Karl Burns

Biography

Karl Burns is the Chief Strategy Officer of VirtualQube. Since
joining the firm, he has led initiatives focused on re-vamping the
go-to-market strategy and operations, increasing organizational
maturity, decreasing cost of service and scaling operations. Karl
brings an enterprise discipline and approach to organizational
development and also a financial acumen to assess business strategy (including
acquisitions). He is also a steward of the VirtualQube culture, leading workshops
which promote the mission and values of the firm.
Before VirtualQube, Karl worked in management consulting for both technology
and new product development. He has led programs to improve internal business
processes, develop technology roadmaps, design and implement e-commerce
portals (financial services), re-design organizational structures, determine portfolio
roadmaps, develop implementation plans for new businesses and their supporting
technologies, and align products and services to customer engagement to drive
incremental revenue. Karl’s deep finance background helps clients focus on the
economic logic of options available and facilitate prioritization across a large set of
competing initiatives. Karl has experience in financial services, telecom, insurance,
retail and manufacturing – including Fortune 500 clients like Best Buy, AT&T, Ally
Bank, Nike, Nationwide, DISH Network, Xerox, HP, Bank of New York-Mellon, and
Citigroup.
Prior to this experience, Karl worked for PNC Bank in the mutual fund services group
in Boston. While serving as an account executive, Karl managed service delivery
generating more than $2.4 million in annual revenue. In this role, Karl helped
transform their external website, improved internal processes to lower the cost of
service delivery, and championed a project with a marquee client to reduce annual
compliance spend by 70% within the first year. Karl also worked on new product
development definitions and beta-testing of new web services (SaaS).
Karl received a BA in Economics from Texas A&M University Mays School of Business
in 1999, and completed his MBA at Wake Forest University in 2008. He received
the “Babcock Leadership Award” for the student who best displayed the core
characteristics of Wake Forest: Management, Scholarship, Integrity, and Leadership.
He now fund-raises for the Vanderbilt-Ingram Cancer Center with the “Young
Ambassadors” group, which has raised more than $250,000 over the past three
years. This group awards discovery grants to individual medical researchers fighting
cancer.