Bill Petty is Professor of Finance and the W.W. Caruth Chairholder in Entrepreneurship at Baylor University, and has been named a University Master Teacher. He also helped establish the Baylor Angel Network where he now serves on the Board. He holds a PhD and an MBA from the University of Texas at Austin and a BS from Abilene Christian University, where he is a member of the University's Board of Trustees. He has taught at Virginia Tech University and Texas Tech University, and has served as the dean of the business school at Abilene Christian University. Petty's research interests include acquisitions of privately held companies, shareholder value-based management, the financing of small and entrepreneurial firms, angel financing, and exit strategies for privately held firms. He has served as co-editor for the Journal of Financial Research and editor of the Journal of Entrepreneurial Finance. He has published articles in a number of finance and small business journals and is the co-author of a leading corporate finance textbook Foundations of Finance. Petty has worked as a consultant for oil and gas firms and consumer product companies. He also served as a subject matter expert on a best-practices study on shareholder value-based management, funded by the American Productivity and Quality Center, and he was part of a research team for the Australian Department of Industry to study the feasibility of establishing a public equity market for small- and medium-sized enterprises in Australia. He has served on the Board of Trustees for the Financial Management Association and currently serves on the Board of the United States Association of Small Business and Entrepreneurship (USASBE). Finally, he serves as the audit chair for a publicly traded energy firm.