About
I am an Assistant Professor of Finance and Entrepreneurship at the Tepper School of Business at Carnegie Mellon University, which I joined in 2010. Teaching responsibilities include an MBA course on venture capital and private equity and an undergraduate course in entrepreneurial finance. I received my PhD in economics from the University of California, San Diego in 2010. Since 2006 I have worked as a quantitative advisor for Correlation Ventures, a venture capital firm based in San Diego.
Research
My research focuses on the financing, valuation, and financial intermediation of high-growth entrepreneurial firms. I am interested in how these features of the venture capital (VC) and private equity markets relate to entrepreneurial firm survival and outcomes. For example, what role does debt play in solving incentive or investment problems? The entrepreneurial firm differs in unique ways from the public firms that are the focus of most empirical work in finance and economics. Investment and valuation decisions in the face of the extreme information asymmetries and agency problems in the VC market provide a unique environment for understanding firm policy decisions in general.