KTDR Capital, Newport Beach, CA
This summer I interned at KTDR Capital, an investment firm, based out of Newport Beach, Calif., that seeks majority investments in growing lower- to middle-market businesses. My role as an analyst was to search for potential investment opportunities. Each industry is unique, so some preliminary research into the industry is required, which leads to some interesting discoveries. I learned a lot about the KTDR investment criteria/thesis and generally about company acquisitions.
We looked at various asset monitoring software industries. I learned that there is significant growth in this space. My supervisor and coworkers were helpful, especially when it came to bouncing ideas off of them. We found that many companies use this type of software. The usage varies from company to company, so it was interesting to see/research. I look forward to continuing this research. I learned a lot about how to gather and find this information. I have also learned methods of efficiency and data collection. Professionally, I am interested in the field so I will likely continue. I am generally interested in data analysis, and in some personal research I have done I realized that this field consists of the following:
• Identify the business question you’d like to answer. What problem is the company trying to solve? What do you need to measure, and how will you measure it?
• Collect the raw data sets you’ll need to help you answer the identified question. Data collection might come from internal sources, like a company’s client relationship management (CRM) software, or from secondary sources, like government records or social media application programming interfaces (APIs).
• Clean the data to prepare it for analysis. This often involves purging duplicate and anomalous data, reconciling inconsistencies, standardizing data structure and format and dealing with white spaces and other syntax errors.
• Analyze the data. By manipulating the data using various data analysis techniques and tools, you can begin to find trends, correlations, outliers and variations that tell a story. During this stage, you might use data mining to discover patterns within databases or data visualization software to help transform data into an easy-to-understand graphical format.
• Interpret the results of your analysis to see how well the data answered your original question. What recommendations can you make based on the data? What are the limitations to your conclusions?
Working at KTDR Capital helped me to develop these skills. I had to learn to identify potential companies by familiarizing myself with the investment thesis and criteria. I had to collect data using various collection methods. I had to clean the data, organizing it into a spreadsheet. I had to analyze the data by cross-referencing a company scorecard. Last, I had to interpret the data and report my findings. Thankfully, through the ASIP program, I was able to pursue this work and further my academic and professional career goals.