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%

This is an activist investor case study from a graduate-level strategy course at Tuck Business School. I led a five-person team analyzing Callaway Golf after its Topgolf merger compressed the company's valuation multiple and blurred what the business actually was. Writing from the perspective of an activist fund, we built the case for a focused pure-play golf company: divest Topgolf and OGIO, acquire GolfTEC and Sun Mountain, and rebuild the business around the avid golfer.

"This is one of the strongest decks I've seen. 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 is exactly the kind of original synthesis that separates a top deck... On your presentation: perfect presentation! Jack came out strong. Strong and clear recommendation with clear thesis."

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How smart is smart money?

ECON 66: Theory of Finance, Dartmouth, March 2025

Do VCs actually have better information than the market?

The idea comes from Real Options theory. When uncertainty rises, the value of waiting rises with it, so rational investors facing irreversible commitments should cut their investment size. A VC check is exactly that kind of commitment: illiquid, long-horizon, hard to unwind, and made in the most uncertain corner of the market. If VCs truly anticipate uncertainty, average check sizes should shrink before it registers in public measures like the Economic Policy Uncertainty (EPU) index.

To answer the question, I built a dataset of 23,470 deals from raw SEC Form D filings and tested how log changes in check size predicted, or were driven by, EPU and industry-specific public equity volatility across different horizons.

The answer is no. The initial bivariate 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 and robustness checks are in the paper.

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