Sr. Director, Corporate Development & Chief of Staff to the CEO / Gotham Greens
She learned to underwrite deals on a trading floor and in a private equity shop. Now she helps run one of America's largest indoor farms - where the numbers grow in greenhouses.
Gina Puccinelli spends her days at the seam of a fast-growing company. As Senior Director of Corporate Development and Chief of Staff to the CEO at Gotham Greens, she works where strategy, capital and daily execution overlap - the deals that get evaluated, the priorities that make it onto the calendar, the plans that turn into action.
Gotham Greens is not a typical place to land after Goldman Sachs and private equity. Founded in Brooklyn, the company grows leafy greens and fresh herbs year-round inside climate-controlled greenhouses, then sells them - along with salad dressings, dips and cooking sauces - to grocery stores and restaurants across the country. It is agriculture reimagined as supply chain, brand and capital plan all at once. Puccinelli sees all three.
The chief of staff title is famously hard to pin down. There is no clean job description, no two days alike. In practice it means being the connective tissue around a CEO: translating vision into workstreams, keeping the executive team pointed in the same direction, and stepping into whatever the moment demands. Pair that with corporate development - the deal-making, partnership and financing side of the business - and you have a role built for someone comfortable with both the spreadsheet and the strategy.
Women entering impact investing should embrace a self-starter mentality.
The line from Wall Street to a greenhouse is not a straight one. It is a decision, made more than once.
Puccinelli started where many sharp young analysts do: a summer internship at Goldman Sachs in 2014, then a full analyst seat in the bank's ranks from 2015 to 2017. From there she moved to MSD Partners, the investment firm tied to Michael Dell's capital, working as a private equity associate through 2019. It was a classic high-finance apprenticeship - learning to value businesses, structure deals and read a balance sheet under pressure.
Then came the pivot. She enrolled at the Stanford Graduate School of Business, and during her MBA she chose the food and agriculture team of the Stanford GSB Impact Fund - a student-run vehicle that invests in mission-driven companies. She rose to Co-Chief Investment Officer, helping decide where the fund's capital went. A summer as a strategy intern at Apeel, the startup known for extending produce shelf life, kept her squarely in the food-tech world.
By the time she graduated in 2021, the thesis was clear. She joined Gotham Greens, and instead of investing in sustainable food from the outside, she moved inside to help build it.
The through-line across every role is the blend of financial rigor and mission focus. Here is how the experience stacks up, drawn from her public career record.
Sustainable agriculture is easy to romanticize and hard to run. Puccinelli's work is about the second part - making the economics of year-round, locally grown produce hold up at scale.
On a podcast about breaking into impact investing, she urged women to bring a self-starter mindset. She took her own advice, building from analyst to associate to chief of staff.
Every stop - Goldman, MSD, the GSB Impact Fund, Apeel, Gotham Greens - has kept her at the intersection of finance and food systems. The pattern is deliberate.
Her full name is Gina Theresa Puccinelli - the version that shows up in her Stanford GSB Impact Fund days, when she appeared on the HBS Women in VC podcast alongside teammates Neha Dalal and Lucy Svoboda to talk about how to break into impact investing.
Before Gotham Greens, her summer at Apeel put her inside one of the most talked-about names in food tech - a company whose plant-based coating helps produce last longer on shelves. It kept her in the food-and-agriculture orbit right up until she made the jump to an operating role.
The move itself is the story worth noticing. It is one thing to fund sustainable food from an investment seat. It is another to leave that seat and go help run an actual farm.