Yale School of Management - Alumni Leaders

"After leaving Yale SOM, I joined American Capital, a start-up investment banking firm with a business plan based on bringing together management, labor, and private and public capital in complex employee-buyout transactions. The approach to problem solving Yale SOM provided me with — rigorous, quantitative, but with a deep respect for practical political and organizational contexts — was incredibly valuable as we built the company over the following fifteen years, and turned it into a major source of mezzanine and equity capital for middle market companies. In the past two years, I’ve taken on new challenges redesigning the pension investment program for the New York City pension funds. The same approach to problem solving has been at the core of what we’re doing at the City, as we look for investment strategies that will deliver returns, and that will also be adopted by Trustees from a variety of backgrounds and with a variety of priorities."

Adam Blumenthal is a founder and Managing Partner of Blue Wolf Capital Management, a private equity firm that invests in companies in which complexity suppresses value, and in which carefully structured transactions can change organizations and create value.

Prior to founding Blue Wolf, Mr. Blumenthal served from 2002 to 2005 as First Deputy Comptroller and Chief Financial Officer for New York City Comptroller William C. Thompson, Jr. In this capacity he oversaw the capital markets activities of the Comptroller’s office, including management of the assets of the New York City Retirement Systems, issuance of budget, financial, and economic analysis, and oversight of the City’s debt issuance. During his tenure, the City’s pension assets increased from $65 billion to $85 billion as a result of strong investment gains. Mr. Blumenthal also led a restructuring of the Funds’ operations and investment strategies, including the establishment of multi-billion dollar allocations to private equity, real estate, and inflation-linked securities, the creation of a risk management unit, and securing, for the first time, funding from the pension funds to hire professional investment staff.

Prior to his work in the public sector, Mr. Blumenthal served in positions including Vice Chairman, President, Chief Operating Officer, and Chief Financial Officer of American Capital Strategies, a publicly traded buyout and mezzanine fund (NASDAQ: ACAS). Mr. Blumenthal joined ACAS in 1989, when it had one other employee and before it raised institutional capital, and helped build it into a publicly traded business development corporation with a portfolio of over $1 billion invested in sixty-three companies when he left in 2002.

Mr. Blumenthal has led or managed twenty-four transactions, totaling approximately $300 million of invested capital. Fourteen of these investments, representing $234 million of invested capital, were made subsequent to ACAS’s IPO and have been fully realized. He has led leveraged buyout transactions in complex situations in industries including environmental services, food processing and distribution, specialty vehicle manufacturing, automotive subcomponent manufacturing, and retail, and has made mezzanine investments in countless industries.

Mr. Blumenthal received a BA, magna cum laude, from Harvard College, and an MBA from the Yale School of Management. He serves on the Board of Advisors at the Yale School of Management.