About Us
Patrick Spain, Chairman & CEO
Patrick Spain is the founder of HighBeam Research, Inc. Spain created HighBeam™ Research in 2002 to serve as a vehicle for building an online research service for individuals. Spain raised a total of $4.3 million to fund HighBeam from Prism Opportunity Fund (Chicago), 1 to 1 Ventures (Stamford, Conn.), and a variety of individuals, including the original angel backers of his former company, Hoover’s, Inc. Spain is the largest shareholder. HighBeam is headquartered in Chicago.
Spain is a cofounder and was former chairman and CEO of Hoover's, a leading online provider of company information headquartered in Austin, Texas. Spain helped found Hoover's in 1990, serving as its CEO from 1993 to 2001 and chairman from 1994 to 2002. Spain was on the board of Hoover’s when the company was sold to Dun & Bradstreet in 2003 for $119 million. During his tenure, Spain led Hoover's from an unprofitable private book publishing company with a few hundred thousand dollars of revenue to a publicly traded profitable media and business information company with $31 million of revenues. Along the way he raised approximately $60 million of capital from both private and public markets, attracting such investors as Time Warner, Media General, NBC and Disney, and developed important strategic partnerships with such companies as Bloomberg, Dow Jones, The Financial Times, Lexis-Nexis, Microsoft, Oracle, Reuters and Yahoo!, among others.
Spain was among the first to recognize the value of online information services (in 1993 Hoover's became AOL's first business information offering) and the Internet (the company launched one of the first subscription based Internet services in 1995) to build brand, expand sales reach and reduce marketing, selling and distribution costs for publishing companies. By using technology to reach millions of businesspeople cost-effectively, Spain created a unique, rapidly growing business enterprise that generated multiple revenues from individual and enterprise subscriptions, advertising, licensing and e-commerce.
Prior to Hoover’s, Spain worked in the telecommunications industry first as a lawyer and then as a business executive, as a real estate developer and as an economic consultant.
Spain sits on the boards of Stockgroup Information Systems Inc. (OTC: SWEB), a financial information company; SmartAnalyst, a private research company specializing in market research for pharmaceutical companies; and Guidestar, a not-for profit enterprise that has created a database about and for the not-for-profit industry. . He holds a Bachelor of Arts from the University of Chicago in Ancient History and a J.D. from Boston University.
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