Karl Burns is the Chief Strategy Officer of VirtualQube. Since joining the firm, he has led initiatives focused on re-vamping the go-to-market strategy and operations, increasing organizational maturity, decreasing cost of service and scaling operations. Karl brings an enterprise discipline and approach to organizational development and also a financial acumen to assess business strategy (including acquisitions). He is also a steward of the VirtualQube culture, leading workshops which promote the mission and values of the firm. Before VirtualQube, Karl worked in management consulting for both technology and new product development. He has led programs to improve internal business processes, develop technology roadmaps, design and implement e-commerce portals (financial services), re-design organizational structures, determine portfolio roadmaps, develop implementation plans for new businesses and their supporting technologies, and align products and services to customer engagement to drive incremental revenue. Karl’s deep finance background helps clients focus on the economic logic of options available and facilitate prioritization across a large set of competing initiatives. Karl has experience in financial services, telecom, insurance, retail and manufacturing – including Fortune 500 clients like Best Buy, AT&T, Ally Bank, Nike, Nationwide, DISH Network, Xerox, HP, Bank of New York-Mellon, and Citigroup. Prior to this experience, Karl worked for PNC Bank in the mutual fund services group in Boston. While serving as an account executive, Karl managed service delivery generating more than $2.4 million in annual revenue. In this role, Karl helped transform their external website, improved internal processes to lower the cost of service delivery, and championed a project with a marquee client to reduce annual compliance spend by 70% within the first year. Karl also worked on new product development definitions and beta-testing of new web services (SaaS). Karl received a BA in Economics from Texas A&M University Mays School of Business in 1999, and completed his MBA at Wake Forest University in 2008. He received the “Babcock Leadership Award” for the student who best displayed the core characteristics of Wake Forest: Management, Scholarship, Integrity, and Leadership. He now fund-raises for the Vanderbilt-Ingram Cancer Center with the “Young Ambassadors” group, which has raised more than $250,000 over the past three years. This group awards discovery grants to individual medical researchers fighting cancer.