Mythic Managers
Rocky Prior, President and Chief Scientific Officer
There’s not many things that our president and chief scientific officer doesn’t know about paint – in fact you could almost say that Rocky is the go to person for making, selling and inventing new paint products. At the very least, he is our very own Mythic expert in everything paint.
Although very smart, Rocky went ahead to become very educated in his field. He has a degree in chemistry from the University of Akron and, if that wasn’t enough, went on to receive a bachelor of science in chemistry from Baldwin Wallace College.
He started off as a group leader in R&D and as a chemist at Glidden and True Value Paint Division, before becoming a manager of architectural applications for Union Carbide (UCAR® Emulsions). He then joined ACE Hardware Paint Division where he was not only responsible for all new product development and reformulation of existing products, but he also saved the company over $2.3 million through his strategic direction and cost reductions.
Not only smart, but with more than 19 years of industrial experience in paint and coatings, we are very pleased that he is our president.
John C. Cushing, Principal Outside Counsel
John, a partner in the K&L Gates LLP Corporate department, counsels entrepreneurs and emerging growth and mature private and public companies on a wide spectrum of strategic and tactical matters at every stage of the business life cycle. His practice focuses on corporate and securities law, including business planning, entity selection and formation, private equity and venture capital financing, joint ventures and strategic alliances, mergers and acquisitions, private placements and public offerings of debt and equity securities, technology licensing, SEC compliance, corporate governance, recapitalizations, and general corporate matters.
John's background in finance and operations affords him an advantage in understanding his clients' business and financial objectives and he works directly with his clients to implement tailored solutions to their complex business problems. John has been advising clients on corporate and securities matters for nearly ten years and has been working with Mythic since the formation of the company. Before law school, he served in various positions of financial planning and analysis, cost and budget control and internal audit, including as Divisional Controller of The Timberland Company's Dominican Republic manufacturing group and Corporate Cost and Budget Manager. He is a graduate of the Lockheed-Sanders, Inc. Financial Management Program.
John received his J.D. from Fordham University School of Law in 1999, his Masters of Business Administration from Boston University 1993 and his B.A. in Economics from St. Anslem College in 1989.
For all legal inquiries please contact:
John C. Cushing
K&L Gates LLP
State Street Financial Center
One Lincoln Street
Boston, MA 02110
Tel: 617-261-3286
Mythic Directors
Keir Kleinknecht helped secure the financial backing for Mythic. A graduate of the University of Vermont, he is a founder of Voltron Ventures, L.P. and Voltron Ventures II L.P. funds, a company dedicated to financing opportunistic ventures in varying sectors of management and technology.
This isn’t Keir’s first foray into the world of investments - In 1999, he founded E-Goo Ventures, a venture capital fund dedicated to the communications industry and from 1998 to 2000 he was a managing partner of MD Ventures, a high tech growth fund specializing in early stage private equity investments. Before MD Ventures he served as a limited partner and Investment Vice President for Meyer Duffy and Associates, guiding early stage software and hardware companies in multiple funds.
Keir has held board positions in over 20 companies several of them publicly traded, and is currently on the Board of Directors of DSLi, Quick filter Technologies, and the Knight Vision Foundation. He also holds numerous advisory positions within the industry.
Dr. James Evans serves on the Board of Directors for Mythic Paint. Dr. Evans is also a technical consultant for all the smart people who invent Mythic paint. He is in the perfect position as he has over 29 years of industrial experience in paint and coatings.
He started back in 1970 as a Research Chemist, Scientist and Technical Manager of the Coating Polymer Synthesis Department of Glidden Paint and Coatings. It was here that he invented the first waterborne beverage can liner.
Seven years later he transferred to the SCM Organic Chemical Division as manager of Product Development for the Sylvachem Ink and Adhesive Resin Business Group. In 1982 he advanced to VP and Director of Technology, before being appointed VP of Research and Development for the Reichhold Coating Resin Division in 1989 and ultimately promoted to VP of Product and Technology Development in 1995.
Phil Mittleman is a managing partner of Voltron Ventures L.P. and Voltron Ventures II, L.P, one of the funding companies for Mythic Paint.
He is also a managing partner of Mittleman Brothers LLC, a holding company that owns the SEC-registered investment advisory firm Mittleman Investment Management; Blue Hill Ventures L.L.C. and MK Opportunity Fund L.P., hybrid venture capital/hedge funds with a broad array of investments in a variety of industries.
Additionally, Phil is a Managing Director of Investment Banking at Source Capital Group, and a co-founder of Quickfilter Technologies, which produces mixed signal integrated circuits (ICs) for analog signal conditioning and digital signal processing.
From 1991 to 1999, Phil served as Executive Vice President of the Kushner-Locke Company, a NASDAQ-listed entertainment company. He began his career at Kushner-Locke after attending Kent Prep School, and Trinity College.
Peter Kleinknecht helped secure the funding for Mythic Paint and is the President and Chief Investment Officer of Knight Investments LP, a private investing company. For more than eleven years Knight Investments has been investing in both private and public companies in high growth technologies across various sectors.
Although he trained as an electrical engineer, Peter feels that sales is his natural calling – a belief that has proved to be true over the years. In 1991 his group bought IPC Information Systems Inc – a communications company that was losing money and had sales of about $65 million. Between 1991 and 1994 Peter, who was acting as president and vice chairman, helped to increase sales to $150 million. When he offered the company as an IPO in 1997 it had more than sixteen hundred employees worldwide.
Peter has also acted as president of Kleinknecht Electrical, an electrical contractor business in New York. During his time there from 1969 to 1998 the company employed over eight hundred people and had sales of $100 million.
Peter is the Chairman of the Knight Vision Foundation, which makes charitable contributions to worthy charities across a broad spectrum of ideals.