Michael Butler is Chairman and CEO of Cascadia Capital, the independent investment bank that has completed more than 550 deals since Michael co-founded it in 1999. Discussion begins with early stops in Michael’s journey – childhood and college in Washington state, then moving cross country to try his luck in Manhattan, a first job at Morgan Stanley and then business school at Wharton. This episode stands out, though, as a world-class case study on how a CEO thinks about building, capitalizing, and differentiating his firm. Michael charts Cascadia’s evolution to highly particularized vertical specialization and to representing private equity as well as non-institutional sellers. Atlas Capital’s strategic investment in late 2022 and the firm’s move from Seattle to Austin are more recent highlights of a large independent investment bank on the rise.
