Clay Whitehead
Founder, Chief Executive Officer and Board Director
Mr. Whitehead is an investor, advisor, and growth company CEO. Mr. Whitehead serves as an advisor to Kernel Group Holdings. He previously served as the CEO of Plum Acquisition Corp. I from March 2021 to November 2021. He founded Pomegranate Ventures in 2019 to invest in private, high-growth technology companies in the cloud, enterprise, and consumer sectors. Recent investments include DigitalOcean, Notion, Gitlab, Calm, and Lemonade. Mr. Whitehead has also served as an advisor to the CEOs of several prominent technology companies, including Databricks, Catchpoint, and Auth0 from 2017 to 2018. Mr. Whitehead also co-founded and led PresenceLearning, the leading telehealth platform and marketplace for special education and mental health therapy services for children and teens, from 2009 through 2018. PresenceLearning was ranked as the sixth fastest growing company in San Francisco on the Inc. 500 Fastest Growing Companies list and eighth on the Glassdoor Employee Choice Award for SMB. The company has scaled to over 1,600 service providers, is profitable, and continues to grow, staying true to its mission of unlocking the potential of all children.
Management Team
Alexander Spiro
President
Mr. Spiro is a director, investor, and attorney with deep ties in technology and media. Since October 2017, Mr. Spiro has been serving as a Partner of Quinn Emanuel Urquhart & Sullivan, LLP. Mr. Spiro served as a Manhattan prosecutor from September 2008 to July 2013. Mr. Spiro has, as lead counsel, tried well over 50 cases to verdict. Notably, over the last several years, he has secured a string of significant verdicts for his clients in both federal and state courts. Mr. Spiro also sits on several company boards, both private and public, including SOL Global Investments Corp., Bragg Gaming Group, and Glassbridge Enterprises. He also serves as a Lecturer at Harvard Law School. Prior to becoming a lawyer, Mr. Spiro studied bio-psychology at Tuft’s University and worked at Harvard’s Psychiatric Facility, McLean Hospital.
Daniel Rogers
Chief Financial Officer and Secretary
Daniel Rogers has served as the founder and Chief Executive Officer since 2016 of FintechForce, Inc., an advisory and financial management outsourcing firm which advises venture-backed fintech companies on financial matters, accounting and fundraising. Representative clients have included Earnest, BillFloat, Flexible Finance, Helpshift and Encircle Labs. Mr. Rogers has served as the Chief Financial Officer for Newcourt Acquisition Corp since March 2021. In addition, Mr. Rogers served as the Chief Financial Officer of Endpoint Clinical from 2017 to 2019 (acquired by LabCorp (NYSE: LH)), Simplee from 2016 to 2017 (acquired by Flywire) and Plastic Jungle from 2011 to 2014 (acquired by InComm). Prior to working with venture-backed fintech companies, Mr. Rogers served as the Chief Financial Officer for Fifth Third Processing Solutions, a division of Fifth Third Bank (NASDAQ: FITB) from 2007 to 2008. From 1998 to 2007, Mr. Rogers served as Vice President of Finance for Wells Fargo Merchant Services, a division of Wells Fargo Bank, N.A. (NYSE: WFC) and Vice President of Corporate Financial Planning & Analysis at Wells Fargo & Company. Mr. Rogers obtained his BSc in 1992 from Lafayette College and his MBA in 1998 from Pennsylvania State University.
