AAAIM HIGH ELI’s latest podcast “Grit, Hustle, Perseverance: my entrepreneurial path” featuring Cindy Chen Delano, Co-Founder and Partner, Invictus Global Management is now available for download via your favorite audio platforms including Apple, Spotify, Google, Amazon, etc.
Some of our favorite quotes from Cindy:
On Cindy’s early years growing up in NYC Chinatown
“Very early years, my parents did everything and that’s why the entrepreneurial bent is in me. When we first came to the US, my dad delivered Chinese food and my mom worked at garment factories. And I learned the art of how important it was for child care because my mom was fired from her job because she brought my brother to work because she didn’t have child care at the time.”
On not being afraid to do the dirty work
“Things that people shied away from…[I leaned in because I wanted to do the dirty work.]. Coming from a school like St. John’s [as opposed to the Ivy League law schools], it wasn’t like I could say that I get the fun assignments… I always felt like I had to earn my place on a deal team. I always had to earn my place on the hardest cases. I always had to earn my place to do the 1st IPO out of bankruptcy. And for me, it was always about being willing to do the work and being willing to roll up my sleeves and that is why for me, bankruptcy was so exciting because it was about a turnaround story. Something is broken, something is falling to pieces, and who is going to come in and fix it.”
On why Cindy and her partner decided to launch their own drawdown fund to focus on bankruptcy claims and litigation finance
“So what we said was that if we want to drive returns and we believe in long term value creation through added components of rolling up our sleeves and helping with the litigation and reorganizing the business… how do you own that without having to trade in and out [of positions]? And we said we need to startup and borrowing from the private equity space… and leverage the closed end structure.”