Morgan Group Principals
Les is an engineer and entrepreneur who has adapted his significant expertise in signals
processing (finding anomalies in large quantities of data) over the course of his career
to various applications, ranging from undersea warfare to automotive part manufacturing and,
since 2002, quantitative models for hedge fund investments. He is a founder and managing
director of Morgan Group.
In 1980, Les founded Airflow Research and Manufacturing Corp, which became the world's
largest supplier of cooling fans to the automobile industry, now found in more than half
of the world's new cars and trucks. In 1990, he led the sale of Airflow to the Robert
Bosch Corporation. Les continued to lead Airflow for Bosch, growing annual sales to more
than $100 million before stepping down from active management in 1995. He began his career
working for nine years at Bolt Beranek & Newman as a senior scientist consulting to the US
Navy on signal processing of noise from various vehicles such as submarines and aircraft.
Les has been a lecturer on entrepreneurship and business best practices at MIT and Brown
University, and serves on the boards of several startup companies. Les has a BS degree in
Naval Architecture from Webb Institute, and an MS in Ocean Engineering from Catholic
University. He was an officer in the US Coast Guard, Naval Engineering division.
Gina Macdonald is President of Morgan Group LLC. Ms. Macdonald’s experience includes mergers and
acquisitions, credit analysis, commercial real estate development and partnerships,
securitization of commercial loans, management of non-performing loans and owned
real estate as well as development and effective utilization of software.
From 2004—2006, she was also CEO of EstateWorks, a software company providing
services to the legal, financial services and family office industries where she
supervised the development of new products and a >500% increase in sales.
From 2000 to 2001, she was Interim Chairman and CEO of geoVue, a business
analytics and mapping software company based in Boston, where she took a stalled
company into new strategic directions, raised their first round of venture financing and
built a management team and structure. She remains a significant shareholder.
Before Morgan, Gina was at Fleet Financial Group from 1991 to 1997 where she was
President and CEO of Fleet Real Estate Capital from 1993 to 1996 and was Senior Vice
President and Director of Corporate Marketing for Fleet Insurance Services during
1996-1997. Fleet Real Estate Capital provided commercial real estate loan
originations, loan servicing, and special servicing of distressed loans and asset
management for institutional investors across the country, with a special emphasis on
securitized loans. From 1993 to 1996, she grew the FREC servicing portfolio from $400
million to more than $4.2 billion and turned the start-up around from a loss to a
significant profit. FREC had 11 offices in nine states and grew from 20 employees to
more than 150 employees in 2 ½ years before it was sold to Mellon Bank.
Earlier, Ms. Macdonald had been a Senior Vice President and head of RECOLL
Management Corporation’s Owned Real Estate (ORE) Division from 1991 until 1993.
She managed a $1 billion portfolio with annual sales in excess of $350 million and a
staff of more than 150 professionals during the worst commercial real estate downturn
in New England since the Depression.
Ms. Macdonald spent five years as President of The Meridian Group, a privately held
real estate investment company from 1986 to 1991. She was a Senior Vice President
and Group Manager in the Commercial Real Estate department of Fleet Bank from 1981
to 1986. From 1977 through 1981, she was Director of Corporate
Communications/Investor Relations for Fleet Financial Group.
Ms. Macdonald, who majored in history at Indiana University, is a board member of
First Trade Union Bank, Cambridge Viscosity and an Advisory Board member of
Spectrum Financial, the Pennysylvania-based real estate investment fund.
In 1999, Angus co-founded Tellme Networks,
a prominent Silicon Valley technology firm that today boasts a profitable,
rapidly growing business with more than $100 million in sales,
over 350 employees, and $238 million of investment backing from
well-respected venture firms including Kleiner Perkins and Benchmark Capital,
among others. Angus continues to work with Tellme to develop business and
technology strategies to guide the company's products and strategic direction.
At Morgan Group, Angus contributes to new business development and investment
technology.
Prior to Tellme, Angus joined Netscape Communications in 1996, bypassing
college to become the company's youngest fulltime employee. While at Netscape,
Angus was a product manager for the flagship Netscape Communicator Web browser,
in addition to other roles contributing to company strategy on legal matters
and working on the AOL/Netscape merger.
Angus has addressed numerous industry conferences on technology and
business. He has been a guest lecturer on entrepreneurship and business
at the Stanford Graduate School of Business, the Berkeley Haas School of Business and at Brown University. Angus has been recognized
in major media outlets for his innovative leadership and "early in life"
success; in 2006 BusinessWeek named him one of the top tech entrepreneurs
under 30.
Barclay has a degree in Psychology from Tufts University. Prior to Morgan
Group, Barclay ran the partner training efforts for the Boston law firm
of Mintz-Levin. At Morgan Group, Barclay leads direct marketing efforts.