David Dupree once had an office with excellent road access and rather limited amenities: a lawn chair in the back of a pickup truck. After college, he worked for North Carolina’s Department of Transportation, counting passing cars. A business-school application was waiting elsewhere. So was the question of how to pay for it.
Then Frank Schilagi, dean of Wake Forest’s Babcock Graduate School of Management, called. There could be a teaching-assistant position to help with tuition. Dupree enrolled and earned his MBA in 1978. The encounter offers an unusually concrete starting point for a career in investment: someone saw a possible future and helped make it affordable.
Decades later, Dupree and his wife, Marijke Jurgens-Dupree, would help finance a scholarship challenge. Between those two moments came corporate finance, Carlyle, the founding of Halifax and a second investment enterprise built around university endowments. The vehicles grew more elaborate. The question of who gets a chance remained close at hand.
A chair beside the road, a seat at the table
Dupree’s undergraduate degree came from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Before Halifax, his work included equity private placements at Alex. Brown & Sons and corporate finance at Montgomery Securities. From 1992 to 1999, he was a managing director and partner at the Carlyle Group.
Private placements put an investor between a company seeking money and people prepared to supply it. The job requires translating a business into terms an investor can evaluate. It also requires translating investor expectations back into terms a company can live with. That two-way relationship would become a recurring feature of the organizations with which Dupree worked.
He co-founded Halifax in January 1999. In a world where financial firms can seem determined to resemble one another, its chosen territory was reasonably specific: established businesses in the lower middle market, working alongside managers and entrepreneurs. These were operating companies, with existing customers and people already responsible for making the business work.
There is a useful distinction between starting an investment firm and starting each business it backs. The founder of the firm has to assemble capital and colleagues; the company’s managers bring a different store of knowledge. Halifax’s partnership model puts those groups in the same conversation. A spreadsheet has its uses. It seldom answers the customer’s telephone.
The money that came back
In October 2017, Halifax announced its fourth fund at a hard cap of $650 million. Its original target had been $550 million. Those figures describe investor commitments to a fund, rather than Dupree’s personal fortune or the revenue of an operating business. They are evidence of the scale of the firm’s fundraising at that moment.
The more revealing detail was the route to that capital. Dupree said Halifax had answered demand from existing investors and had avoided a broader marketing campaign. Some returning limited partners had relationships with the firm stretching back 18 years. One new investor joined, accompanied by an investment team Halifax already knew through previous collaboration.
Limited partners supply the capital that a private equity firm invests. Asking them to return means asking them to make another decision after seeing how a previous relationship worked. That gives the fourth-fund announcement a different texture from a launch story. It was a renewal, on a larger scale, involving people with a history together.
The cap matters, too. It set a ceiling even though demand exceeded the initial target. Raising a fund and putting its money to work are separate tasks. The announcement paired its fundraising news with active pursuit of investments. The money had arrived; finding appropriate businesses was still the work.
The grocery aisle has a boardroom
Alongside private investing, Dupree served on the board of Whole Foods Market. The company’s filings place the beginning of his directorship in August 1996. In December 2007, he told the board he would not stand for reelection at the shareholder meeting scheduled for March 2008.
His responsibilities included the audit committee and chairing the nominating and governance committee. Those assignments deal with how a company accounts for itself and how its board is constituted. They are less photogenic than an opening-day ribbon, though a business needs both the public occasion and the machinery behind it.
Whole Foods’ 2004 annual report gives a sense of the operating world around that board seat: 163 stores, including locations in Canada and the United Kingdom, and approximately $3.9 billion in annual sales. Dupree was one director in a larger organization. The scale is useful context, without turning the company’s results into a personal scorecard.
It also adds a different kind of experience to the career. A private investment partnership and a listed retailer have different constituencies and obligations. A director must work within the board, while management runs the company. Dupree’s record includes both investing in businesses and sitting with the people charged with overseeing one.
Returning to campus with a different assignment
Wake Forest’s connection to Dupree continued well beyond his MBA. He joined the business school’s Board of Visitors in 1998 and the university’s Board of Trustees in 2005. His university work included chairing the endowment’s investment policy committee. An institution that had helped him pay for an education now asked him to help oversee its capital.
The endowment assignment led into Verger Capital Management. In May 2014, Wake Forest announced an external investment company that would take over the work of its investment office. Jim Dunn, the university’s chief investment officer, became Verger’s chief executive. Investment-office employees would move to the new company.
Wake Forest expected the arrangement to broaden investment access and address rising management, operational and administrative costs. The university had been discussing an outsourced chief investment officer model for several years. Creating Verger made that discussion an operating arrangement, with a team moving from inside the university into a separate business.
Dupree helped lead the transformation through his investment-committee role. Halifax’s biography identifies him as a Verger founder and chairman. The distinction between his role and Dunn’s matters: the governance work and the daily executive work belonged to different people. Building an institution can involve choosing an arrangement that lets other people do their jobs.
“people cared how you did”
David Dupree, remembering Wake Forest · 2016
A scholarship with company
In 2018, David and Marijke joined four other couples in committing $1 million each to a Wake Forest scholarship challenge. The design divided gifts between the donors’ own scholarship funds and a pool that would match gifts from others. Across the program, the university said the challenge could help create as many as 55 scholarships.
The intended students included those from middle-income families, first-generation students and students with financial need. The number 55 was a possibility described at the launch, rather than a count of completed awards. The arrangement was designed to bring additional donors into the effort.
A matching gift adds a second decision to the first gift: will someone else join? It gives a donor with a smaller budget a way to establish a scholarship sooner. The 2018 program included people who did exactly that. For Dupree, the connection to his own tuition question is easy to see, even without claiming that every later decision began with Schilagi’s call.
His explanation of Wake Forest’s appeal was personal. He remembered the personal support he received there. The university honored him with its Distinguished Alumni Award in April 2016. The recognition brought a finance career back into the company of teachers, fellow alumni and family.
Making room for the next partners
Halifax’s leadership transition had visible preparation. In April 2016, it promoted Scott Van Duinen, Scott Plumridge and Chris Cathcart to partner and brought them onto its investment committee. Each had already spent years at the firm. Dupree explicitly connected the appointments with continuity of management.
That is an ordinary-sounding word with a demanding practical meaning. A founder can establish an organization; colleagues must be able to carry responsibility through its next phase. Promotions give that intention a shape: names, roles and authority. By Halifax’s 25th anniversary in 2024, Cathcart and Plumridge were its managing partners.
The anniversary announcement reported 120 transactions since the firm’s founding: 42 platform investments and 78 add-ons. A platform investment establishes a portfolio business; an add-on brings another business into it. The split shows how much of Halifax’s transaction history involved building around companies already in the portfolio.
Those totals belong to the firm and its teams across a quarter century. Dupree’s founding and senior-partner tenure ran from 1999 to 2022; today Halifax lists him among its senior advisors. At the anniversary gathering, he spoke about the firm’s history. The founder was present while the current partners marked the next chapter.
The board seat after the founder’s chair
His later public record includes a November 2023 appointment to Digital Harmonic’s board, alongside Brian Lacey and Leslie Armitage. The company described the appointments in connection with expanding its software business. Dupree’s contribution was framed around experience scaling companies and putting their operations on a firmer footing.
It is another version of the supporting role visible elsewhere in his career: bringing investment and organizational experience to people running a business. The titles change between founder, director, trustee and advisor. The responsibility keeps returning to the relationship between resources and the people who can use them.
A lawn chair is an unlikely opening prop for that story. It earns its place because the tuition offer was practical. Years later, the scholarship match was practical, too. Both involved a person with an ambition and an arrangement that helped make the next step possible.