Aashish, Jain

Internship Description

Aashish Jain, ‘19BUS, interned as a private equity summer associate for 17 Asset Management (17AM), a global asset management company that specializes in blended finance and aligns investments with the 17 UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), with the belief that achieving these Global Goals will contribute to a world that is economically prosperous, environmentally secure, and more inclusive while also delivering superior long-term returns. Aashish sourced and screened potential investments for the SDG Jordan Growth Fund, and participated in due diligence, assessed financial strengths and risks, and developed an investment thesis and framework that aligns all investments with the UN SDGs.

I worked on three major projects throughout the summer, including creating a decision matrix for the firm’s fund sourcing and creation, a playbook for the firm’s design thinking approach to investments, and comprehensive due diligence research for two fund investment opportunities. 17AM is a newly formed asset management firm that focuses its investment thesis on advancing the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals while delivering market-based financial returns. Given the unique approach to integrating financial and social returns, 17AM required a specific process for investing that could be used internally for firm operations and externally for LPs fundraising. Both the decision matrix and playbook were critical tools for 17AM to employ during their fund sourcing and management. The playbook details the full fund creation process, integrating both the traditional asset management steps and social impact metrics to generate financial and social returns for the global community. The decision matrix is a specific proprietary tool that the firm can use to benchmark and evaluate investment decisions. In addition, I performed comprehensive due diligence on two investment opportunities, one for a university-partnership based fund and one place-based fund that target separate investment stages, ticket sizes, and target portfolio companies. Because of the varied nature of the opportunities, I gained experience in both early-stage and late-stage diligence, and in the process, I created a diligence framework for the firm to use for future investment evaluations and created concept notes for both partnerships that the firm can use to carry the conversation forward.

During the diligence process for both investment opportunities, I relied heavily on core finance classes such as Accounting, Corporate Finance and Capital Markets in better understanding evaluation metrics between portfolio companies. Additional electives such as Debt Markets, Activist Investing Seminar, Mergers & Acquisitions and Corporate Transactions helped in providing investment models and frameworks to use when calculating the Enterprise Value or understanding the capital structure of portfolio companies. Other classes such as Private Equity in Emerging Markets, Economics of Strategic Behavior, Operations Strategy, and Supply Chain Management helped provide me with tools to analyze core company strategies within the target addressable markets. Finally, my leadership position with Microlumbia helped expose me to diligence, financial analysis, emerging markets analysis and SME investments that were very useful in executing diligence and understanding emerging market-level indicators. Specifically, having worked with a Microlumbia-partner in the FinTech SME industry in South Africa, I better understood challenges that Micro- and Small- Enterprises face in operations and growth and was able to bring this perspective when interacting with MSMEs in emerging markets for 17AM.

Being a “start-up”, often priorities and projects changed day to day, which made workplanning somewhat difficult. Despite having an established weekly workplan to begin the internship, many key deliverables had evolved into broader objectives or new deliverables entirely by the end of the internship. This made the work challenging and interesting as I had to react quickly over the course of the summer to new initiatives and priorities. The quickly changing nature made it imperative to be organized at the beginning of the week with specific internal deliverables, but also being flexible to allow for new projects. In addition, the team was always traveling internationally to fundraise for new emerging markets funds and this often made my work remote. I had to communicate by Slack, Zoom Video Meeting, or WhatsApp phone call being based in New York City while interfacing with team members traveling in Jordan or Chile.

The 13-week internship provided unique insights into the worlds of private equity, asset and wealth management, impact investing, venture capital, and social development as the firm and my work straddled all of the above fields. In addition to providing specific deliverables, it was a unique experience in working for a start-up while conducting meetings with institutional investors. My future goals are to combine the best of impact investing and traditional asset management to transform the investment management industry in integrating a true impact lens into every investment decision. Just as Larry Fink’s letter shook the public equities world, I want to expand the financial world’s narrow view of impact as simply ESG, and bring conscious investing in impact into the mainstream. From my summer, I learned that there is a large opportunity to integrate impact into traditional financial products, and there is a significant need to bring more transparency to the plethora of players in this space.