Kneeland Youngblood ’78
Dallas, Texas

At-Large Candidate

An emergency room doctor turned businessman, Kneeland Youngblood ’78 credits Princeton with preparing him to “be tough mentally and physically, to think strategically, not to be afraid of making difficult decisions and to embrace taking thoughtful risks.” Founder and Managing Partner of Pharos Capital Group, a private equity firm in Dallas that funds technology, business services and healthcare services endeavors, Youngblood has embraced risk throughout his career.

At Princeton, Youngblood majored in Politics, completed his pre-med requirements, and also managed to see something of the world in the process. “My Princeton experience has given me the confidence to take risks,” he recalls, “from spending my junior year studying in Sweden and England, to participating in the Nassau Hall sit-in during my senior year, to taking my senior medical school electives in Cairo, Egypt.” Following graduation, Youngblood earned his MD at the University of Texas Southwestern and devoted 14 years to emergency room practice at the Medical Center of Plano and at Baylor University Medical Center. “Practicing medicine was the opportunity to directly make a difference in people’s lives, especially in the emergency department setting,” says Youngblood. “I enjoyed the crisis management, quick analysis and decision-making the profession required.”

But having met the challenges of the medical world, Youngblood was in search of a new challenge, and both politics and business called to him. “I thoroughly enjoyed medicine,” he says, “but I recognized there were other worlds to be explored.” So he threw his support behind former Senator Bill Bradley during both a Senate campaign and Bradley’s 2000 presidential bid: Youngblood “believed in the man and the message.” This foray into politics led to his assisting then Texas Governor Ann Richards, who eventually appointed him to a task force on revenue and to the Board of Trustees of the Teacher Retirement System of Texas, a $100 billion pension fund. Former President Bill Clinton appointed him twice to the five-member board of the U.S. Enrichment Corporation, a large nuclear fuel company formed “out of the Department of Energy to provide low-level uranium to utilities around the world.” The board’s job was to oversee the privatization of the company. He also joined Hillary Rodham Clinton’s Health Care Task Force and co-led a trade delegation on NAFTA to Mexico.

If Youngblood’s early experience in business was an offshoot of his political work, it did not stop there. In the early 1990’s he founded his own heathcare consulting firm, Youngblood Enterprises, Inc., in Dallas, but he eventually realized that his real desire was to explore private equity, and in 1998 he founded Pharos Capital Group, LLC. “The business of private equity allows me to continue to make a difference in people’s lives, but in a different way,” says Youngblood. “Notwithstanding the different environment, this business is like triaging crises in the ER.”

In addition to his Pharos work, Youngblood sits on the boards of Gap Inc. and of Burger King Corporation. He is also a director of Starwood Hotels & Resorts Worldwide, Inc. and is chairman of the American Beacon Funds, a $30 billion mutual fund company managed by an American Airlines affiliate. He is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations and has also given time to numerous non-profits, including Princeton, serving as a regional Alumni Schools Committee member and a Career Services volunteer. “My time at Princeton was the most intense academic and personal experience of my life,” he says. “Nothing I have done before or since has been as intense as that experience.”