Kare Partners

Ross M. Annable retired in 2000 as President of First Union Securities, Inc and Executive Vice President of First Union Corporation. During his 18 years with the company, he held various positions in the areas of Portfolio Management and Capital Markets including balance sheet management, money market sales and trading, product origination, derivatives trading, international, and leasing. Prior to joining First Union, he was Treasurer of a privately held international steel trading company and, before that, a commercial banker. Mr. Annable has a BS(EE) degree from the University of Wisconsin and an MBA from Harvard Business School. He is a veteran of the US Navy nuclear submarine program. He is currently an active investor in startup and early stage companies and serves on several boards. He recently completed a pro-bono role of Executive Director for the Ben Craig Center, a business incubator affiliated with UNC Charlotte.

Mark Carpenter is a member of the firm and practices with Moore & Van Allen in the Charlotte office. He primarily represents financial institutions in a variety of financing transactions including real estate syndicated and mezzanine credit facilities, asset based lending and project finance credits. Mr. Carpenter’s real estate finance expertise includes extensive experience in the financing of limited liability companies, partnerships, REITS, funds and other owners of virtually every type and class of real estate. He also has significant experience in the workout and restructuring of real estate and project finance credit facilities. Mr. Carpenter also assists clients with general business and capital markets matters.

Mr. Carpenter has been a guest lecturer at the University of Virginia’s Darden Graduate School of Business in the Real Estate Development and Finance Seminar. He is also a former speaker at Bank of America’s Real Estate Finance Training Program.

Mark Cates is a Senior Vice President, Managing Director and Chief Technology Officer (CTO) for Wachovia’s Corporate and Investment Bank. Mark directly supports the Chief Information Officer (CIO) of the Corporate and Investment Bank, defines their broad technology vision, and leads teams responsible for system strategy, architectural design, and infrastructure support for all Corporate and Investment Bank business areas.

Throughout his career at Wachovia, Mark has held various technology senior management positions, managing departments of three employees to departments of more than 1000 employees. Mark designed and managed the growth in infrastructure for The Capital Markets Group, traveling extensively in Europe and Asia. The Capital Markets Group grew from less than 500 people with three domestic offices and one international location in 1994 to more than 6000 people in over 90 offices spread across 25 countries in the year 2000. He also was responsible for upgrading the performance and resiliency of all distributed computing platforms and networks at Wachovia, and was instrumental in introducing several technologies including, Ethernet, UNIX, TCP/IP, clustered servers, Internet, web services, and computational grids.

Before joining Wachovia in 1992, Mark spent 12 years with the consulting division of Arthur Andersen, now Accenture. There he became an expert in financial services and spent the majority of his career implementing large scale banking systems including deposits, lending, and financial reporting. Mark also helped introduce the use of mini and mid-range computers to provide operating and accounting systems for small and mid-sized financial organizations. Later in his career with Andersen Consulting, he specialized in planning large consolidation efforts required for financial institution acquisitions and mergers.

Anjan Chatterjee specializes in the automotive and manufacturing sectors. Mr. Chatterjee has over 25 years of management consulting, strategic planning and financial management experience in the automotive, electronics and distribution industries. He has served automotive OEMs and Tier 1 companies in the areas of strategy, information systems, global restructuring, sales force effectiveness and global sourcing. Most recently he was interim CFO and Senior Vice President of Strategic Planning for Visteon Corp. He was responsible for all financial activities for Visteon as well as for developing and putting in place a restructuring plan for this $18 Billion Tier 1 automotive company.

Prior to Visteon, Mr. Chatterjee was a Senior Director at McKinsey & Company. He opened McKinsey's Detroit office and was head of their North American Automotive practice. He grew the Detroit office from an initial base of 6 professionals to about 50 in 3 years. Mr. Chatterjee was also a partner at AT Kearney and has broad international experience. He spent 3 years in the Middle East helping a large distributor of construction equipment install critical IT systems including financial, parts inventory control and product order processing systems. He has also worked with large companies in Europe and Asia. He has an engineering degree from IIT Delhi and an MBA from Stanford.

