Team | southcap

OUR TEAM

Ben Brooks

Founding Partner

Ben Brooks brings over 25 years of experience in working with entrepreneurial companies. Ben is the Founding Partner of Southern Capitol Ventures and also serves as Director of Strategy for Capital Investment Group. He formerly served as a Senior Vice President for Josephthal & Co., a New York based investment banking and brokerage firm, which is now Oppenheimer (NYSE:OPY). Before joining Josephthal, Ben was Chief Executive Officer for Marion Bass Securities where he orchestrated the sale of Marion Bass' retail business to Josephthal. Prior to his position as CEO, he was Director of Investment Banking where he successfully completed numerous acquisition and capital placement transactions with companies like SciQuest.

He received his undergraduate degree from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and graduated from the Fuqua School of Business at Duke University with a Masters in Business Administration.

Jason Caplain
General Partner

Jason is a general partner and co-founded Southern Capitol Ventures after spending two years at Red Hat (NYSE:RHT), the world's leading provider of open source solutions. There, he directed the company's global budgeting process, provided financial analysis for the successful IPO in August 1999 and performed due diligence on many of the company's acquisitions. Prior to Red Hat, Jason was at Harrison Hurley and Company, an investment banking and business-consulting firm headquartered in Providence, RI.

Jason received his BS in Finance from Bentley College.

David Jones
Partner

Prior to joining Southern Capitol Ventures, David was with the Deloitte Consulting practice in Washington, DC where he managed strategic technology projects for the newly formed Department of Homeland Security.

David was on the board of ArtusLabs (acquired by PerkinElmer) and was a board observer at AVIcode (acquired by Microsoft). He is co-Founder and former Chief Technology Officer of medical device portal, Orthocopia.com, which provides surgical information to operating room professionals.

David's background in technology stems from the military where he served as a Naval Aviator flying over 1900 hours in the P-3C Orion. During his last tour he served as an Assistant Professor at the University of Virginia teaching Engineering and Leadership courses. David served as the Weapons and Operations Officer during two deployments to the Mediterranean theater and North Atlantic and led a Naval Intelligence special projects crew testing cutting-edge technologies for acoustic and non-acoustic sensors and combat mission hardware and software.

David recently received the Triangle Business Journal's "40 under 40" leadership award and is a frequent guest lecturer at UNC Kenan Flagler Business School. He received his BS in Electrical Engineering from the US Naval Academy, his MS in Management Information Systems (MIS) from the University of Virginia and his MBA from UNC Chapel Hill.

Cindy Kasner

Admin Operations

Cindy Kasner oversees the administrative operations of Southern Capitol Ventures. Prior to joining Southern Capitol Ventures, Cindy served as office manager for the Raleigh office of Marion Bass Securities Corporation. In that capacity, Cindy worked closely with Ben Brooks and other members of the Marion Bass investment banking team on numerous capital placement transactions. Cindy attended both Western Oklahoma College and Oklahoma State University.