Pierre Chao

Pierre Chao, Managing Partner, brings over 26 years of management consulting, investment banking and policy expertise in the aerospace/defense industry. Throughout his career he has been a trusted advisor to senior corporate, government and financial decision makers on key strategic issues - from major investments to mergers and acquisitions to strategic and policy choices. As well as being a Managing Partner and co-founder of Renaissance Strategic Advisors, he is also a co-founder and Managing Partner of Enlightenment Capital, a member of the Board of Directors of KeyW Corporation (Nasdaq: KEYW), a member of the Board of Directors of Channel Technologies, and a Senior Associate at the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS). Prior to co-founding RSAdvisors in 2008, he was a Senior Fellow and Director of Defense-Industrial Initiatives at CSIS, a Washington D.C.-based, non-partisan defense and foreign policy think tank. Before joining CSIS in 2003, Pierre was a Managing Director and senior aerospace/defense analyst at Credit Suisse First Boston from 1999-2003, where he was responsible for following the U.S. and global aerospace/defense industry. He remained a CSFB independent senior adviser from 2003-2006. Prior to joining CSFB, Pierre was the senior aerospace/defense analyst at Morgan Stanley Dean Witter from 1995-1999. He served as the senior aerospace/defense industry analyst at Smith Barney during 1994 and as a director at JSA International, a Boston/Paris-based management-consulting firm that focused on the aerospace/defense industry (1986-88, 1990-93). Pierre was also a co-founder of JSA Research, an equity research boutique specializing in the aerospace/defense industry. Before signing on with JSA, he worked in the New York and London offices of Prudential-Bache Capital Funding as a mergers and acquisitions banker focusing on aerospace/defense (1988-90). Over the course of his Wall Street career, Pierre participated in 31 aerospace/defense equity offerings/IPOs raising $11.7 billion and dozens of buy-side and sell-side M&A assignments. In addition, he garnered numerous awards while working on Wall Street. Institutional Investor ranked Pierre's team the number one global aerospace/defense group every year eligible from 2000-02 and he was on the Institutional Investor All-America Research Team every year eligible from 1996-2002. He was ranked the number one aerospace/defense analyst by corporations in the 1998-2000 Reuters Polls, the number one aerospace/defense analyst in the 1995-99 Greenwich Associates polls, and appeared on the Wall Street Journal All-Star list in four of seven eligible years. In 2000, Pierre was appointed to the Presidential Commission on Offsets in International Trade. He is also a guest lecturer at the National Defense University and the Defense Acquisition University, and he has served on multiple Defense Science Board task forces, including the 2005 Summer Study – Assessment of Transformation, the 2006 Summer Study – Strategic Technology Vectors, and the 2006/07 study on the health of the defense industry. Pierre earned dual Bachelor of Science degrees in Political Science and Management Science from M.I.T. He is a holder of the right to use the Chartered Financial Analyst designation.