Barry O'Callaghan
| Barry O'Callaghan | |
|---|---|
 |
|
| Born | 1969 (age 47 or 48) Mitchelstown, County Cork, Ireland |
| Occupation | CEO of Rise Global |
| Known for | Former CEO of EMPG, formerly known as Riverdeep |
Barry O'Callaghan (born 1969) is a business executive and financier. Currently he is the Chairman and CEO of Rise Global. He formerly led Riverdeep for a decade, later known as EMPG and HMH. He grew the small educational software company into the largest K-12 publishing company in the American education system through a series of acquisitions that were funded by loans. As a result of cuts in school textbook purchases, excessive debt, and the end of the dot-com bubble, the company was taken over by bondholders in 2011. This almost wiped out the interests of shareholders and O'Callaghan's own fortune. After the fallout, he became CEO and partial owner of the international division, EMPGi.
Barry O'Callaghan was born in 1969 in Mitchelstown, County Cork, Ireland. His father was a doctor. O'Callaghan was educated at Clongowes Wood College, a Jesuit secondary boarding school. He was captain of the school's senior cup rugby team and later he played rugby for Trinity College Dublin, where he studied law in the late 1980s. According to O'Callaghan, after graduating he no longer wanted to pursue a career in law.
After getting a degree in law, Barry O'Callaghan got a job at investment bank Morgan Stanley, where he "quickly prospered" working in mergers & acquisitions. He worked in the London office, then later in the Hong Kong office, before moving to New York City to work at Salomon Smith Barney near the beginning of the dot-com bubble. In 1997 O'Callaghan got a senior job the telecommunications and technology division of investment bank Credit Suisse First Boston. There he helped internet companies prepare to go public. O'Callaghan quit Credit Suisse First Boston in 1999 to become the Chief Executive Officer of the digital publishing startup, Riverdeep, in order to take the company public.
Just as CD-ROMs were gaining popularity, O'Callaghan transitioned Riverdeep away from CDs into offering online subscriptions to educational content. He led the acquisition of a software company called Logal, which sold math curriculum online. More significantly, it had intellectual property for a method of converting CD-ROM applications into online downloads. This acquisition was the beginning of O'Callaghan's efforts to web-enable the company's software. It was followed by a $24 million acquisition of ED-Vantage and an $85 million acquisition of Edmark. Both were IBM subsidiaries that provided digital educational content online and together the acquisitions made IBM a 14 percent shareholder in Riverdeep. As O'Callaghan expanded Riverdeep's network of distribution partners that sold the software to individual schools, IBM became a significant partner in referring business to Riverdeep.
...
Wikipedia