Scott Smith
With a background in Wall Street finance, Scott Smith is a serial entrepreneur, having co-founded companies in such diverse industries as agriculture, finance, educational media, and technology. He began his career as a pioneer grower of Sunburst tangerines, helping to develop a market for the fruit and establish the variety’s popularity in North America. In the 1990s, Scott was an early pioneer in structured finance, developing the model for conduit financing. His model was rapidly adopted by Wall Street and used for securitizing many forms of debt. Scott founded Kidz Magazine in 1995, which was one of the earliest examples of user-generated content. During this period Scott also served as co-founder and board member of two nationally-ranked charter schools in Colorado: Summit Middle School and Peak-to-Peak K–12. In the past decade, Scott helped co-found four enterprises: C Squared, an angel fund employing a patent-pending financial structure; FinaTech, a developer of a patent portfolio of financial structures that increases the yield on investments in private equity funds; Blue Cheetah, a solution for porting legacy software applications to the cloud; and Fathym, a platform for creating social media applications.