Charles Rutstein is CEO at Comlinkdata, a private equity-backed data company in Boston, MA focused on the telecom market.

He was previously CEO in Residence at Alpine Investors, based in San Francisco, CA.

Prior to that, Rutstein was CEO at RISI, the leading provider of proprietary data and insight to the forest products industry, backed by private equity investors Electra Partners.

Under Rutstein's leadership, the firm's EBITDA grew ~60% in three years. In 2017, Rutstein and his team orchestrated a sale of the company to Euromoney for ~16x EBITDA, yielding a return of ~4.3x invested capital to investors.

He also has served as a board director for several venture-backed, private equity-backed and public companies.

Prior to RISI, Rutstein was COO at Forrester research. He began as an analyst, and later oversaw nearly all technology research at the firm, including servers, networks, security, storage, application development, and others.

He then moved to run Forrester's consulting business, where his team designed and built a new operating model for the business. During his tenure, the business grew in excess of 45% y/y.

Rutstein later ran Forrester's executive peer network and events businesses. Under his leadership, those businesses grew more than 60% y/y.

Under Rutstein's executive leadership, Forrester's revenue nearly doubled, earnings more than doubled, and the firm's stock outperformed the NASDAQ by a wide margin.

Rutstein joined Forrester from Price Waterhouse Management Consulting Services, where he was a Principal Consultant. During his tenure at the firm, he wrote a best-selling information security book.

Charles has had wide exposure in national and international media, including The McNeil-Lehrer News Hour, ABC, Bloomberg, Canadian radio news, CNBC, NBC, MSNBC, and NPR.

Charles holds a B.A. in economics from Hobart College and an M.B.A. in strategic and entrepreneurial management from The Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania.