Yusef Kassim joined Advent in 2019 and is a Managing Director in New York. He joined the Limited Partner Services Group in 2023, where he focuses on business development and investor relations activities, primarily in the US, Canada, and Latin America. Yusef is a member of Advent’s Global Diversity, Equity and Inclusion Committee. Previously, he was the Global Head of Business Development for Advent Global Opportunities.
Yusef has more than 20 years of business development experience, cultivating and managing relationships with leading global institutional investors. Prior to joining Advent, he was a Partner at Blue Harbour Group. Previously, Yusef held senior executive positions at Eton Park Capital Management and Gerson Lehrman Group. He began his career at Goldman Sachs as an analyst in the Equities Division.
Yusef received his BAS in Systems Engineering from the University of Pennsylvania.
How would you characterize your role in investor relations?
I’d split my role into three parts. The first is client coverage, making sure our Limited Partners (LPs) have a good sense of what we’re invested in, where we’re exiting, and what our value creation plans are. The second part is identifying a select group of potential investors to join the Advent family. This includes conducting due diligence on potential LPs to make sure they would be a good fit, getting to know them, and earning their business. The final part is around strategy. Advent will ask my group to think about trends, the market landscape, and new funds we could launch, because we’re in the best position to analyze that kind of data and present it to the managing partners.
How has Advent’s culture of collaboration helped to drive success?
An organization is only as good as its people and their quality of communication. Like a family, it can become estranged from itself if it’s not made up of rational actors who are talking thoughtfully and respectfully to each other. The Advent culture is one of teamwork, collaboration, high integrity, and strong investment and deal execution. And it needs to be, because when we make an investment, there are usually a lot of handprints on it. And for that to work, people have to be collegial and team oriented.
“An organization is only as good as its people. The Advent culture is one of teamwork, high integrity, and strong investment and deal execution.”
Yusef M. Kassim
Managing Director, Advent
What does learning and growing look like at Advent?
Advent offers great opportunities to challenge its senior folks. I was previously global head of business development for Advent Global Opportunities, our public markets investment arm. I did that for four years, until I was tapped on the shoulder to join the Limited Partner Services team in private equity. It’s been exciting to move into an asset class I wasn’t an expert in, and coming up that learning curve has been extremely rewarding. It keeps me young and multi-faceted, and I wake up every day ready to create and add value. I still feel like it’s 1999, I’m in my first year right out of UPenn, and I’m going for it. I love the work I do.
What are the aspects of your job that particularly inspire you?
It’s rewarding to think that we’re dealing with pensions, endowments, and foundations, and contributing to their mission of helping meet the needs of patients (hospital endowments), educating students (university endowments) – even helping my parents, who worked for the government for almost 40 years and retired on a state pension. We play an important part in delivering value to those pensioners, along with teachers, firefighters, police officers, and many others. It’s an extremely important remit, and I take it very seriously. I believe in the product, and I’m excited to do right by the end client that we serve.
Is there any historical figure you’d like to swap places with for a day?
My first reaction would be Albert Einstein. He understood the way the universe worked before we had the instruments to prove his theories – he did it intuitively, using paper rather than computers. The more the world researches Einstein, the more they uncover his level of brilliance. He just had a beautiful mind.
