Tanja Tenniea

I started my career at Morgan Stanley in the London office, where I worked on the media and telecoms team. This is where I gained a lot of technical experience in helping model large M&A transactions. I then transferred over to the technology team, and I would say my time on the technology team were the most formative years. I got to work on basically all the sub-segments within technology - internet businesses like Facebook, Google, Twitter, WhatsApp, and then semiconductors and software as a service companies. I worked in San Francisco from 2013 to 2016. Then, for personal reasons, I moved to Los Angeles and joined the consumer retail group at Morgan Stanley. I was able to leverage my experience in tech because e-commerce was emerging as a major sales channel for a lot of consumer businesses. By virtue of me working with a lot of internet companies, I had a deep understanding of this e-commerce channel. When I moved to the consumer team, I combined my experience in internet and leveraged it towards consumer brands. I got to work with some of the e-commerce leaders like Honest Company (we took them public), Allbirds (a direct-to-consumer shoe brand), and Figs (a direct-to-consumer medical apparel brand). In addition to working with e-commerce leaders, I worked with traditional retailers, primarily on the apparel retail side - large corporates like Gap, Nordstrom, and Levi's. I also worked with restaurant businesses and helped sell Coffee Bean and Tea Leaf, a global coffee shop chain, to an Asian buyer. For the past 3 years, I have specialized in sell-side M&A, working with beauty and wellness brands to help them raise capital from private equity investors or find strategic buyers. I currently work at North Point, where I work much more directly with founders themselves on smaller, emerging high-growth brands. My job is extremely multifaceted - I do both selling and business development, tracking the landscape of consumer brands to identify potential targets, reaching out to those people, and building relationships. Once they mandate us on a potential sell side, I work very closely with them in the trenches, distilling the investment highlights of the business, figuring out the positioning, curating the buyer list, and reaching out to the buyers. I maintain a network with potential investors and strategic partners like L'Oreal, Estee Lauder, and Shiseido.