Board Of Directors
Patricia Nakache
Board Director
Ms. Nakache has served as a member of the board of directors of ThredUp Inc., an online consignment and thrift store (Nasdaq: TDUP), since June 2010 and as Chairperson of ThredUp Inc.’s board of directors since September 2020. Ms. Nakache has also served in various roles, most recently as a General Partner, of Trinity Ventures, a venture capital firm, since July 1999. Ms. Nakache has served as a Lecturer in Management at the Stanford Graduate School of Business since April 2016. From 1991 to 1998, Ms. Nakache served in various roles and most recently as a Practice Consultant and Senior Engagement Manager at McKinsey & Company, a management consulting firm. From 1987 to 1989, Ms. Nakache served as a Business Analyst at McKinsey & Company. Ms. Nakache has served as a board member of the National Venture Capital Association, an organization dedicated to advocating for public policy that supports the American entrepreneurial ecosystem, since May 2018. From 2008 to January 2014, Ms. Nakache served as a member of the board of directors of Care.com, Inc., a publicly traded family and senior care company that was acquired by IAC/InterActiveCorp (Nasdaq: IAC) in February 2020. Ms. Nakache also serves as a member of the board of directors of a number of privately held companies. Ms. Nakache holds a Master of Business Administration from the Stanford University Graduate School of Business and a Bachelor of Arts in Physics and Chemistry from Harvard University
Patrick Pohlen
Chairperson and Board Director
Mr. Pohlen has been the Chief Financial Officer of MNTN since May 2021. Prior to joining MNTN, Mr. Pohlen was a partner at Latham & Watkins LLP from 2002 to 2021, where he was global chair of the technology and life sciences practice for approximately 15 years. He represented technology and life science companies, as well as venture capitalists and investment banks on a variety of corporate matters, including private financings, public offerings including IPOs, and mergers and acquisitions. Mr. Pohlen has published and lectured on various corporate law topics. He has lectured at the University of California at Berkeley’s Coleman Fung Institute for Engineering leadership and Carnegie Mellon University, among others. Mr. Pohlen also ran a venture-backed technology company from 2000 to 2002. Mr. Pohlen holds a Bachelor of Arts degree from Iowa State University and a juris doctorate from University of Iowa College of Law.
Dee DeeSklar
Board Director
Dave Yarnold
Board Director
Ms. Sklar is a seasoned banking executive with over 40 years of experience in the financial services industry. Ms. Sklar’s diverse and global leadership experience spans across all functions and segments of the industry and has allowed her to build an extensive network that includes C-suite and Board members across leading private equity and alternative investment management firms, banks and insurance companies. Most recently, Ms. Sklar served as Vice Chair and Head of Subscription Finance at Wells Fargo (NYSE: WFC) from 2012 to 2019, where she helped build the bank into a leading global provider of subscription financing. During her time at Wells Fargo, Ms. Sklar also held various corporate governance and leadership positions including Co-Head of the New York Women’s Network. Ms. Sklar is the Founder and current Co-Global Chair of Women in Fund Finance and continues to hold global roles with the Fund Finance Association. Ms. Sklar currently serves as an independent director of Kernel Group Holdings, Inc. (Nasdaq: KRNL), a SPAC targeting an investment at the intersection of technology and infrastructure/supply chain logistics, as a Supervisory Board Member of 17Capital, a private equity credit platform focused on providing equity solutions and late cycle financings to private equity sponsors, as a Business Advisory Board member of Tealbook, a Canadian-headquartered global leader in AI supply chain technology, and as a Board Nominee to Callodine Acquisition Corporation (Nasdaq: CALQ). Prior to her time at Wells Fargo, Ms. Sklar worked at WestLB AG, a European global bank from 2000 to 2012, serving as the Head of Financial Institutions Americas and Global Head of Fund Finance from 2004 to 2012. Ms. Sklar led the negotiations of WestLB’s sale of its global funds business to Wells Fargo. During her eight years at WestLB, Ms. Sklar oversaw the firm’s fund finance business across the U.S., Europe, Asia and Latin America and led the origination of over $70 billion of fund financing for global private equity funds. Prior to joining WestLB, Ms. Sklar was a senior securitization banker at Rothschild Inc. from 1994 to 2000. Ms. Sklar earned a B.S. from the University of Tennessee.
Mr. Yarnold has spent over 30 years as a serial entrepreneur in the enterprise software industry. He currently works as an independent consultant, working with a number of CEOs as coach and advisor, while serving as an independent director on the board of directors at Model N (NYSE: MODN) and several private companies. From 2009 to 2018, he was the CEO of ServiceMax, a cloud-based field service software application, which he sold to GE Digital (NYSE: GE) in January 2017 for more than $900M. Prior to that, he was CRO for SuccessFactors, a Saas leader in the talent management space, from 2004 to 2008, where he built a global sales team that helped the company go public in November 2007. The company was subsequently acquired by SAP (NYSE: SAP) for over $3B. Mr. Yarnold’s experience in the software industry began in 1986 at Oracle (NYSE: ORCL), where he was part of the original team that developed and sold the first Oracle applications products. From 1996 to 1999, as Vice President of North American sales at Clarify, he helped that company grow from $18M to $250M in annual sales over a four year period prior to Clarify’s acquisition by Nortel for $2.2B. He then led Worldwide Sales and Business Development at Extensity, a provider of web-based employee productivity applications, from 1999-2003 during which the company completed a successful IPO in 2000, and, subsequently, a sale of the company in 2003 to Geac.