Mr. McDonald is Chairman & Chief Executive Officer of CEA Industries Inc. (previously Surna Inc.), as well as President of its subsidiary Surna Cultivation Technologies LLC. He joined the Board of Directors of Surna Inc. in 2018 and was appointed CEO later that year.
Prior to joining Surna he led sales and business development as National Sales Director for Seeley International and as Vice-President-Sales for Coolerado Corp., a manufacturer and marketer of innovative, energy-efficient environmental control systems. He led the sales of the company, growing revenue from near zero to become an INC. 600 high-growth company award winner. Along with the company’s CEO, he was instrumental in securing growth equity funding from a cleantech investment fund. The company was later acquired by a large strategic competitor.
Mr. McDonald’s recent career work has included the cleantech, energy efficiency and HVAC industries. He is also the author of Cleantech Sell: The Essential Guide To Selling Resource Efficient Products In The B2B Market.
Prior to joining Coolerado, Mr. McDonald spent over ten years in private equity and M&A where he was involved in numerous transactions in the technology, manufacturing, and power development industries. As a business development officer with private equity acquisitions groups, and later as founder and principal of a specialty M&A finance firm, he identified, financed or acquired numerous transactions with total enterprise value of several hundred million dollars.
Mr. McDonald was previously a consultant to international banks with KMPG’s Financial Services Practice and served on the Board of Directors of Keating Capital, Inc., a publicly-traded business development company that made investments in pre-IPO companies. He has served as a mentor for companies in the CleanTech Open and as a judge in the competition.
Mr. McDonald is a U.S. Army veteran and former Cavalry officer. He earned a B.S. degree in Engineering and Economics from the U.S. Military Academy at West Point, N.Y. and an M.B.A. degree from the Harvard Business School.
Nick Etten is the CEO of Lone Star Bioscience, a Texas-based medical company. With over 7 years in the industry, he previously served as the Head of Government Affairs at Acreage Holdings, a vertically integrated, multi-state operator of licenses and assets in the U.S. Nick is also the Founder and Chairman of the Veterans Project (VCP), an organization dedicated to advocating on behalf of access issues for U.S. military veterans. His career has been focused on the growth equity market, and previous positions include Vice President of Global Business Development for FreightWatch International (successfully sold to UTC), Director of Corporate Development for Triple Canopy (a zero to $150M revenue company in two years), and investment professional at Trident Capital, where he focused on the cyber-security space and led over $100M in investments.
Earlier in his career, Nick was an investment banker at Thomas Weisel Partners, where he participated in more than 20 IPOs totaling over $1B raised and served on active duty as a U.S. Navy SEAL officer. He earned an MBA from the J.L. Kellogg Graduate School of Management at Northwestern University and a BS in political science from the United States Naval Academy. Nick lives in the Chicago area with his wife and two young sons.