Key Executives

Don Yount, Chief Executive Officer and President

Don Yount joined Critical Mention after serving as president and CFO of Corente, Inc., a cloud networking company acquired by Oracle Corp. Previously, Don served as executive vice president, COO and board member of TVI Corp. (NASD:TVIN), a supplier of health and safety technology devices. Prior to TVI, Don was operating principal at Mid-Atlantic Venture Funds. Earlier in his career, Don served in executive corporate strategy and finance positions at several high-tech firms in the telecom, datacom, software development and media industries. He received a BS in Business Administration and an MBA from the University of North Carolina, where he won the Richard H. Jenrette Fellowship and was a Dean’s Scholar. Don also served as chair of the Early Stage East Venture Conference and was a board member of the Greater Philadelphia Venture Group, now called PACT.

Michael Bermann, Chief Operating Officer/ General Counsel

Michael Bermann rejoined Critical Mention as general counsel in 2008. He had previously crafted the firm’s initial user agreements and negotiated its first content partnerships during the company’s 2002 launch. Prior to that, Mike was in private practice with the national law firm of Mintzer, Sarowitz, Zeris, Ledva and Meyers, P.A. in Miami, Florida. In 2004, Mike served as senior associate and head of the legal team at Silver, Levy Feldman & Pass, P.A. in Tampa. He received his J.D. from Nova Southeastern University Law School in Florida and earned a dual degree in Political Science and Philosophy from Syracuse University.

Vishal Padhye, Chief Technology Officer

Vishal was named Chief Technology Officer in 2020. His leadership has resulted in the improvement and modernization of over 160 globally-distributed datacenters, using configuration management, distributed networking, datacenter infrastructure management and hardware lifecycle management. Vishal joined Critical Mention in 2013 as Senior Network/Systems Engineer and was responsible for the configuring, deploying, supporting and maintaining of Unix and Windows-based Enterprise Class servers across 150 data centers. In 2015 he became Head of DevOps, leading continuous integration and deployment using Jenkins & Puppet, Ansible and Docker.

Prior to joining Critical Mention, Vishal served as Senior System Analyst and IT Infrastructure Manager at Visual Graphic Systems. He holds a BE in Electronics and Telecommunication from the University of Mumbai and an MS in Management and Information Systems from SUNY Buffalo.