William H. Harrington is the founder and principal of Vista Ventures, LLC, a venture capital consulting firm that specializes in assistance to investors and entrepreneurial companies both in the US and Latin America. Vista Ventures provides advisory services and due diligence for investors in early stage companies. The firm also advises emerging companies on issues related to capital-raising, business strategy, marketing plans, management team, and strategic alliances.

In his prior capacity Mr. Harrington served as executive vice president of the Ben Franklin Technology Center which is widely recognized as perhaps the leading example of effective public/private partnerships in economic development in the US. Mr. Harrington operated the nation's largest seed capital investment program with a portfolio of over 200 companies. Investments ranged from $25,000 to $300,000 through five different investment funds, including one fund devoted to microenterprises. Over 70% of the companies in which these funds are invested are still in business, a remarkable figure considering the early stage of the ventures. On average, each dollar of investment in these early stage companies subsequently generated $20 in additional outside capital from private investors, venture capital funds, and public offerings.

Mr. Harrington was responsible annually for marketing to generate over 150 new applicants, due diligence evaluations of about 80 investment candidates and closing investments in approximately 40 start-up or emerging companies. These efforts combined (a) investment capital, (b) management training for entrepreneurs and (c) transfer of technology into the commercial sector. In addition, he oversaw a program of assistance to the management of small business incubators and a network of private investors who finance entrepreneurial ventures.

Prior to the eight years spent in this capacity, Mr. Harrington served five years as chief executive of an organization that provided volunteer executives to assist small and emerging businesses. His position for the previous four years was as the chief executive of a non-profit community development corporation engaged in housing rehabilitation, industrial redevelopment, commercial revitalization, and employment training for youth.

Mr. Harrington has a bachelor's degree in mechanical engineering from Lafayette College and a master's degree in city planning from the University of Pennsylvania. He has been selected annually since 1999 by the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania to serve as a judge in its business plan competition. He is a frequent panelist on raising private equity capital, due diligence, and assistance to portfolio companies.  Mr. Harrington serves on the board of the Sustainable Development Fund which invests in environmentally sustainable business ventures. Mr. Harrington is an active private investor in emerging companies and is conversant in Spanish.  

Vista Ventures was highlighted in a front page story on venture capital in the Philadelphia Business Journal on May 28, 1999.  

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Mr. McGrann is a consultant specializing in functional business consulting and competitive transition planning for family owned and managed corporations worldwide. His focus is providing clients with strategic management, marketing, and leadership development support.

Prior to his present activities, Mr. McGrann was a consultant at the Wharton Small Business Development Center where he provided consulting advice on management, marketing, finance, and operations issues to small businesses throughout the Philadelphia area. Through an exchange program with a similar organization in Monterrey Mexico, he spent eight weeks on an intensive consulting engagement in Mexico where he conducted an export feasibility study for a Mexican manufacturer of solar energy panels, and a harvest strategy for a Mexican manufacturer of electrical fixtures.

Mr. McGrann has also worked in finance as both a corporate lender and a micro-enterprise lender to family businesses. As the project manager for a Catholic Relief Services Small Enterprise Development Project, he was responsible for the start-up and management of all aspects of a micro-enterprise lending project based in an impoverished rural area on the Dominican-Haitian border. Mr. McGrann's responsibilities included development of loan funding procedures, the development and implementation of a marketing plan to stimulate demand for loans, the recruitment and training of project administrators, the supervision of 30 project employees including Peace Corps volunteers assigned to the project, and the supervision and start-up of a community-owned bakery. As a corporate lending officer for National Westminster Bank in New York, Mr. McGrann was responsible for marketing the bank's products and services, analyzing credit, and negotiating loans.

Mr. McGrann holds a BA in economics from Cornell University. He earned an MBA in marketing and operations management from the Wharton School of Business and an MA in International Studies from the School of Arts and Sciences, both at the University of Pennsylvania. Mr. McGrann's masters thesis was entitled "The Future of Mexican Economic Reform Amid Privatization-Nationalization Cycles." He has lived and worked in the Dominican Republic, Mexico, and Finland, and he speaks Spanish fluently.

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Brian Dunn, an associate of Vista Ventures, has six years of experience in providing consulting services to small businesses and micro-finance programs worldwide. He is particularly active in the field of "venture philanthropy," which blends the dual bottom lines of financial return and social investment. He has recently worked extensively in Haiti to determine the optimal corporate structure, logistics management, and accounting procedures needed to bring an association of garment makers to scale.

Mr. Dunn has provided strategic, marketing, and financial planning assistance in industries ranging from bakeries to information retrieval and telecommunications. Mr. Dunn helped to create a business assistance center in South Africa that provides consulting services directly to township entrepreneurs through the use of MBA students from the University of Cape Town. The center is now in its fourth year and is being supported by Standard Bank and PriceWaterhouseCoopers.

Mr. Dunn's prior experience involves multiple projects in the arena of international small business development. He has assessed the feasibility of a credit program in Brazil, identified growth markets and viable subsector interventions in Mozambique, and explored market opportunities in the water sector in Burkina Faso. In the United States, Mr. Dunn has worked with a number of non-profit programs such as Seed Capital Development Fund, DEVCAP, the Aspen Institute, and Business for Social Responsibility.

Mr. Dunn earned a BA in international development studies and music from the University of California at Berkeley. He holds an MBA in Entrepreneurship and Operations Management from the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania, and an MA from Johns Hopkins University in International Economics. Mr. Dunn has working fluency in French and Portuguese.

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