Keri Findley and the art of getting the money back

Keri Findley knows a peculiar kind of waiting: doing the work, repeating the movement, and having very little to show for it until, suddenly, a jump lands. Growing up in Los Angeles, she spent as much as 40 hours a week figure skating. School occupied the remaining gaps. Her parents insisted that college remain in the picture, even when skating seemed quite capable of consuming the whole frame.

At Columbia, she swapped the rink for club ski racing and studied operations research. Mathematics offered a language she liked. Sport offered a schedule, companions and another reason to get outdoors. The neat retrospective would turn every turn on the ice into preparation for a financial career. Her own account leaves room for something less tidy: she enjoyed it, worked hard at it and eventually found other things to do.

The useful habit was repetition. A promising first landing could be followed by weeks before the next one. Progress had to become repeatable before it meant very much. That is a demanding education in the difference between a good afternoon and a reliable process.

A career with an awkward first turn

Wall Street entered the picture through Columbia’s recruiting machinery. Findley began in asset-backed securities and collateralized debt obligation research at Morgan Stanley. These were products built from other financial obligations, a world in which the detail underneath the label mattered considerably. She had found work where being interested in the mathematics was useful.

Then came a move into sales, and an uncomfortable discovery about fit. She has spoken candidly about struggling with clients who shouted at her. The response required of a salesperson, getting back on the telephone and doing it all again, did not come naturally. An early job can issue a verdict with the confidence of a Supreme Court. It is still only one job.

Her subsequent employers included D.B. Zwirn and EOS Partners. At D.B. Zwirn, she found mentors in Rob Flowers and Ray Chan. Their importance in her account extends beyond the mechanics of evaluating investments: she remembers how they handled difficult conversations with borrowers. Lending puts people across a table from one another when the arithmetic has become inconvenient. How someone behaves at that table is part of the job.

By 2009, she had joined Daniel Loeb’s Third Point to build its structured credit business. She stayed until 2017 and became a partner in 2016. The progression carried her from learning inside existing operations to being responsible for creating one. A business has to function on the ordinary days too, when nobody is announcing a promotion.

The favorite class turns up at work

One of Findley’s favorite Columbia subjects was stochastic calculus. Later, while working with loan transition matrices at Morgan Stanley, she recognized the connection. The paths a loan could take through repayment and default resembled the problems she had enjoyed in class. The degree had followed her to the desk, wearing a different name badge.

That episode helps explain the particular appeal of credit. A loan portfolio contains many possible journeys. The lender has to consider timing, cash collections and the possibility that a borrower stops paying. A confident forecast about a company’s future leaves much of that work undone. Findley’s mathematical interest had found a practical object.

Her interest in financial technology developed while she was at Third Point. In a 2022 account of her career, she described moving from the aftermath of the financial crisis toward arranging deals with fintech originators. The attraction was increasingly to businesses making new financial products, and to the financing those products required. After Third Point, she continued doing transactions with partners before putting the activity into a dedicated firm.

The business behind the business

There was an institutional stop along the way. In February 2020, the publicly traded investment company then called Sutter Rock Capital, later SuRo Capital, appointed her senior managing director and a senior member of its investment committee. Its strategy was expanding to include private credit alongside equity investments in venture-backed companies.

The company described opportunities to lend against assets at businesses that needed capital, sometimes with warrants giving the lender a potential share of future equity upside. That combination matters to understanding Findley’s later venture. Interest income and participation in a company’s growth can sit in the same transaction. They answer different questions, and the structure has to account for both.

Tacora took shape in 2021. Investing began in 2022. Peter Thiel backed the first fund, giving Findley the support to turn a way of doing deals into an organization of her own. Starting independently had not been her original preference. She explored partnerships before concluding that another organization’s operations and infrastructure would also come with its own complications.

Independence meant choosing which complications to own. Recruiting, administration and building a working team would now belong to her firm. In an August 2026 conversation, she described Tacora as a team of 12, grown from an initial partnership with Claire Councill. The founder who understood other businesses’ financing needs had acquired a business whose everyday needs were her responsibility.

An invoice has no elevator pitch

Tacora announced a $250 million first close in March 2022. Its opening proposition addressed companies whose technology came attached to substantial assets: loans, real estate, contracts or insurance policies. Venture equity could help create the company, but financing everything with ownership capital could become expensive for its founders.

Consider the distinction in ordinary terms. Paying a team to develop a product creates an uncertain future business. Funding a portfolio of existing financial assets presents another set of questions: what cash should arrive, when should it arrive, and what protection exists if it does not? Both activities need money. They need not use precisely the same kind.

Findley’s stated ambition was to separate the performance of assets from the broader gamble on a venture-backed company. Tacora’s announced toolkit included debt, equity and other structured financing instruments. The purpose was to help companies expand their asset base while limiting how much ownership they surrendered. A financing solution is useful only if it fits the thing being financed.

The language can sound fussy next to a startup pitch. Yet an invoice will not become more collectible because the presentation has excellent typography. It has a payer, an amount and a due date. Those particulars give the lender something concrete to examine, even when the surrounding company belongs to an industry still inventing itself.

Creativity, with a repayment schedule

Findley describes creativity as an investing strength. In her formulation, the work involves finding a solution that suits the borrower and the company. Assets that generate cash or have a resale market can provide ways to recover value when a transaction goes wrong. The potential exit from a troubled loan belongs in the original decision to make it.

This makes for an unusual pairing of temperaments. A lender working with young companies needs enough imagination to understand an unfamiliar business and enough skepticism to examine the collateral. Tacora’s place in financial technology and related sectors brings those requirements together. The inventive part is in the design of the financing as well as the product being financed.

An asset-backed loan still carries risk. The presence of collateral does not settle questions about its value or how readily it can be sold. The appeal of Findley’s approach is the specificity of the questions it asks. Her borrower may be describing a future market. She also needs to understand the assets already on the balance sheet.

“I think my edge has always been in creativity.”

Keri Findley

A bigger fund, a deliberate loan size

In July 2025, Tacora announced $685 million for Fund II, against an initial $500 million target. Fundraising took less than nine months. Nearly all the first fund’s investors returned, joined by institutions including endowments, foundations and pensions. The audience for Findley’s approach had widened beyond the early backers.

The firm nevertheless described a continuing focus on loans of $10 million to $50 million. Fund size and transaction size tell different stories. More committed capital can support more activity without requiring every borrower to be larger. That distinction is easy to lose when the headline number has nine digits and a pleasing upward slope.

The numbers also need their proper labels. Commitments describe money investors agree to supply to a fund. They do not describe profits, realized returns or the founder’s personal wealth. The visible achievement here is building an investment business that attracted a second pool of capital, while retaining a defined range of financing needs it wanted to serve.

The next ordinary day

Findley’s public conversations also return to who gets to build a career in finance. She has discussed networking and helping women find positions. Her own path included a role that fit badly, mentors she valued and increasing responsibility before founding a firm. That history gives practical weight to the idea that someone’s first assignment need not determine the rest of their working life.

There is a pleasing lack of ceremony in her description of the lending objective: advance money and get it back. Around that simple task sit unfamiliar companies, negotiations, mathematical models and the responsibilities of employing other people. The simplicity survives because so much work goes into it.

The former skater’s story offers a useful scale for looking at all of this. A fund close is a public event. Building a business continues the following morning. Someone has to examine the next opportunity, ask the awkward question and decide whether the money has a credible route home. The landing matters. So does being able to do it again.