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Clifford Schorer

Professor Schorer is a serial entrepreneur who specializes in the start-up acquisition and development of small and mid-sized companies. He focuses on businesses with unique ideas or technologies that are in need of guidance during their initial growth phases. Cliff has been involved with companies in the high tech arena, his last position being CEO of GeoVideo Networks, a Lucent Technologies Venture. Prior to that his career included businesses in the real estate, office-supply and health care industries. During the early 1990's he spent a considerable amount of time in Russia using his entrepreneurial approach to assist in the privatization process During his extensive professional career, Schorer has lectured in numerous business and academic forums both in the United States and abroad. He has developed financial management software programs for business education through his publishing company Bized.

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Brendan Burns

Brendan Burns has spent over 20 years at leading technology and financial institutions including Moody’s Investors Service, Salomon Brothers, Vigilar and AdOne, an Internet software pioneer.

Currently Burns is a Managing Director of Stepping Stone Capital Partners, LLC. SSCP is a growth-stage focused advisory and merchant banking firm. The firm specializes in early and growth stage capital raising, M&A and turnarounds. Primary recent assignments include the turnaround and sale of Vigilar, an information security company where SSCP drove balance sheet restructuring, multiple capital raises and a sale in 2.5 years resulting in a 5x increase in enterprise value.

Prior to Vigilar, Burns spent two years as the CEO and Publisher of Empire Information Services (now readMedia), the leading regional press release distribution company and publisher of political information in the Northeast. Burns led a financial and strategic repositioning of EIS that impacted all areas of its business including marketing, branding, product and corporate structure. He also raised a significant outside equity financing and recruited a new management team. Burns’ investment resulted in a 3x cash on cash return in 3 years.

Earlier in Burns’ career, as the founding CFO at AdOne (founded in 1995 as a pioneering Internet advertising company), Burns led a series of successful financings from leading venture firms including Venrock, Lawrence, Smith & Horey and New World Ventures (representing the Pritzker family interests). Under Burns’ guidance, the company became a pioneer in dynamic Internet classified advertising and grew to represent newspaper clients approximating 50% of total US daily newspaper circulation. In the late 1990’s Burns engineered a management buyout through backing by 12 major U.S. media companies including Advance/Newhouse, Hearst, Scripps and MediaNews.

Upon becoming CEO in 1998, Burns was responsible for coordinating the financial aspects of three successful strategic acquisitions, two major restructuring efforts, and obtained total financing of $55 million from a mix of strategic and financial investors. Following an extensive merger and restructuring, the Company made it through the “Internet bubble” emerging as a profitable entity with revenue of over $20 million per annum and 150 employees.

Burns has a Master’s in Corporate Finance and Entrepreneurship from the Graduate Business School of Columbia University and earned his Bachelors of Science degree from Fordham University. Since 2004, Burns has been an adjunct professor in the Lang Center for Entrepreneurship at Columbia’s Graduate Business School and serves on the Advisory board of the Lang Fund which invests in promising student-originated startups.

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