Rick Coplin

Investor

<!--?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8" standalone="no"?--> Rick Coplin has helped to build and sell a start-up company, directed technology programs in a major financial institution and consulted with companies throughout the United States in the areas of technology, finance, marketing and operations. Currently, Rick is TechColumbus’ Vice President of Community Partner Ventures working alongside entrepreneurs who are building great start-up companies.

Rick Coplin is a seasoned entrepreneur having invested five years with a start-up company that developed law enforcement information sharing software. The company was sold to investors in 2007 and is still in business. Prior to this Rick was Technology Program Director at Bank One for overseeing technology acquisition, development and implementation. Previous to that, he was with Ernst & Young and KPMG Peat Marwick. At E&Y, Rick focused on emerging, entrepreneurial and high growth companies, providing consulting expertise in technology transition, software design, selection & implementation, and business process re-engineering. While at KPMG, he focused on technology implementation in manufacturing, supply chain management and warehousing.

Rick currently works alongside entrepreneurs who are building start-up companies. His role is to find, support, mentor, coach, incubate, and fund high growth potential companies in Central Ohio. In this capacity, his expertise in business formation, commercialization strategies, and capital planning helps accelerate companies toward success. His passion is mentoring and supporting entrepreneurs, helping them to determine how best top accomplish their goals.

Rick has assisted entrepreneurs with nearly 1,000 pitches, helping them to hone their message and delivery to attract partners, employees and investors. Many of these entrepreneurs have raised funds from TechColumbus, angels and angel groups. From this experience, Rick developed Pitch Your Best! (Available on Amazon, <!--?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8" standalone="no"?--> http://ow.ly/xQDNJ ) to help entrepreneurs design their pitches with their audience, time constraints and key purpose in mind.