A little extra detail on my initial journey through the corporate world of finance & technology

prior experience 

Carta (2020 - 2023)

Strategy & BizOps Manager

I came across Carta after reading Tribe Capital’s piece on Carta’s vision, where Carta’s mission of building infrastructure for the inefficient, opaque private markets with the ultimate goal of facilitating deeper liquidity resonated with me, especially given my experience in the public markets via investment banking. I personally wanted experience the world of venture-backed technology start-ups while leveraging my background in deal-making & simultaneously gaining tangible operating skills to see what the day to day of building a a high-growth software company was like. I was the first hire in the Corporate Development team within Strategy & BizOps, reporting to the Head of Corporate Development and ultimately the Chief Strategy Officer.

I had the opportunity to work on a variety of initiatives, with my work falling into four main buckets: 1) M&A execution 2) corporate strategy 3) venture investing and 4) new product incubation. On the M&A front, this involved work across all stages of a start-up acquisition process from beginning to end - target identification and assessment, spearheading / structuring / diligencing / negotiating deals in conjunction with internal and outside counsel, and integration work. I led our acquisition of YearEnd which was part of our entry into the tax advisory business, our foray into India with our acquisition of ZenEquity, as well as our expansion into the European market and bolstering of our SPV business with our acquisition of Vauban. On the strategy side, I worked closely with Product and BizOps counterparts to define both short term and long term strategy for Carta, where I engaged in dialogue on consistent basis with our Exec Team on a variety of initiatives pertaining to growth opportunities, market dynamics, high-level strategic thinking , and buy / build / partner thinking across the various segments of our business. For Carta Ventures, this involved traditional corporate venture work - building relationships with entrepreneurs in our various markets (e.g. fund administration, liquidity) as well as emerging managers, where I helped write 10+ checks into start-ups under our corporate venture thesis and 40+  LP checks into emerging managers to help seed the next stage of venture capital GP’s. Finally, on new product incubation, I had a chance to work on launching our Seed Round Closings offering, providing a white-glove service to allow for a more seamless way for entrepreneurs to close their seed rounds.

My experience at Carta gave me exposure to the inner working of the venture ecosystem and start-ups, refined my business / strategy / product chops, provided a good experience in the type of problems faced by ambitious teams tackling difficult, complex problems and taught me the importance of thinking big, ownership, and believing you can have an impact. At the tail end of my tenure, Carta’s business hit both some internal and external road bumps due to the changing macro venture environment which placed pressure on our core business and ability to use M&A to drive growth with Carta also beginning to face internal culture strife which stifled progress.

From this experience, there are a few things I’m interested in exploring when it comes to the world of entrepreneurship - how organization function as complex adaptive systems (with thinking by Stripe’s Head of Corporate Strategy Alex Komoroske as a jumping off point), the role that power and influence play in organizations (Samo Burja’s Great Founder Theory), leveraging military strategy as a way to augment strategic business thinking (e.g. John Boyd’s a Discourse on Winning and Losing is a great synthesis across disciplines initially based on Sun Tzu’s Art of War), leadership and creating optimal teams (Jason Caldwell’s experience rowing the Atlantic w/ the associated leadership lessons gleaned and the timeless heroes such as Ernest Shackleton and Teddy Roosevelt), and of course general business & innovation strategy (to name a few but my personal favorite being the late Dee Hock who founded Visa as well as folks like Brian Arthur from the Santa Fe Institute)

Credit Suisse (2017 -2020)

M&A Investment Banking Analyst

My first job after college was in the Mergers & Acquisition group at Credit Suisse. Going to school at Columbia, pre-professionally there was a strong pull for students to go into either finance or consulting - hard to resist the tantalyzing allure of a prestigious, secure, high-optionality and relatively high-paying job. In retrospect, my first hand experience with both Girardian memetic desire and accepting a Faustian bargain. This gave me an experience into the heart of capitalism and the very competitive world of high finance in New York as a young 20-something in New York City. Pragmatically, it provided a great starting corporate bootcamp, general fluency in finance & the corporate world while developing quite the thick skin and resilience.

Plenty of stories to talk about about here, but this experience was a more muted but not too far off version of what you see on the HBO show Industry. 100+ work weeks, late night seamless orders from Tao, take-privates and hostile takeovers, being an absolute wizard in Excel, board meetings, fire drills, Reverse Morris Trusts, bull pen bonding with your fellow analysts, dealing with the quirks and particularities of Managing Directors, designing deal toys, buying Gucci loafers with your first year bonus, DCF’s, WACC analysis, being in the office at 3am correcting formatting and footnotes for valuation materials that an Exec team of a multi-billion public company probably won’t read, and of course - asking yourself existential questions about the nature of late-stage capitalism.

Professionally, it was a great experience in gaining deal exposure from the advisory perspective, where I worked as an excel monkey for a variety of deals such as: Dr. Pepper’s merger with Keurig Green Mountain, Dana’s white knight attempt to acquire GKN Driveline business, Liberty Media’s potential bid for a stake of CAA, Eli Lily’s acquisition of ARMO Biosciences, and my personal favorite given my love for books and growing up going to Barnes & Noble stores - Elliott Management’s take private of Barnes & Noble.

College / Pre-Vocational (pre-2017)

Science Researcher - or more aptly, “Math & Science Nerd”

Before the days of corporate life, apartment hunting, and adult responsibilities, my main passion was for mathematics and science. I came to Columbia in part due to a scholarship called the Science Research Fellowship, where I was interested in studying statistical neuroscience and better understanding the computational nature of the brain. Specifically, in college under the guidance of the Statistics Department, I worked on a research project where I implemented an algorithm (the trusty Kalman filter) to detect when neurons fired in fluorescent neuronal imagining of a mice’s motor cortex to map neuronal images to movement. Relatively basic but instilled in my a curiosity in mathematical neuroscience that I’m still exploring via the work of Karl Friston, Jordan Peterson, and Ian McGhilichrist today. My interest in research started in high school, where one of the defining moments was a summer spent at the Summer Science Program (SSP) in New Mexico, where a group of self-ordained “astro-nerds” learned all about astrophysics and math / CS to implement an algorithm (The Gaussian Method of Orbit Determination, if you were curious) to predict and track an astroid in the night sky based on data collections from an observatory.