Graham Partners MBA Senior Associate

I interned at Graham during the spring/summer of my 1st year at Booth and this was my full-time summer internship role. Graham Partners is a ~$4B MM PE fund that invests in industrial technology and advanced manufacturing businesses. I specifically led investments for Graham’s emerging Growth Equity fund, which is focused on late-stage venture opportunities.

During my time at Graham I screened 20+ deals and led investment process on 3 deals, submitting the first 3 term sheets out of Graham Growth I, one of which was accepted and was in confirmatory diligence at my point of departure. I performed financial, operational, and management diligence; coordinated legal, technical, and 3rd-party diligence; and built out Graham’s proprietary sourcing process.

I functioned as a full-time Senior Associate/Vice President on the team during my tenure and leveraged my technology background and earlier stage investing experience to help build out the growth team.

Morpheus Ventures MBA Senior Associate

I interned at Morpheus Ventures for ~5 months in the winter/spring of my 1st year at Booth. Morpheus Ventures is a LA based early stage investment firm that focuses on both B2B and B2C companies, typically ones with wide technical moats. During my time at Morpheus I worked on three transactions. A follow on investment in Bestow Insurance (Series C; Closed), an investment into a Stealth AI Vision Company (Series A; Closed): and lastly a Series B investment into a Stealth Hypercar Company (Series B; Closed).

I enjoyed my time at Morpheus and gained transaction experience in earlier stage VC investing and how to better assess Seed/Series A/Series B investment opportunities.

Jackson Private Capital MBA Senior Associate

I spent ~6 months during the fall/winter of my 1st year at Booth helping Duane Jackson build out his firm, Jackson Private Capital. Jackson Private Capital is a Chicago-based merchant bank that provides objective advice and long-term capital to middle market founder-run and family-owned businesses across North America.

Turn/River Capital - Private Equity Vice President

I spent over four years at Turn/River a had a tremendous experience at the firm. During my tenure the firm grew from three people to over thirty and from ~$70M in AUM to over $700M. My time was split between sourcing, due diligence on potential deals, and working with our existing portfolio companies on their sales and marketing operations. It was very much an end to end middle market private equity experience.

On the sourcing front, I am proud to say that alongside my other Associate, we have built an incredibly robust sourcing process which involved hiring multiple team members overseas to help with the process. As of now we have a database of 20,000+ companies and reliably send over 25,000 emails, schedule 1,200 initial calls, and generate 500 qualified investment leads per year.

On the investment side of things, I closed six deals and was the lead Associate on half of them and a Senior Associate/Vice President on the other half. I've gotten a strong sense of the end to end process of running a deal and how to quarterback a deal. On the operations side, to borrow a word from our Managing Partner, I have much clearer view of the mechanics of a business and find it easier and easier for me to quickly understand what makes a business grow and what operational improvements are needed to facilitate greater growth.

Transaction Experience

The deals I've completed during my time at Turn/River have been

ThinQ, a CPaaS software company providing voice API solutions.

Mindflash, a LMS software platform for SMBs and enterprises.

Netsparker, a web app security scanning tool for SMBs and enterprises.

Huddle, an enterprise collaboration and workflow management software that is tailored towards to high compliance clients such as professional services firms and government organizations.

Mailgun, an email API company that helps developers to send transactional emails at scale.

I was the lead associate on all of these deals which involved business and operational due diligence, coordinating third party consulting (tax, technology, etc), working with lenders to obtain debt financing when necessary, and working with our legal counsel to draft all relevant legal documents. Each deal is unique, so the type of work I do on each deal varies, but I can confidently say that I've gotten a broad exposure to the PE deal process and feel comfortable executing on various types of transactions.

Intuit - Corporate Development

I joined the Corp Dev group just as they were beginning the process of three significant divestitures, including the sale of the Quicken business, which was the original product Intuit was founded on. During my time in Corporate development, I served as the lead analyst on the Quicken divestiture and was responsible for both CIM and financial model construction and actively worked with both our PE and Strategic buyers to facilitate a smooth sale. I was also responsible for building out a detailed "Good Hands" assessment which involved diligencing the portfolio companies of prospective PE and Strategic buyers to assess their potential fit with the Quicken Management Team.

Reflecting back on this rotation, I learned a tremendous amount about the M&A process and more importantly about the soft skills that are required to close deals of this scale. My excel and powerpoint skills were also definitely expanded, but the biggest learning for me was the significance in communicating effectively and working cross functionally, across Intuit teams, potential buyers, and investment bankers to facilitate a quick transaction.

