David Wheeler

After graduating from O’Neill, I went to college at the University of Vermont. Following graduation from “groovy UV,” I bar tended on Catalina Island (off the coast of Los Angeles) for two summers and at a ski resort in Vermont during the intervening winter. Following my second summer on Catalina, I went to work for an accounting firm in Chicago and passed the CPA examination. I then went to law school (graduating in 1996) and worked for Arthur Andersen and Taft, Stettinius & Hollister (a large Cincinnati-based law firm) doing transactional tax and mergers and acquisitions. In 1999 I joined Eric Rennagel in founding Tivix, a “dot com” that provided online services to television and movie distribution companies. In early 2000, we raised venture capital from Silicon Valley and set up our executive offices in Beverly Hills (at the insistence of our investors – what a time!). In mid-2001, I left Tivix to join another “dot com” that ended in a spectacular train wreck. After playing in the world of “dot coms,” I went back to practicing law – this time with Squire, Sanders & Dempsey, a large international law firm – doing mergers and acquisitions. Now, I spend 85% of my time buying and selling companies, mostly in the U.S.

My wife, Jennifer, and I were married in 1997, and we currently live in Cincinnati. Our oldest, Nicholas, is going into second grade and is loving baseball, football and hockey. Our youngest, Michael, is going into kindergarten and is learning t-ball and hockey. Jennifer is in the wine industry; she is a wine consultant for a boutique distributor and sells wine to stores and restaurants. Her job is certainly more fun than mine, and the perks include meeting the owners of the vineyards when we visit Napa or Sonoma.