New Trier High School Graduate, Peter Pacelli, Co-Founds High School Sports Focused Technology Company

Co-founded by Peter Pacelli, Victory Views was originally intended to be a digital media company focused on high school sports. Peter was an athlete in high school. He grew up in Winnetka, IL, and attended New Trier High School, where he captained the Wresting and Football teams.

Peter and his partners understood that high school sports are a huge but untapped market. In fact, high school sports have a higher combined fan base than collegiate and professional sports and some of the most engaged fans anywhere. But where do these fans find content when the game ends? Local media only has the resources to focus on top teams. National high school sports media also skews toward top athletes and teams. Parents aren’t necessarily dependable to capture media content from every game and social media can be amateur and low-quality. Victory Views filled the gap in the media landscape by connecting fans with content they really wanted: photos and videos from teams and players they care about.

So, Victory Views partnered with top-notch photographers and videographers to capture and distribute high-quality sports content. After a couple of seasons strictly covering Peter’s alma mater, New Trier, Victory Views quickly expanded across the country. Like many other media companies, Victory Views sold advertising and sponsorship alongside its content. Victory Views offered advertisers an attractive user base. These users were personally connected to and participating in each event, allowing brands to target specific demographics (by sport, gender, age, etc.). The high-quality photo content drove engagement and massive traffic that advertisers loved.

At its peak, Victory Views was procuring, editing, and distributing millions of photos and videos per year. In order to achieve that scale, the company had developed highly robust and sophisticated technology products and soon realized that there might even be a bigger opportunity to license its software to other companies that are burdened with the cost and hassle of moving large volumes of photo and video content.

Today, Victory Views provides software services to numerous media and education companies. And it is run with the same values and work ethic developed on the sports fields of New Trier and high schools everywhere.

Peter Pacelli - Three Virtues of Investing

Perpetual Learning

Every investment is different. Different sectors, different management teams, different market conditions. Private company investing forces you to stay nimble and innovative. You cannot simply use off-the-shelf templates to manage private equity assets. However, experience working across many different investments with different people and outcomes provides essential data to make good business decisions.    

Wearing Many Hats

Private equity investing combines many business disciplines into one job. MBA students are often required to focus on one area of business. Marketing, operations, finance. Investment professionals who are hands on, working directly with management teams, are required to demonstrate fluency in all subjects. This keeps the job fresh, fun, and challenging. And because an investment professional often has numerous portfolio companies at various stages, there are multiple missions to be executed contemporaneously.

  

Building Relationships

Ultimately, private equity investing is a relationship business. Lenders, lawyers, bankers, limited partners, and other advisors all make up the private investor’s ecosystem. And given that building companies is a long game, all these players can play surprising roles in advancing interests over the long term. Nurturing relationships, making introductions, going out of your way for others to provide advice or other information are all important aspects of the role.

About Peter:

Peter Pacelli is a Principal at Knox Capital, where he focuses on deal sourcing and execution in the business services industry. Prior to Knox, Peter worked at Victory Views, a technology-enabled managed services company serving customers in the education space. 

Peter was raised in the Chicago area. He graduated from New Trier High School before attending Yale University. After Yale, Peter worked at Bank of America in New York before moving back to Chicago to work at Wind Point Partners, a middle-market private equity firm.

Peter holds an MBA from The University of Chicago Booth School of Business and is a veteran of the U.S. Navy.