John W Polis

John W. Polis is an entrepreneurial information management and business operations leader with a 25+ year track record of creating and enhancing technology enabled businesses and building platforms that allow for significant scale.

Mr. Polis is currently Chief Operating and Technology Officer at Star Mountain Capital. Star Mountain provides debt and equity capital to established small and medium-sized private businesses that have at least $15 million of revenue or under $20 million of EBITDA and provides early liquidity to investors in lower middle-market private equity and private credit funds. Star Mountain's Collaborative Ecosystem ® is powered by custom-built technology and a deep and experienced team that has been investing in this market since 2001.

Prior to joining Star Mountain, Mr. Polis was COO and CTO for Guidepoint Global, a primary research firm and expert network serving the world’s leading Institutional Investors, Private Equity Firms, Consulting Organizations, and Corporations. Brought on in 2011 with a direct turnaround mandate, Mr. Polis changed the operating culture leading positive change in process and people management along with directing significant improvements to their information technology platform guiding the company back to profitability and significant double-digit growth.

Before Guidepoint, Mr. Polis served as COO and CTO for Coleman Research Group (CRG), also a primary research firm and expert network where he was recruited immediately after the company secured financing. Without delay Mr. Polis led the product management and development effort on their custom built, Web based CRM, Recruiting, and Payment Processing platform – Knowledge Broker™ – while also being responsible for overseeing all operational areas of the company including research, relationship management, compliance, human resources, and data management. CRG also had a broker dealer arm, Coleman Brokerage Group, for which Mr. Polis served as compliance officer for. During his tenure Coleman Research scaled from 5 to 140 employees worldwide and in 2009 was voted one of Crain’s New York “Best Places to Work in New York City”.

Earlier in Mr. Polis’ career he served as a Co-founder and Executive Vice President Operations and CTO for Dotcom Distribution and Chief Information Officer for the GT Media family of companies.

Mr. Polis holds a BA in Economics from New York University, an MBA in Management from Wagner College and is FINRA Series 63, 7 and 24 licensed.