Investment Review Committee

Douglas Clarisse is a graduate of the McDonough School of Business at Georgetown University (MBA 1992). He received his BS in Economics (1988) from the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania. He is currently a board member of the Georgetown Angel Investment Network (GAIN), and is also a board member and Treasurer of the Wharton Club of the UK, and co-chairs the UK Wharton Alumni Angel Network. He holds citizenship of the US and the UK, and is resident in London.

Doug is a co-founder and Managing Director of ProspectHill Capital Advisors. His practice includes advising on capital structure, acquisition financing, debt negotiations and restructuring, as well as start-up and venture financing. Doug is also an active angel investor, focused on tech-enabled startups.

Doug has 24 years of banking experience in New York and London. His most recent role was to establish the High Yield Capital Markets team at HSBC. In this role, he was particularly instrumental in opening the European high yield market to Greek corporate borrowers post-crisis in 2012. Previously, he has worked for banks including BNP Paribas, ABN Amro, JPMorgan and Deutsche Bank – generally working on leveraged finance and high yield debt transactions.

In his various roles, Doug has worked with startups, medium sized enterprises, and large public companies as well as with family-owned and private-equity owned companies. He has a great deal of experience interacting with institutional buyers of structured debt, as well as private equity and venture capital funds. He has extensive experience reviewing company business plans and preparing companies for negotiating with private capital providers or for accessing the public debt markets. He has completed transactions in the UK, several continental European jurisdictions, the US and the Middle East.

Osman is the founder and portfolio manager at DX2 Capital, a global long/short equity fund. Prior to founding DX2 Capital, Osman spent nearly a decade in the financial services industry with top-tier financial institutions, including Moody’s Corporation, TD Wealth Management, and Bank of America, specializing in risk management, investment strategy, and product development.

Liz Leahy (C’91) started her career as an early member of a-then-small start-up called The Princeton Review. Responsible for launching the SAT and GRAD test prep programs in different markets, she took pride as the company grew from a few employees to an international franchise. Post business school, she joined a start-up management consulting firm called Mitchell Madison, founded by ex-McKinsey Partners. She left to help launch and build Bigfoot Interactive, an early innovator in email marketing communications and best practices for Fortune 1000 companies; Bigfoot was acquired by Epsilon Interactive in 2005. Leahy then went on to participate in a number of start-ups, most notably Section 101, a website platform for music, entertainment, and lifestyle brands. She is an avid supporter for artist’s rights and fair compensation for their creations, and she sits on the board of the Artist Rights Alliance.

Leahy has also been an active early stage investor and start-up advisor over the course of her career. She recently launched a new fund, Purples Sage Ventures, that is focused on equality in funding for underrepresented founders with products/services that reimagine work and education, increase business and personal productivity, enable consumers to live well, and make supply chains more durable.

Leahy is a 1991 graduate of the College, the parent of two Hoyas, and a Columbia Business School alum. Entrepreneurial education and investing sit at the nexus of her passion for creating opportunities for young companies to grow. Leahy is the chair of the Georgetown Angel Investor Network (GAIN), the only official Georgetown University investor network. The network works in partnership with university-wide entrepreneurial efforts to help amplify the Georgetown start-up ecosystem. She is the pitch coach in residence at Columbia University start-up lab and sits on the board of the Columbia Business School Lang Center for Entrepreneurship. She is a Lean Launchpad convert and co-teaches the course with Steve Blank at Columbia Business School.