Though Sonostar’s corporate identity was formed in 1997, David Moore and Greg Kiernan, Sonostar’s principals, have been friends and business partners for almost 30 years.  Greg has invested and worked to implement more than a half dozen of David’s entrepreneurial ventures dating back to their earliest partnerships when the two were students at Amherst College.

After college and graduate school, David continued his entrepreneurial bent, starting and successfully running a number of companies.  Greg pursued a career on Wall Street where he ultimately rose to a senior level position at Paine Webber, Inc. As the two pursued their respective careers, they stayed in regular contact with one another, investing in and advising each other on various ventures that each was pursuing.

In 1995, David approached Greg with an idea to restructure a troubled publicly traded home improvement company.  Over a period of about a year, the two built a position in the stock and worked to successfully implement David’s restructuring ideas.  David was able to convince the company to implement a series of strategic shifts that dramatically improved the company’s operating margins.  In the process, David became a member of the Board of Directors, and together David and Greg became the largest individual shareholders in the company.  In the fourth quarter of 1995, that company's stock was the number one percentage gainer on the NYSE, and by the spring of 1996, the company's market capitalization had increased almost ten fold from a year earlier.

Armed with the profit from this investment, the two principals determined that it would be in their financial best interests to formalize their partnership and to devote their full time energy to deal making and venture capital.  Sonostar Ventures LLC was formed in April of 1997.  Since the time of its formation, Sonostar and its principals have invested in more than a dozen private securities transactions described in our “Investment Portfolio” pages.  In total, over its eight year investment history, Sonostar Ventures and its principals have generated realized and unrealized returns of more than 13 times our original investment capital with no additional capital provided.