Governing Board

Yusef M. Kassim is a Partner and Head of Business Development with Sunley House Capital Management, the public securities division of Advent International Corporation.  He leads Sunley House’s global marketing and investor facing activities.  Prior to joining Advent International, Mr. Kassim was a Managing Director within the Capital Strategies division at Blue Harbour Group, L.P., a multi-billion dollar investment fund employing a concentrated Active Ownership investment strategy.  Prior to joining Blue Harbour, Mr. Kassim was a senior member of the Investor Relations Group at Eton Park Capital Management, a global multi-strategy investment firm.  Eton Park had several hundred global institutional investors and $14 billion under management at its peak.  Before joining Eton Park, Mr. Kassim was a Partner and Head of Marketing & Investor Relations for R6 Capital Management, a multi-strategy hedge fund with a focus on corporate credit and asset-based lending.  Mr. Kassim has over 20 years of investor relations and business development experience, cultivating, and managing relationships with leading global institutional investors.

Prior to joining R6 Capital, Mr. Kassim joined a start-up, investment research firm, Gerson Lehrman Group (GLG), where he served in various leadership capacities from 2001 to 2007.  He was promoted to Senior Vice President of the Sales Division, where he developed and managed the firm’s key relationships with hedge funds, private equity firms, mutual funds, proprietary trading desks, and global asset managers.  Prior to his senior role in the Sales Division, Mr. Kassim served as Co-Head of the firm’s Technology, Media & Telecom research practice from 2001-2004.  During this time, he broadened the firm’s research coverage to encompass private and publicly-traded technology, media and telecom companies throughout the U.S., Europe, and Asia.  As one of GLG’s first employees and throughout his tenure at the firm, he played an instrumental role in their strategic and business development efforts including growing the client base to over 400 of the leading investment institutions.  Prior to joining GLG in 2001, Mr. Kassim worked for Goldman, Sachs & Co. in the Prime Brokerage Sales Group, specializing in Merger and Convertible Arbitrage focused hedge funds.

Mr. Kassim has exhibited professional excellence throughout his 20 year career on Wall Street.  He graduated from the University of Pennsylvania in 1999 with a Bachelor of Applied Science in Systems Engineering from the School of Engineering and Applied Science and a minor in Mathematics from the College of Arts and Sciences.  Mr. Kassim serves as the Chair of the Penn Fund Executive Board helping support and advise the fundraising activities to grow the University of Pennsylvania’s endowment and the Penn Fund.  He is also a strong advocate of mentoring programs for disadvantaged youth, and serves as a founding Board Member of America Needs You (ANY), a nonprofit whose mission is to fight for economic mobility for ambitious, first-generation college students through transformative mentorship and intensive career development.  In 2012, Mr. Kassim was one of 25 Americans selected to be a delegate to Germany and serve as a Young Leader by the American Council on Germany whose mission is to address current international challenges and strengthen German-American relations.  In 2015, Mr. Kassim was selected for The Network Journal’s 40 Under Forty Achievement Awards.  In 2016, he was selected as one of Institutional Investor’s Hedge Fund Rising Stars and for the Milken Institute Young Leaders Circle.  In 2017, he was selected as a CUP Catalyst Change Agent in Finance by the Council of Urban Professionals.

Mr. Kassim resides in New Jersey with his wife and three children.