Jennifer Davis

Partner at Bain Capital (Consumer and Retail Vertical)
 

Background
Jennifer is a Partner in the Consumer and Retail Vertical at Bain Private Equity and a member of the North American Private Equity Team.
 
Prior to joining Bain Capital in September 2022, Ms. Davis was a partner in Consumer/Retail Investment Banking at Goldman, Sachs & Co., where she served as Head of Retail Investment Banking and Head of Consumer/Retail Client Coverage. She was also Vice President in the Industrials Group, where she focused on advising a variety of diversified industrial clients. In 2007, Jennifer spent a year in the Mergers Leadership Group, where she advised the firm’s corporate clients across all industry groups. Jennifer has also worked at Credit Suisse First Boston and Donaldson, Lufkin & Jenrette.
 
Jennifer earned a BS in Applied Economics and Business Management from Cornell University and an MBA from Harvard Business School. She serves on the Board of Directors for The Opportunity Network, a member of the Alumni Advisory Council for the SC Johnson College of Business at Cornell University, and a member of the Cornell University Council. She and her husband, Michael, live in New York City with their two sons.
 
I read that you went to college thinking you would be a veterinarian! How did you end up in investing?

Growing up, I loved animals. I worked for a lot of my high school career at a veterinary hospital. The veterinarian I worked for had gone to Cornell, which is how I got introduced to the school. Then, when I went to choose my major, my father suggested I major in business because the business program at Cornell is in the College of Agriculture and Sciences, so you have to take a lot of sciences to graduate. He told me it was a two-fer: "you get a business degree and you fulfill the requirements for vet school."
 
I found that I really enjoyed my business classes, having never been exposed to them before, like marketing, accounting, and finance... and that I did not enjoy my college-level science classes as much! At the end of my freshman year, I decided to focus specifically on business and finance, which led me to investment banking initially.
 
You recently transitioned from a role from as the Head of Retail Investment Banking at Goldman Sachs to a Partner at Bain Capital in the Consumer and Retail Vertical. What inspired you to make the switch from banking to private equity?

I was in my mid-40s, and we were living through the COVID pandemic. I was reflecting on having been at the same place doing the same job, just at increasing seniority, for twenty years at Goldman Sachs. I just thought it was time to think about something else.
 
I was fortunate that several members of the Bain Capital consumer team had been my clients; I had worked with Ryan Cotton on the Canada Goose IPO and interacted with the rest of the team over the years. Ryan had become a friend, and I confided to him I was thinking about other options. He said, "why don't you think about joining us at Bain?"
 
I was intrigued by the opportunity to think more immersively about consumer and retail, the sectors in which I had spent a lot of time, and to put my money where my mouth is when it comes to ideas for companies. It was a way to pivot mid-career and think more expansively than I had previously had the chance to do.
 
What have you found rewarding about your new role? What have you found challenging?

It's definitely 95-5 in terms of rewarding vs. challenging. What's rewarding is the chance to think deeply and more immersively. I feel like my prior job was an inch deep and a mile wide, and now I get to go an inch wide and a mile deep with a specific company.
 
The second thing is the team and culture at Bain. I feel incredibly fortunate because of how everyone is kind, willing to help, and incredibly smart; I feel like I'm learning from everyone every day.
 
In terms of challenging, it's a different pace from banking. Banking was a little bit frenetic—you had fifty things going at once—and there were a lot of fire drills. Here, there's a much more nuanced, thoughtful, calibrated approach to deciding when you're going to go deep into something and how you'll spend your own and the team's resources. In banking, everything needed to be done yesterday. There were lots of late nights, weekends, holidays, all the time. For me to walk that back a little bit has been the biggest challenge.
 
Have you found anything surprising?

Private equity, and maybe Bain in particular, has a much more collaborative and consensus-driven culture that deliberates and debates pros and cons on virtually everything, which I think is really healthy because it allows the best thinking to be brought to bear, and everyone feels included in the decision-making process (which is an advantage from cultural perspective). Maybe because of the pace in banking, there wasn't as much cross-visibility into what everyone else was doing. In the consumer vertical here, there's a lot of visibility into what we're spending our time on, how we're thinking through things, and the stage of various transactions and processes. There is clarity and transparency around the product and processes, around both what you and the rest of the team are working on, and that's really refreshing. That extends beyond the consumer vertical too—it's great to hear what other verticals are working on and what the latest state-of-play is.
 
What drew you to working with and investing in consumer and retail companies?

