Kneeland Youngblood

Co-founder and Managing Partner, Pharos Capital Group, LLC

Kneeland Youngblood is a founding partner of Pharos Capital Group. Mr. Youngblood was chairman of the American Beacon Funds, a $30 billion mutual fund company, managed by American Beacon Advisors, a $65 billion investment affiliate of American Airlines. He was a director of Starwood Hotels and Lodging, one of the largest hotel companies in the world with more than 725 properties in 80 countries and 120,000 employees. He also served on the board of directors of Gap Inc., Burger King and the $3 Billion Dallas Employee Retirement System. He was a former director of the U.S. Enrichment Corporation, a global energy services company taken public in 1998 in a $1.4 billion initial public offering in the largest U.S. government privatization since Conrail. He served as a Presidential appointee with Senate confirmation in his role on the Board. He currently serves on the board of Energy Future Holdings (formerly TXU) and Mallinckrodt Pharmaceuticals, a UK based company, listed on the New York Stock Exchange.

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Mr. Youngblood is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations and graduated from Princeton University in 1978 with an A.B. in Politics/Science in Human Affairs and earned an M.D. degree from the University of Texas, Southwestern Medical School in 1982. Mr. Youngblood is based out of the firm’s Dallas office.

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Jim Phillips

Partner, Pharos Capital Group, LLC

Jim Phillips is a Partner of Pharos Capital Group, LLC. Prior to joining Pharos and its predecessor entities in 1996, Mr. Phillips was with Goldman Sachs, serving in both its Equities Management Division and in Private Client Services. Mr. Phillips graduated from Georgia Institute of Technology with a B.S. in Management and from the University of Miami with an M.B.A. He has more than eleven years of private equity experience.

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Kenneth Frank

Vista Equity Partners

Kenneth has a proven track record in the technology arena - in telecommunications, software, services and retail. He has held responsibility for P&Ls in excess of $2B and has managed organizations as small as 100 and as large as 7,000. He has vast international experience having lived in Paris, France and in Mumbai, India for over 5 years. He has worked in large, public multi-nationals (Alcatel-Lucent, BellSouth),
early stage start-ups (Broadband Office, Masergy) as well as, most recently, software technology private equity turnaround and growth companies. Kenneth's strength in technology and product is coupled with significant scaled operational and Go-To-Market experience. He is well networked and respected in the industries he's served.

 

Kenneth has served as the CEO at Kibo Software a Vista Equity Partners (private equity) portfolio company providing omni-channel retail SaaS solutions for the mid-market retailer and branded manufacturing segments. Prior to Kibo, he was the Chief Operating Officer of Aptean - another Vista Equity Portfolio company focused in the Enterprise Resource Planning, Customer Resource Management and the Supply
Chain Management segments.

 

Prior to his Vista experiences, Kenneth was most recently the President, Solutions and Marketing a member of the Management Committee at Alcatel-Lucent where he was responsible for their integration, software, end-to-end delivery and go-to-market functions globally based in their Paris, France headquarters. During this stint, he was also the President of the Joint Venture between Reliance Industries (India) and Alcatel-Lucent supporting the design and strategy of Reliance Industries telecommunications investment working directly for both the CEO of Alcatel-Lucent and Mukesh Ambani, CEO and founder of Reliance Industries in Mumbai, India. He held earlier assignments at Alcatel including President, Global Professional Services and CTO of Alcatel North America. Prior to Alcatel-Lucent, he held executive positions at AT&T Bell Laboratories, BellSouth Telecommunications and Kleiner-Perkins backed start-up Broadband Office/Zephion/Masergy.

 

Besides his board experience with Kibo Software (as CEO) and with Eyecast (privately held company in video surveillance segment based in Miami, Florida), Kenneth has been on multiple non-profit boards including Junior Achievement, Circle Ten Council/Boys Scouts of America and University of Southern California Board of Leaders (Marshall Business School). He has held industry board positions including Alliance for Telecommunications Industry Solutions (ATIS), the Telecommunications Management Forum (TM Forum) and Center for Telecommunications Management (CTM at University of Southern California).

 

He received his BS in Computer Science from the University of Southern California, his MS in Computer Science from Stanford University, and his MBA from Emory University.

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