Most recently, Mr. Brown formed C.W. Brown & Company a merchant bank in New Orleans. Prior to that, he was a Senior Managing Director of Houston-based MSB Fairway Capital Partners. In 1994, he joined Advantage Capital Partners, a private equity firm with over $1.8 billion under management.  At Advantage Capital Partners, his focus was the sourcing, closing and monitoring of investment opportunities.

 

Before joining Advantage Capital Partners, Mr. Brown served as Director and Senior Vice President of Corporate Development for The Reily Companies, Inc., a private holding company based in New Orleans.  He also served as the General Partner of a private merchant-banking fund. The Reily Companies owned an interest in Fuelman, a regional commercial vehicle credit card platform for purchasing fuel. Through Mr. Brown’s efforts, FleetCor Technologies, Inc. was created from Fuelman; and in 2010, FleetCor Technologies went public with a market capitalization of $300 million. Today, FleetCor Technologies has a market capitalization of $10 billion and is a leading global provider of fuel cards and workforce payment products and services to businesses, commercial fleets, major oil companies, petroleum marketers and government entities in countries throughout North America, Latin America and Europe.

 

Mr. Brown also served as Principal of Houston-based Criterion Venture Partners, acquired by Centennial Funds in the late 1980s.  He has served as an advisor to the Louisiana Economic Development Corporation.  Before that, he was associated with Ernst & Young LLP in the Management Consulting Services Practice Group and with International Business Machines Corporation’s General Systems Group, both in the San Francisco Bay Area.  In 1998, he was co-recipient of the Ernst & Young Entrepreneur of the Year Award for being a Supporter of Entrepreneurship.  Mr. Brown is also a Limited Partner of Next Stage Capital, L.P., a Philadelphia-based venture capital fund focused primarily on early stage information technology based companies.

 

In early 2011, Mr. Brown was selected to become a Member of the   Committee of 100 for Economic Development for the State of Louisiana, a private non-profit organization whose members include CEO’s and other senior officers of leading Louisiana private and public companies, professional firms and universities.  He is an active supporter of the Tulane AB Freeman Business School and is a member of the Association for Corporate Growth (ACG), an organization that in May 2011 awarded him “Dealmaker of the Year” for his lead-investment into FleetCor Technologies, a fleet-services/payment processing company currently trading on the NYSE.  Mr. Brown is also a member of various New Orleans civic and carnival organizations.  He is a former member of the World Presidents’ Organization (WPO) and the National Venture Capital Association (NVCA) and has been services, active in various lobbying initiatives in Washington on behalf of that organization. He currently serves in an advisory capacity of Turbo Squid, the industry leader in 3D models. Mr. Brown is also a current board member of Gulf Fiber Corporation; an affiliate of Broadpoint/Petrocom which provides broad band communication services to deep water platforms.  In the non-profit sector, Mr. Brown serves on the board of the New Orleans Eye, Ear, Nose and Throat Hospital Foundation.

 

Mr. Brown received an M.B.A. from the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania, where he received the Frederick H. Gloeckner Award for Entrepreneurial Studies. He earned a bachelor’s degree in Engineering Management/Business Administration from Stanford University. Mr. Brown completed coursework in Industrial Economics at University College, Oxford University while attending Stanford-in-Britain at Cliveden, England.  He started his first company in the water pollution control sector at the age of 19.