It was a little bit by accident. When I started at Goldman Sachs, I was actually a banker in our industrials vertical for eight or nine years. I loved it. But then a mentor at GS suggested I move to consumer/retail, as there was a position opening up in the group, and he thought I would be a good fit.
 
Why I've stayed here is that it's a sector about which everyone feels like an expert, because we're all shoppers and consumers in our personal lives, but it's actually incredibly complex and nuanced below the surface—what's happening at a branded food company is very different from what's happening at an apparel company or a beauty company. 

Consumer spending is roughly 70% of US GDP. The way the consumer feels and how they are thinking about the world is indicative of our broader society. It's an incredibly interesting sector that's always evolving—just think about the growth of e-commerce in the last 5-10 years and how it's massively changed how we all think. I find the evolution and the shifts fascinating; you're constantly learning. Whatever the hot, high-growth company is now will be totally different in 18 months. That's true in other sectors as well, but it's more tangible and visible in consumer and retail.
 
You've worked with some of the most recognizable consumer companies in the world today, from PepsiCo to Olaplex. What companies have you personally been a customer of recently?

It's funny—I'm actually not very much of a shopper! My husband is the shopper in our family. But I love trying new brands. I just tried a new body oil by a company called Elemis, which was beautiful. I learned about it on a vacation. And then a high-growth food brand called TruFru chocolate-covered frozen fruit. Those are some of the brands that I've been recently introduced to that have products I find really interesting. 
 
You're on the Board of Directors for a nonprofit called the Opportunity Network. Can you tell us more about it? How did you get involved?

I grew up in a small town in upstate New York and did not have family involved in any way, shape, or form with Wall Street or finance. My parents and brother all went to community college, so for me to go to Cornell was a big shift. I feel very grateful that a lot of the opportunities and the path that I'm on are a direct result of the educational opportunity and exposure I received at Cornell. So I feel very passionately about giving back and trying to chart that path from an educational and career opportunity perspective for others that also don't necessarily have that opportunity in their day-to-day life. I think about my own sons, who are going to be just fine because we'll be able to direct them, make introductions to them, and help guide them… but I didn't have that growing up. 
 
Even very early in my career, I worked as a mentor to kids in underrepresented communities, helping guide them on the college application process with an organization called Student Sponsor Partnership when I was right out of college. Since then, where I donate time and money has evolved a lot.
 
OppNet came to me from a business school classmate of mine who is still Chairman of the Board, and it's exactly what I aspire to do. OppNet focuses on students in underrepresented communities in NYC. They enter the program at the end of their sophomore year of high school. During their junior and senior years, the program helps them identify colleges, apply, and navigate the funding and scholarship process. 93% of the students—Fellows—are the first in their families to graduate from college. And OppNet also stays with them for four years of college to make sure their transition goes smoothly, including helping them get paid internships every summer.
 
I introduced OppNet to one of my clients, the handbag company Coach, when I was at Goldman Sachs. Coach ended up giving them their biggest foundation grant ever, several hundred thousand dollars, and now hires a lot of OppNet interns for the summer. It's a win-win for corporates who are looking to expand their pool of diverse talent and for the Fellows who graduate with a resume full of professional experience. For me, it's been wonderful to see the impact we can have on 1,000+ fellows in both their college path and career path.
 
I’ve heard you like to hike, cook, and read. Can you tell us about a recent hike, kitchen experiment, or memorable book?

My favorite hike of all time was doing Jenny Lake in Grand Teton National Park. I'd love to go do it again.
 
Something I like to cook? I'm a raving fan of a site called Once Upon a Chef. I have all their cookbooks. I probably make the chicken parmesan the most, but over the holidays I tried the molten lava chocolate cakes, which were a big hit with my family.
 
I keep a list of all the books I've read and I had to go back to the list when I saw this question… The Splendid and the Vile by Erik Larson and Sapiens by Yuval Noah Harari. The Splendid and the Vile is all about Winston Churchill, non-fiction but written in a very story-like way.
 
What advice would you share for women early on in an investing career?

I feel like I'm early on in my investing career! I'll talk about finance more generally. It can be an incredibly enriching sector to stay in. It's lucrative from a financial point of view, which is wonderful, but really just the exposure you get to so many different types of companies and different life stages with different founders and stories means that it's a constant evolution and learning process. And it is a better-paying job than so many out there, which provides the ability for me to give back to non-profits. It's nice to think about a career that is intellectually and professionally rewarding that allows you to have personal impact as well.

Thank you for your time, Jen! To learn more about Bain Capital, click here.