Sustainable Finance — Silver Leaf Partners

Summer 2025 on the investment team at Silver Leaf Partners, a New York–based firm focused on the companies and infrastructure of the climate transition. The summer's work split three ways: modeling, pipeline research, and a CRM rebuild.

Modeling

• DCF work on early-stage sustainable-infrastructure targets — revenue forecasts, cash-flow analyses, sensitivity testing for investor presentations and funding strategies
• Supported the preparation of the IC fund pitch deck, translating thousand-row models into slide-level positions that preserved the honest middle of the range
• Tax-equity and project-finance sensitivities on renewable-energy deal structures

Pipeline research

• Read every week's industry news — private-markets flows, carbon-removal deals (Frontier / Arbor, Rubicon Carbon / Deep Sky), energy-transition credits (Kinetic Coalition retiring coal plants early), DAC-adjacent transactions — and wrote short briefs on the ones the fund thesis should track
• PitchBook research on manager performance and social-impact investing mandates
• Market-size work for the firm's target segments

CRM rebuild

Firms with small teams feel their own systems. What gets logged, gets remembered. My standing mandate for the summer was to rebuild the Client Prospect Investors workbook: map every conversation to the right fundraising stage, tag investor profiles by check size and mandate fit, and wire the deal archive back to the contact records so a follow-up email two quarters later could land with context.

I left it better than I found it.