I worked on the due diligence process for investing in a seed bank of native Amazonian trees in Caquetá, Colombia. The seed bank is a for-profit off-shoot of an environmental nonprofit and aims to supply the nascent carbon tax industry in the region. This would allow reforestation projects to use native trees and plants, rather than the current practice of using non-native pine and eucalyptus trees. This project aligns with Acumen's mission to invest in rural post-conflict regions of Colombia, since Caquetá is a mainly rural department that was significantly impacted by the guerilla and drug violence of the last several decades. It also aligns with Acumen's mission to alleviate poverty because the seed bank is being developed in partnership with local greenhouses and young low-income entrepreneurs. Finally, it fits with Acumen's recent shift towards climate investments, considering that the low-income rural communities Acumen seeks to help will be the ones hardest hit by the climate crisis.

During this project, I applied many technical skills that I learned from my core courses at CBS. I helped prepare a model of financial projections using the skills I learned in Corporate Finance, and I analyzed the financial viability of the project by reading information from their balance sheet, cash flow, and income statements, using skills I learned in my accounting course. I employed abilities developed in my Strategy course to analyze the competitive advantage of the seed bank relative to other providers. I used the value stick method taught in the CBS course, focusing on how the seed bank's products increase customer willingness to pay, and therefore could gain a share of the market, since they could not effectively lower their prices below those of competing providers. Finally, I used my knowledge from Climate Change and the Energy Transition to better understand the carbon credit market, and how the seed bank could fit into this ecosystem.

This was a completely new field for me. While I had learned about financial analysis and modeling from my MBA courses, I had never had to apply those skills. It was challenging to deal with the imperfect information that you have in a real-world scenario, and with issues that were extremely specific to the circumstances. For example, I helped analyze the financial impact for owners of local greenhouses of partnering with the seed bank. Most of these greenhouses were located on a portion of a small holder farmer's property, so expanding them would require giving up grazing land for the owner's cattle. To calculate the opportunity costs for farmers, we had to get cost and profit information from them on their current cattle operations. This was challenging, since they often did not have an exact idea of how their monthly income was broken down from their different agricultural activities, and some of their cost estimates would not be consistent. For example, they would estimate a weekly cost that was greater than a fourth of their monthly cost, and we would need to decide which number we thought was more reliable. Additionally, when trying to do financial modeling for their future costs, I had to research issues I was not familiar with, such as the ways in which fertilizer prices fluctuate, and how susceptible they are to exchange rate changes in Colombia, where much of the fertilizer is imported.

My summer internship proved to be an invaluable experience. I learned about impact investment, an area that was new and of interest to me. I was able to participate in all stages of the investment process through my participation in various projects, including searching for pipeline opportunities, conducting initial research, conducting formal due diligence, finalizing the legal documents for an investment, and following up on portfolio companies. I also gained some exposure to the challenges and processes that entrepreneurs undergo in early-stage companies, as I got to work closely with many of the founders of Acumen's current and potential investments. Moreover, I was able to implement various general skills around financial modeling and financial analysis that I had studied in my MBA courses but had never had the opportunity to apply in a real-world setting. Finally, this experience was deeply meaningful to me on a personal level. It gave me the opportunity to learn about rural regions of Colombia that I was largely unfamiliar with, as they'd been mired in conflict for the past several decades. Getting to interview the potential beneficiaries of an investment Acumen was considering, and learning about the obstacles they had faced during the peak of Colombia's guerilla and drug violence, was an incredibly moving and edifying experience.