Keri Findley is Chief Executive Officer of Tacora Capital, which focuses on Asset-Based Private Credit Opportunities in Specialty Finance and Insurance.  She was previously a partner at Third Point.

Our conversation starts with her childhood and in particular her high school years, when Keri spent up to 40 hours per week practicing figure skating alongside academic commitments.  With a strong aptitude for math but not some of the other subjects she was not an obvious candidate for attending Columbia, but thrived once she arrived there and found herself drawn to finance. While her figure skating was replaced by ski racing, she pivoted to finding a career on the shop floor of an investment house.

Having started in a sales role that probably was not the best fit, we hear about her retooling and pivot into more investment centric roles and hear about some of the role models who led and inspired her during this time.  She ultimately grew numerous private credit businesses within other hedge funds before developing her own fund, and we discuss this trajectory and some of its ups and downs.

Keri is firmly at the coal face in private credit and I ask her about some of the dynamics going on behind the scenes there such as actual defaults and workouts, and we learn a lot that may not make the headlines.

Finally we hear about the utmost importance of networking, particularly for women in the profession and we hear about how Keri has personally helped many women to find positions.

This episode is supported by PIMCO, a global leader in active fixed income with deep expertise across public and private markets. PIMCO invests their clients’ capital in income and credit opportunities that span the liquidity spectrum, leveraging their decades of experience navigating complex debt markets. Their flexible capital base and deep relationships with issuers have helped them become one of the world’s largest providers of traditional and alternative investment solutions and a valued financing partner. Visit pimco.com to learn more.

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