David E Thomas

David Thomas is a Director at Cascade Partners, a Michigan-based M&A advisory and investment-banking firm serving the lower middle market. He brings roughly 25 years of technology investing experience, including about 14 years on Wall Street, where he became one of the first dedicated software and IT-services equity analysts in the early 1980s. He holds a Bachelor of Arts in economics from Brown University and lives in Dexter, Michigan.

Thomas began his Wall Street career at Hambrecht & Quist in 1983 as an associate analyst covering the software and IT-services industries, working on IPOs including Informix and Paychex, and was the first Wall Street technology analyst to publish a software-and-services industry index. His analyst coverage universe included Oracle, and in 1990–1991 he was hired personally by Larry Ellison (with CFO Jeff Walker) to help launch Oracle's first applications-software solutions. He later held research roles at First Albany Corporation's META Technology Research group.

In 1993 he joined O'Connor & Associates (a division of Swiss Bank Corporation) in Chicago, where he managed a hedge fund investing the firm's own capital in the technology sector and directed an equity-options trading team. In 1998 he raised the seed funding for a start-up software company and served as its CEO. From 2003 he was a member of Endurance Ventures, LLC — the manager of two traditional venture capital funds with total assets of more than $60 million plus two sole-purpose investment funds totaling nearly $5 million — where he evaluated portfolio companies and advised on acquisitions, divestitures, and strategic initiatives. He has also been associated with e121 Corp. before joining Cascade Partners.

• Deep, career-long specialization in software, IT services, and technology-enabled business services, rooted in three-plus decades of covering, operating within, and investing in the technology sector.
• Comfortable across the capital lifecycle: from seed funding (as a founder-CEO who raised his own seed round) and traditional venture capital (Endurance Ventures) to lower-middle-market growth capital, recapitalizations, corporate divestitures, and management/individual-sponsor buyouts at Cascade.
• At Cascade Partners, focus sectors span business services, healthcare, industrials/manufacturing, consumer, and infrastructure, with a preference for value-added manufacturing and technology-enabled business services.
• Values operating and strategic experience alongside financial engineering — Cascade positions itself as combining accounting/finance/consulting expertise with hands-on operating background.