About
Aref M. Bajwa
I was born in Scotland and grew up in Ireland, on an American compound in Saudi Arabia and, ultimately, in suburban St. Louis, Missouri. I studied at Indiana University's Kelley School of Business, where I was a member of Sigma Chi and served on the Indiana University Student Foundation steering committee. After graduating, I began a roughly twenty-year career in finance in Chicago that took me to Wall Street, Silicon Valley and eventually Orange County, and along the way I earned an MBA from the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University. I spent the first part advising companies on financial advisory, valuation and M&A matters, then moved into director-level corporate finance roles at public, private-equity-backed and venture-backed companies, focusing on growth initiatives, investor relations, capital markets, treasury and divestitures. After a stroke in 2024, I began using voice-to-text and other tools to write about finance, economics and politics. The site is a work in progress, and I appreciate you visiting.
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My parents were born in Pakistan just after Partition. My mother qualified as a doctor in Lahore in 1973, my father in Multan in 1974, and they married in 1974.
My father took a post in Tehran, and my mother joined him. My older brother was born there in 1978, and the family left about a year before the revolution.
My father began his training in radiology in Vienna. My parents lived there until they moved to the UK in 1980.
My parents both trained in the UK. I was born near Glasgow in May 1984.
Both my parents took hospital posts in Cork. It was the last stop in about eight years of British and Irish training.
Saudi Aramco recruited my parents, my mother as a pediatrician and my father as a radiologist. We lived on an American compound, and I went to an American school with expats and children from around the world. We were there from the beginning to the end of the Gulf War.
We moved to St. Louis in December 1992, and I started school there that winter. I'm Midwestern at heart.
I studied accounting and finance at the Kelley School of Business. I was a member of Sigma Chi and served on the IU Student Foundation steering committee.
My career began at Huron Consulting Group, then Houlihan Lokey, in financial advisory and valuation. I earned my MBA from Kellogg in 2014 while working.
I worked in M&A investment banking at Moelis & Company.
I came home for a corporate finance and M&A role at Vectra, a company owned by Apollo funds.
I was Director of Corporate Finance at SunPower, working on the transaction that split the company in two.
I was Director of Financial Operations at Kajabi.