Bid to win a meeting with Keith Bank, CEO of KB Partners, and Chairman and Co-founder of Club Champion Golf, via Zoom!
Keith Bank is the founder and has been the Managing Member of KB Partners since its inception in 1996. In this role he has been intimately involved in all aspects of the firm, including deal sourcing, evaluation and negotiation, executive recruiting, working with management of portfolio companies, board oversight, reporting to limited partners and raising capital. This tenure has included managing one predecessor sports tech fund, two traditional pure technology focused venture capital funds, making and overseeing a large number of both sports related and non-sports related angel investments, founding and managing multiple companies and delivering many very successful exits. His most successful and notable angel exits have included Club Champion Golf, Golf.com, Buddy Media, Fusion Risk Management, and MST Analytics. He currently serves on the Board of Directors and oversees the firm’s investments in multiple companies.
Prior to organizing KB Partners’ venture funds, Mr. Bank was an active investor in various early stage and start-up technology companies in a wide variety of industries, including the consumer, semiconductor, medical, real estate, and information technology arenas. Mr. Bank previously co-founded and served on the Board and as President of MST Analytics, Inc., which was very successfully sold to ATMI, Inc., a public company, in 1999.
Before forming KB Partners, Mr. Bank served for seven years as a Principal at Hiffman Shaffer Associates, Inc., a Chicago-based national real estate development, investment, management and brokerage firm. There he participated in the development and acquisition of more than $250 million worth of retail, industrial and office properties. He also leased and/or sold properties totaling over three million square feet with a value in excess of $400 million. Major projects he either sourced and/or helped develop include Ontario City Center, The Broadway, Soo T Rail Terminal and Broadview Village Square.
His other career highlights include co-founding a chain of deep discount drugstores, acquiring and completing a successful turnaround of a woman's apparel manufacturing and sales company, and procuring the equity and debt financing for, and producing feature films Tommy’s Honour (BAFTA Scotland Best Film of the Year) and Heaven Is a Playground. He got his start in venture investing as the founder of a Chicago angel investment group, which he formed to allow entrepreneurs to present their business plans to a diverse group of potential individual investors. Additionally, he served as Founder and Chairman of the Chicago Select Golf Invitational, which in its 25 years of existence has raised over $10 million for the American Cancer Society, making it one of the largest and most successful events of its kind in the country. Mr. Bank was honored in 1999 as a “40 under 40” by Crain’s Chicago Business, and as a Who’s Who of Chicago Executives by Crain’s several times. He was one of the Founders and served as the Chairman of the Illinois Venture Capital Association, where he also was honored in 2006 with its prestigious Fellows Medal. He sits on multiple private company boards, including Phenix Real Time Solutions, Club Champion Golf, Hammerhead, Streamlayer and Workforce Athletics. He also serves on the board of NU Wave, an investment entity affiliated with the Northwestern University endowment and athletic department, and a frequent co-investor in KB led deals.
Mr. Bank graduated magna cum laude with a B.S. degree in Economics from the Wharton School of Business at the University of Pennsylvania and received his MBA degree with honors from the J.L. Kellogg Graduate School of Management at Northwestern University. In his younger days, he was a multiple sport athlete and is currently a course rater for Golf Week Magazine. He is 99% of the way toward his goal of playing the Golf Digest Top 100 U.S. golf courses and 81% of the way toward playing the Golf Magazine World Top 100 courses.