Pauline Chow: Women in Secured Finance

Recognizing Excellence

Pauline Chow is a managing director and principal at Birch Lake, a merchant bank that combines decades of advisory experience with principal investing focused on making structured debt and equity investments where we can influence enhanced financial outcomes.

She specializes in working with founder-led businesses to develop and execute strategies for value creation, sustainable growth, and social impact. Pauline has more than two decades of experience with corporate restructurings and is accomplished in capital raising, M&A, and recapitalizations.

Pauline is a member of the Global Board of Trustees of the Turnaround Management Association (TMA), where she also serves on TMA Global’s Finance and the Network of Women Committees. She is active in the women-led investment community as a member of Private Equity Women Investor Network (PEWIN), Women’s Association of Venture & Equity (WAVE), and Women Investment Professionals (WIP).

In addition, Pauline is on the Advisory Board of VALCON, the annual business valuation conference co-sponsored by the American Bankruptcy Institute and the Association of Insolvency & Restructuring Advisors.

Pauline received her B.A. from University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and studied at American University Washington, D.C., and The London School of Economics and Political Science.

What is the best advice you ever received?

The former managing partner of my prior firm was a stoic leader of few words — he was well-respected and admired by his colleagues. He would invite me to business development lunches and sit silently observing his guests.

It was hard to discern what he was thinking, but this kept us on our toes. As the speaker, you would get an occasional nod in agreement from him and a smirk if you shared something that amused him. When he finally decided to use his voice, everyone listened with the intent to understand (versus the intent to reply).

From his actions, he instilled in me to listen more than I speak and, in doing so, I learn more than I otherwise would.

How did you approach making a big decision in your career, either moving onto a new organization or role?

In 2014, I read an article published by Harvard Business Review — How Netflix Reinvented HR. It summarized 127 PowerPoint slides drafted by Netflix’s CEO and chief talent officer.

The key principles of the Netflix Culture: Freedom and Responsibility presentation include the following:

• Leaders own the job of creating company culture and managers own the job of creating great teams

• Tell the truth about performance

• Hire, reward, and tolerate fully formed adults

• Good talent managers think like businesspeople and innovators first, and like HR people last

Although most of the tenets are common sense, they were unconventional.

When Jack Butler founded Birch Lake seven years ago, he asked me to join as the first employee of our merchant bank. We had previously worked together for 15 years and during that time, Jack was a supportive mentor — pausing when a teaching moment surfaced and offering more responsibilities, which I embraced and viewed as opportunities to grow.

He shared his vision of a merchant bank — blending structuring and advisory experience with principal investing. The offer was intriguing and over tea at the Peninsula, I brought up the Netflix culture deck. To my delight, Jack had read the presentation — all 127 slides.

We didn’t know it at the time, but our alignment on the core values led to creating Birch Lake’s culture. Eventually, our team settled on 15 core values that enable us to inspire exceptional outcomes.