Top Gun Ventures Taps Dr. Wallace Pond to Lead Education Executive Search Practice

DENVER--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Top Gun Ventures (“Top Gun”), a premier retained executive search firm, today announced the appointment of Dr. Wallace Pond as Partner and Head of the firm’s new Executive Search Practice for Education. With this addition, the company is expanding its unique, powerful, and guaranteed search model into education, serving national and international clients out of their Denver, Colorado office.

"Top Gun Ventures has always been, and always will be, about recruiting Game Changing leaders into our client organizations,” noted Co-Founding Managing Partner, Don Tuttle. “Based on the current challenges facing higher education and the critical need for dynamic, game changers in post-secondary education, the firm concluded that it was time to bring our very unique approach to executive search to education. Such an effort requires truly distinctive experience and insightful leadership within the firm as well, and we’ve found such a person in Dr. Wallace Pond, whose 30 plus years of experience across every sector of post-secondary and K-12 education, positions TGV to achieve exceptional results for its education clients.”

Pond noted that “Higher Education is currently facing greater challenges than at any time since WWII, entering its eighth year of contraction across all sectors, with a substantial number of institutions downsizing, merging, and even closing. Part of the solution to surviving and thriving in the current environment is truly unique and dynamic leaders, who are up to the task of operating under hyper-change, complex, and turbulent conditions. In fact, it is the non-traditional search model employed by TGV that brought me to Top Gun as the new education practice head. Only partners, who are each industry experts themselves, handle searches from beginning to end. It is a true concierge model and the results are guaranteed.”

“Although much of higher education is facing genuine crisis, there has never been more opportunity for innovative and entrepreneurial leaders and institutions than there is now,” noted Peter Donovan, Co-Founding Managing Partner. Donovan adds, “As a thought leader and GameChanger himself in Higher Education, Wallace will help clients identify the strategic, new paradigm leaders they need to shift course and meet the contemporary needs of post-secondary institutions and their diverse constituents.”

“We are delighted to have someone of Wallace’s background and expertise lead our incredibly important executive search practice for education. Not only can he play a role in serving clients with their critical leadership needs, he has the experience, insights, and skills to help higher education address its unprecedented systemic challenges,” added Tuttle.

About Top Gun Ventures

Founded in 2002, with offices in Austin, Boston, Dallas, Denver, New York, Palo Alto, Seattle and St. Louis—and reach throughout the Americas, Asia, the Middle East and Europe—Top Gun Ventures is a premier global executive search firm known for its highly unique, client-centered practice, placing CEOs and executives with corporate, venture capital, and private equity clients across multiple industries.