highly entrepreneurial experience in private finance, philanthropy, and leading growth companies innovating solutions for food, forests, and water.

Prior to joining Ejido Verde, Shaun served as the Managing Director and Founding Partner of Reinventure Capital, an impact venture fund, to invest in innovative entrepreneurs scaling businesses creating solutions for social inequality, healthy living and ecosystem renewal.  Beginning in 1992, Shaun founded and led the EcoLogic Development Fund that included managing forests with indigenous communities and establishing forest plantations in Mexico, Guatemala, Honduras, and Belize. As a founder and president of Pico Bonito Forests LLC  in Honduras, he pioneered forestry finance with carbon offsets beginning in 2004.  In addition, Shaun led the incubation of Root Capital that has lent US$903 million to small and growing businesses in Latin America and Africa.

Shaun currently serves on the boards of International Funders for Indigenous People, as well as Accelerating Appalachia for nature-based companies. He is an advisor to EcoMadera in Ecuador and serves as a research fellow at the Global Development and Environment Institute at Tufts University to innovate next generation impact metrics empowering entrepreneurs and investors to realize superior performance by applying Regenerative Principles and a Living Systems Framework.