Kevin Paulsen is Founder and Managing Partner at Vendere Advisors. He has 40 years of experience in driving growth in startup, mid-size and large companies. During his career, Kevin has raised more than $40M in debt and equity capital in his various positions.

The last nine years Kevin has been involved in helping Main Street and Lower Middle Market businesses successfully exit their businesses and has acted in an advisory capacity to help owners with acquisitions to help those businesses grow and increase their value.

Kevin co-founded and served for 10 years as the President and CEO at TechSkills LLC, – a privately held, national, post-secondary institution. Kevin grew the company from startup to $47M in annual revenue. He accomplished this both organically, as well as through acquisition of Edgia, a provider of online education testing. Kevin also orchestrated the acquisition of Boston University Corporate Education Center from Boston University, a corporate training provider for Fortune 500 companies.

Before his involvement at TechSkills, Kevin served as Executive Vice President of Global Services for Norstan, Inc., a publicly traded technology integration and consulting company in Minneapolis, MN. While there, Kevin made several acquisitions of IT consulting firms, totaling more than $50M in revenue.

As well, Kevin spent 21 years at IBM, where he held a number of financial, sales and consulting positions. His career at IBM culminated in a position as Vice President of Integration Services within IBM Global Services, Chicago, a $100M organization with 500 IT consultants.

Kevin is a graduate of the University of Iowa with a major in Finance. He has been an Austin resident since 2000 and holds a current Texas real estate license.