Ranjana Clark, Executive Vice President and head of Marketing, Wachovia Corporation. Previous positions at the company: Ms. Clark joined Wachovia in 1989 as a product manager in the Capital Markets Division. She moved to the Corporate Development area in 1991. She was elected senior vice president and head of Strategic Planning for Wachovia in 1995. In 1997, she moved back to the Capital Markets Division as manager of Strategic Development to lead the build-out of a Section 20 securities subsidiary. She moved to the Treasury Services division in 1999 as head of the Treasury Product Solutions Group and became head of Treasury Services in 2001. In April 2007, she became head of Marketing. Dr. Michael Clark is in private practice in Mount Airy, NC.

Tan Ganatra, Director, Paetec (Nasdaq PAET) Mr. Ganatra co-founded US LEC in June 1996 and has served as a director until joining PAETEC's Board in February, 2007. He served as Chief Executive Officer and Vice Chairman of the Board of Directors from July 1999 until his retirement in December 2001. He also served as President and Chief Operating Officer from June 1996 until July 1999. From 1987 to 1997, Mr. Ganatra held various positions with ACC Corp., including serving as its President and Chief Operating Officer. Prior to joining ACC Corp., Mr. Ganatra held various positions during a 19-year career with Rochester Telephone Corp., culminating with the position of Director of Network Engineering.

Mike Kelly has spent the last 6 years with Biovail Pharmaceuticals. Biovail is a pharmaceutical company with facilities all over the world and one of the largest Canadian pharmaceutical companies. In his six years at Biovail he has held numerous positions in sales, management, and most recently as the Director of Managed Markets. Mike oversees all areas of distribution, supply chain, managed care, long term care, and government. Before Biovail Mike has worked for SmithKline Beecham, KOS Pharmaceuticals, and DJ Pharma. Mike joined Biovail six years ago when DJ Pharma was acquired by Biovail.

Vipin Mayar leads the marketing accountability group for McCann WorldGroup, a 200 person team of marketing professionals in North America and EMEA. He is a recognized industry expert in CRM and knowledge based marketing. Prior to that he led a central research and analytics organization at Bank of America with $55M marketing budget and 130 person team. He was with Fidelity before that helping create best in class marketing tools.

David Orr retired in 2002 from First Union as their Chief Economist. He was nationally and internationally respected and helped build First Unions’ capital markets forecasting group. College degree in Economics from Davidson in 1966.

Jay Patel is Head of AAHOA for North Carolina and a hotelier.

Vittal Shenoy, former head of the pathology department at Carolinas Medical is currently on sabbatical.

Tom Tyree started TWT Distributing Inc. in 1992 in Charlotte, North Carolina. He currently serves as the company’s President and Chief Executive Officer. Since its inception, TWT has focused on establishing the ethnic toiletries category as a contributing value-added profit center for its retail trading partners. TWT is the only African American owned ethnic toiletries distributor in the United States. Thomas Tyree has over 30 years of experience in the ethnic toiletries industry.

Prior to starting TWT, Tyree was the national sales manager for an Ohio-based ethnic toiletries distributor. Tyree has served as an advisor to major manufacturers such as Revlon, Proctor and Gamble, Johnson and Johnson, Sara Lee and Clairol as well as major retailers such as Food Lion, Harris Teeter, Family Dollar, Winn Dixie, Kroger, Ingles, and Piggly Wiggly. In his advisory capacity Mr. Tyree has worked to educate both manufacturers and retailers on the vast economic influence of the African American consumer across various categories.

For many years Tyree has been a strong contributor to African American educational organizations such as The United Negro College Fund and sororities and fraternities scholarship funds. In addition Tyree has established endowments and scholarships for students at Livingstone College, Virginia Union University, St. Augustine College, Benedict College and South Carolina State University.