R Mccarthey

R. Eric McCarthey spent roughly 25–30 years as a senior corporate officer and marketing/commercial executive inside the global Coca-Cola system, working across four continents. He rose to Senior Vice President of Corporate Strategy at The Coca-Cola Company and is credited with repositioning the Coca-Cola, Coca-Cola Light, and Fanta brands in the Nordic and Russian markets, building deep expertise in consumer and retail marketing, brand management, and commercial innovation. In interviews he traces his entrepreneurial start to running and rescuing a Boulder, Colorado fish market from bankruptcy with family loans straight out of college, before joining Coca-Cola and later returning for an MBA.

He was educated at the University of Colorado Boulder (undergraduate science degree, where he also played college football and baseball) and the USC Marshall School of Business (MBA). He is an ISS-Certified Board Director and an NACD Leadership Fellow, and is active in the National Association of Corporate Directors' Atlanta chapter.

After his corporate career, McCarthey moved into venture capital and board work. As Managing Partner and acting COO of Crestlight Ventures (Crestlight Venture Studio) and CEO of Shelty-Viking Capital Group, he helped raise Crestlight Fund I — focused on disruptive technologies including metadata search, IT productivity, apps development, retail, and predictive analytics — and championed the firm's Connected Industry Fund™ for IoT startups in retail and manufacturing. He has also served as a past chair with Vistage International, the world's largest CEO peer-membership organization.

Today McCarthey concentrates heavily on board service and value creation, sitting on the boards of Avnir, Hamra Enterprises, and Interra International, and advising on leadership development and business-model optimization. He describes himself as having redesigned more than a dozen organizations to improve revenue, brand, customer development, and strategic planning.

• Invests at seed stage and as a bridge to Series A, with Crestlight Fund I checks roughly $250K–$5M.
• Targets market-disruptive technology startups, especially in the Internet of Things / "Connected Industry" space — connected retail, manufacturing, supply chain, inventory, and predictive analytics — as well as IT productivity, apps, and digital health.
• Operates as a venture studio, not just a passive check: Crestlight "originates and launches" ventures alongside established corporate partners, sharing risk through its "Venture Production" and "Lean Equity for Startups™" methodology, often taking board seats and providing product engineering and customer development.
• Brings an operator-first, value-creation lens shaped by decades as a Coca-Cola commercial executive — in his words, "value creation is easy to say, but it's hard to engineer. It requires an engineering mind and an imagination mind."
• On the IoT thesis specifically, he framed the Connected Industry Fund™ as "the perfect vehicle at the right time to capture this next wave of innovation."