Matt Dabaco

Class of 2012, Silver Lake Partners

I graduated from Notre Dame in 2012 with a major in Finance. I currently works as a Private Equity Associate at Silver Lake Partners.

As an undergraduate, I was actively involved within the SIBC’s Finance division and led the Council’s Houlihan Lokey Restructuring and GTCR LBO projects. I also served as SIBC’s Finance Director in 2011.

The SIBC was an invaluable experience because it helped me understand my career choices prior to making the decision to pursue finance as a major and ultimately, as a career. The SIBC was a platform that allowed me to experiment with different career paths in very low-risk semester long projects. The hands-on nature of the projects provided me clarity for what I wanted to do as it gave me the opportunity to play the role of an intern or a recent graduate without having to fully commit to a given field.  Through the SIBC, I was able to understand fully which aspects I liked about business and which I didn’t in order to shape my initial career goals.

Through its semester long projects and its interactions with alumni, the SIBC helped me understand the skillset required to excel in finance and enabled me to recognize what skills I wanted to develop in each position. This allowed me to create a checklist of desired skills that I wanted to cultivate during the first few years of my career. I consciously followed that list to ensure I was taking advantage of my opportunities to continually better myself. Even more, the SIBC helped me perceive the key differences in skillsets between a sell-side analyst (such as an investment banking analyst via the Credit Suisse IPO project) and an investor (such as a private equity associate via the GTCR LBO project) and recognize that there is a natural progression from being an advisor to being a principal investor.

If I had to describe SIBC in two words, they would be Developmental and Jumpstarter.