Analysis
Research and strategy work, with the documents to back it up.
Callaway Golf: an activist case
Strategy final project · Prof. Mark DesJardine, Tuck School of Business, May 2026 · Team lead · Graded 100%
Two other groups analyzed the Topgolf merger from Topgolf's side. We picked Callaway on the other side of the same deal. Our thesis: divest Topgolf and OGIO, acquire GolfTEC and Sun Mountain, and turn Callaway into a focused pure-play golf company built around the avid golfer.
"This is one of the strongest decks I've seen. The thesis is crisp and stated up front... every analytical framework the assignment asks for is not only present but deployed with genuine rigor and tied back to the single avid-golfer thesis."
"The ‘reversing the pattern’ insight (TravisMathew worked because it was small, pure-play, customer-aligned, operationally independent, and Sun Mountain / GolfTEC fit that template while Topgolf and Wolfskin didn't) is exactly the kind of original synthesis that separates a top deck."
"On your presentation: perfect presentation! Jack came out strong. Stood in middle of room. Strong and clear recommendation with clear thesis."
- Role
- Team lead, 5-person team
- Grade
- 100%
- Capital flow
- ~$880M–$1.08B in divestitures and cash funding $350–650M of acquisitions
- Frameworks
- Porter's Five Forces, VRIO, GE-McKinsey, Better-Off and Three Tests, PESTEL, activity systems
How smart is smart money?
ECON 66: Theory of Finance, Dartmouth, March 2025
Do VCs actually have better information than the market? I built a dataset of 23,470 deals from raw SEC Form D filings to find out. The short answer is no. An initial signal disappeared once I added standard macro controls. VCs read the same public information everyone else does.
The more interesting finding: VCs respond to volatility within their own industry, not the broader economy. And they cut bigger checks in industries where companies can't easily pivot, which runs opposite to what Real Options Theory would predict. The full methodology, robustness checks, and the one data issue I flag honestly are all in the paper.
- Type
- Original empirical research
- Data
- 23,470 deals, 196 months, built from raw SEC Form D filings
- Methods
- Time-series and panel regression, Granger causality, robustness checks in Stata
- Finding
- No private VC foresight; industry volatility drives check sizes
GHC Partners: market research
Live work product for a venture fund · included three times in LP reports
I produce quarterly VC market overviews for GHC's managing partner using data from Bain, PitchBook, NEPC, and NVCA. When the partner asked how current volatility compared with past crises, I calculated it rather than guessing: 33.9% annualized on the 20-day realized volatility measure, closest to the 2008-09 regime. That's the kind of question I like — answerable with data if you're willing to go get the data.
Fund correspondence and full memos are confidential. Summaries here are limited to my own analysis of public data.
- Audience
- Managing partner and LPs
- Cadence
- Quarterly
- Sources
- Bain, PitchBook, NEPC, NVCA, LSEG