Towards the end of my rotation, I realized that while my experience in Corp Dev had been great, I was aiming for something with a little more of an operational focus. Corp Dev felt isolated within Intuit and I wanted to continue to build my operational skills. Product Management was a strong consideration and I was in discussion with the Mint team to join them as a PM; however, at this time I stumbled across the unique opportunity to work at a growing Tech focused PE company called Turn/River capital. They were looking to hire an associate with both tech operations and finance experience and were willing to take a chance on someone who didn't come from a strict investment banking background. Tech Private Equity combined my two interests which were M&A and tech operations so once again, the opportunity was too good to pass up.

Intuit - Product Management - Quickbooks Online

Within QBO, I focused primary on user First Time Use which meant thinking about how to optimize the experience for new users to the product. QBO had been having issues with retaining new users beyond their free trial, so that was the issue I was set out to solve. The main project I worked on, involved building a product around connecting QBO certified accounting pros with first time users in a real time, uber-like setting in order to drive higher product retention as well as drive leads to our accounting partners. Although I was only on the team for six months, I was involved in the early ideation of this product as well as four stages of experiments which led to a MVP being created. The project has been highly successful and now has a dedicated team working out of the Plano, TX office to continue solving this issue. During this time I independently managed a team of eight software engineers and three UX/UI designers in order to build, design, and test our product feature.

Additionally, I participated in a Hackathon during my time as a PM where I worked with some fantastic engineers and designers to build an adaptive personal finance app which was codenamed Jimmity Cricket. The idea behind the app was to utilize the popular swiping action to help users categorize their spending habits as either good or bad. Over a period of multiple days, users could reflect and start to better understand how they were spending money and how they perceived their purchases. Our team came in first place and was invited to be part of the gallery walk at the Intuit CTOF(Create the Offering Forum) conference. Sadly, the app never made it to production, but it was picked up by the Mint team and I have hi fidelity designs I can share upon request.

At the end of my Product Management experience, I was extremely tempted to stay in Product Management; however, I was having difficulty in finding a Product Role within Intuit that excited me. I was looking to find a team that was consumer facing with a product that I could more easily relate to myself. At the same time, I heard of an amazing opportunity within the Corporate Development team to work on some of the divestiture deals that Intuit was beginning the process on. Given my background in Finance & Banking, I was a natural fit for the team and joined the Corproate Development team for my 3rd rotation.

Intuit - Corporate Finance and Investor Relations

After graduation I landed a position at Intuit in their Rotational Development Program. The Rotational Development Program or RDP, is a highly selective early career leadership program in which Associates spend two years rotating through various facets of operations, product management, marketing, and finance. 

In the summer of 2014, I moved out to the Bay Area to begin my job at Intuit and was assigned to the Corporate Finance and Investor Relations team for my first rotation. In reflection, I don't think I could have picked a better team at Intuit to begin on. Not only was I surrounded by some of the most talented managers and leaders I've ever worked with, the departure of our lead financial analyst at the outset of my rotational meant that I was performing the work of someone who was many years my senior. My main responsibilities were to be the lead driver of our monthly and quarterly close processes which involve aggregating data from across the business units within Intuit and presenting that to our CFO, board of directors, and to both internal and external audit teams. I also spent time with individual BUs to forecast and plan their earnings for future quarters. On the Investor relation side, I was responsible for helping to explain Intuit's broader company strategy to investors on Wall Street, which meant having a deep understanding of Intuit's core business lines.

As much as I enjoyed my time in the Corp FP&A group, at the end of my rotation, I was excited to move to a more product oriented role to strengthen my technical skill set and better understand the end to end process of developing software. With the support of Intuit, I taught myself to code some basic Javascript, took a two day in person course to become a Scrum Certified Product Owner, and landed a position as a Product Manager for Intuit's Quickbooks Online or QBO product.

Morgan Stanley - Private Equity Summer Analyst

My first work experience came after my Junior year of college (Summer 2013) when I was a  Summer Analyst for Morgan Stanley in their PE Fund of Funds Group. My main responsibility was to perform due diligence on funds of private equity companies which involved LBO modeling, question list preparation, and general research on companies and industries. It was a tremendous learning experience and it gave me my first exposure to Finance. When I returned to Hamilton in the fall I was pursuing a number of Investment Banking opportunities; however some of my close friends recommended that I look for positions on the west coast, given my interest in Technology.