John Spence

John "Yogi" Spence is Co-CEO of XA Investments and a founding partner of XMS Capital Partners. Yogi co-founded XMS in 2006 with his long-time friend and colleague, Ted Brombach. Before founding the firm, Yogi spent 17 years at Morgan Stanley where he rose to Managing Director. Yogi also had a brief stint at ABN AMRO before being recruited to run the Midwestern investment banking operations of Dresdner Kleinwort Wasserstein, based in Chicago. Yogi and Ted formed XMS with the goal of creating a different kind of investment banking boutique - one that harkened back to what investment banking used to be in the days of John Weinberg of Goldman Sachs and Richard Fisher of Morgan Stanley. They wanted to create a place where relationships are more important than transactional velocity and where advice is rendered to clients over a long period of time and across all of their critical strategic and financing issues. From the outset, it was determined that XMS would remain independent and offer unbiased advice free from the internal conflicts so common within the larger investment banks. From its humble beginnings, XMS has grown into an organization filled with talented and driven investment bankers that work collaboratively to achieve client objectives. Yogi maintains responsibility for many of XMS's longest-standing relationships and is actively involved in new business development, both in the U.S. and Europe, ongoing deal execution and firm management.

During his time at Morgan Stanley, he had many roles, including leading the corporate finance execution practice in the Midwest from 1997-2002. This involved executing tens of billions of dollars of equity offerings, converts and high yield financings for companies as diverse as Embraer, Celestica, Sears, Allstate, Timken, Amway, Eaton, Teletech and the Chicago Mercantile Exchange.

Yogi graduated magna cum laude from the University of Notre Dame with a BA in Economics and earned his MBA at The Anderson Graduate School of Management at the University of California - Los Angeles.