Barry O'Callaghan

Barry O'Callaghan (born 1969) is a business executive and financier.

Currently he is the Chairman and CEO of Rise Global.

He formerly led Riverdeep for a decade, later known as EMPG and HMH.

He grew the small educational software company into the largest K-12 publishing company in the American education system through a series of acquisitions that were funded by loans.

Barry O'Callaghan was born in 1969 in Mitchelstown, County Cork, Ireland.

His father was a doctor.

O'Callaghan was educated at Clongowes Wood College, a Jesuit secondary boarding school.

He was captain of the school's senior cup rugby team and later he played rugby for Trinity College Dublin, where he studied law in the late 1980s.

According to O'Callaghan, after graduating he no longer wanted to pursue a career in law.

After getting a degree in law, Barry O'Callaghan got a job at investment bank Morgan Stanley, where he "quickly prospered" working in mergers & acquisitions.

He worked in the London office, then later in the Hong Kong office, before moving to New York City to work at Salomon Smith Barney near the beginning of the dot-com bubble.

In 1997 O'Callaghan got a senior job the telecommunications and technology division of investment bank Credit Suisse First Boston.

There he helped internet companies prepare to go public.

O'Callaghan quit Credit Suisse First Boston in 1999 to become the Chief Executive Officer of the digital publishing startup, Riverdeep, in order to take the company public.

Just as CD-ROMs were gaining popularity, O'Callaghan transitioned Riverdeep away from CDs into offering online subscriptions to educational content.

He led the acquisition of a software company called Logal, which sold math curriculum online.

More significantly, it had intellectual property for a method of converting CD-ROM applications into online downloads.

This acquisition was the beginning of O'Callaghan's efforts to web-enable the company's software.

It was followed by a $24 million acquisition of ED-Vantage and an $85 million acquisition of Edmark.

Both were IBM subsidiaries that provided digital educational content online and together the acquisitions made IBM a 14 percent shareholder in Riverdeep.

As O'Callaghan expanded Riverdeep's network of distribution partners that sold the software to individual schools, IBM became a significant partner in referring business to Riverdeep.

O'Callaghan took Riverdeep through an initial public offering on Nasdaq in 2000.

Initially it received a $2 billion valuation after having tripled in share price over a few days of trading.

O'Callaghan's seven percent interest in the company became worth $126 million.

The Sunday Business Post said Riverdeep's time as a public company was difficult, in particular due to criticisms from activist investor David Rocker, who accused Riverdeep of shady accounting practices.

In response to Rocker's criticisms and improving financials, but a declining share price as the tech bubble declined, O'Callaghan and others took the company private, through a management buyout in 2003.

The buyout brought O'Callaghan's interest in the company to 21 percent.

From 2003 to 2004, he "streamlined" the company, negotiated 300 million euro in bonds and worked to expand into international markets, like the United Kingdom and Saudi Arabia.

O'Callaghan and company founder Pat McDonagh bought the shares of venture capitalists; then O'Callaghan bought McDonagh's portion in 2006, giving O'Callaghan a 59.4 percent share of the company.

Ernst & Young "abruptly" left as the company's accounting auditors that year, saying the company made "incorrect representations" about "a material contract," an allegation O'Callaghan denied.

O'Callaghan used low-interest loans to fund acquisitions of traditional print publishers.

At first he led the acquisition of smaller publishers, before buying Houghton Mifflin and Reed Elsevier's US school business, which were bought for $1.75 billion and $4 billion in 2006 and 2007 respectively.

He merged Riverdeep with Houghton Mifflin in 2006 to create the Education Media and Publishing Group (EMPG), before acquiring Harcourt Education in America from Reed Elsevier.

O'Callaghan owned about one-third of the company and is estimated to have had 1.5 billion euro in assets after both acquisitions.

He was the largest investor in the company.

The acquisitions made EMPG the largest educational publisher in the US market, but it became laden with debt from loans made to fund the acquisitions.

In 2008, the great recession caused US states, and California in particular, to cut spending on textbooks from EMPG.

As a result of cuts in school textbook purchases, excessive debt, and the end of the dot-com bubble, the company was taken over by bondholders in 2011.

This almost wiped out the interests of shareholders and O'Callaghan's own fortune.

After the fallout, he became CEO and partial owner of the international division, EMPGi.