Billion Dollar Backstory 102. How a Female, First-Gen American Founder Turned European Credit on Its Head | Meet Agata Dornan and Her $230M Boutique, Chepstow Lane
When you think about European credit investing, most people assume it’s only for the big shops with billions under management. Agata Dornan, Founder & CIO of Chepstow Lane, is here to challenge that, and she’s doing it with smarts, grit, and real talk about what it really takes to succeed.
Agata’s path to launching her own boutique wasn’t a straight line. As a first-generation American who started out on the pre-med track at Middlebury, she discovered her passion for finance by accident (thanks to one random economics class) and never looked back.
In this Episode, Agata sits down with Stacy to discuss:
- How a single economics class flipped the script on her entire career
- Why her liberal arts background is a secret weapon (and how it helped her land Chepstow Lane’s first big allocation)
- Lessons from her time at Soros (including what it was like working on Wall Street after 9/11)
- The hard truths every boutique founder needs to know about building a team and finding the right investors
- How Chepstow Lane is winning by focusing on the white spaces most firms overlook
- What she’s seeing in European credit today and why it might be time to pay attention
About Agata Dornan:
Agata led Soros Fund Management’s European credit investments from 2012 to 2020, managing corporate credit and financials, and became a partner and portfolio manager in 2016. Before that, she was a distressed research analyst at BlueMountain Capital in London, and she started her buy-side career at Soros in 2005 on the Distressed team, which later spun out to form Camulos Capital. She moved to London with them in 2006.
She began her career at Deutsche Bank in NYC as an investment banking analyst in Energy and Chemicals. Agata has been investing in the US since 2005 and in Europe since 2006, with deep experience in restructurings across sectors and credit cycles.
Agata graduated from Middlebury College in 2002 with a degree in International Politics and Economics, was awarded a Fulbright Scholarship, and completed programs at LSE and Tuck Business School. She lives in London with her husband and two children and is a dual US and Polish national
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