For the past twenty years, Robert Finkel has been investing as part of the Chicago private-equity community. As founder and president of Prism Capital, Mr. Finkel has overseen fund deployment into a total of 40 portfolio companies through both the Prism Opportunity Fund and the Prism Mezzanine Fund.
Mr. Finkel is a co-founder and former chairman of the Illinois Venture Capital Association which represents Illinois’ $100 billion of venture capital and private equity funds, and he received its prestigious Fellows Award. He also received on Prism’s behalf the Private Equity Fund Manager of the Year Award for both 2007 and 2008 from Opal Financial. Mr. Finkel was selected to serve on the Illinois State Treasurer’s Fund of Fund Review Board and serves on the board of Chicago Junior Achievement and the Governing Board of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists.
Prism is an active supporter of small businesses across the country; Mr. Finkel was selected to testify before the House Small Business Committee in support of the SBIC program’s reauthorization.
Previously, Mr. Finkel was an investment manager at Wind Point Partners where he invested in both growth and later stage companies. Before entering the world of private equity, he was an investment banker specializing in mergers and acquisitions with PaineWebber. He received an M.B.A. from Harvard Graduate School of Business and a B.A. from Johns Hopkins University. Quoted in BusinessWeek and featured on MSNBC’s Last Call talking about private equity, Mr. Finkel frequently appears as a speaker at trade conferences and seminars.
David Greising is business columnist and chief business correspondent for the Chicago Tribune. In September 2008, he resumed writing a column that first ran in the Tribune from 1998 to 2003. As chief business correspondent, Greising is the newspaper’s lead writer on globalization and the intersection of politics, business, and economics.
Greising’s opinion column features analysis of business and economic news and their impact on readers. Re-launched as the 2008 financial crisis was first exploding, his column has offered incisive and timely analysis of events. As chief business correspondent, Greising has traveled around the world, from the rainforests of South America to the industrial boom towns of China, to report about globalization and its impact on Chicago.
Greising previously worked for BusinessWeek, both as its Atlanta bureau chief and in the Chicago bureau. He was a business reporter and columnist for the Chicago Sun-Times. He is the author of two business books: I’d Like the World to Buy a Coke: The Life and Leadership of Robert Goizueta and Brokers, Bagmen and Moles: Fraud and Corruption in the Chicago Futures Market, co-authored by Laurie Morse.
Born in Chicago, Greising is a graduate of DePauw University. He and his wife, Cynthia Hedges Greising, are co-authors of the children’s book Toys Everywhere!