Alejandra Torres Dromgold

A research background, applied to private deals

Torres Dromgold was head of research for ING Barings and later a World Bank consultant on Colombia's first environmental trust. Equity research is a specific discipline: building a defensible view of what a business is worth, in writing, and being measured against it publicly over time.

Applied to early-stage companies, that training helps in one direction and not the other. The habit of interrogating assumptions transfers well. The core method does not — research depends on financial history, comparable companies and disclosure, and an early-stage company has almost none of those. Analysts moving into private investing usually describe having to replace valuation work with judgement about people, which is a genuinely different skill.

Two women, arriving together

She joined the Colombian programme in its third season as one of the first two women investors in its history. Arriving in a pair rather than alone is a small detail with a real effect.

A single newcomer tends to be read as an exception, and is easily framed that way by everyone around them. Two at once is harder to treat as a one-off, and it changes the experience for the people involved — a lone dissenting view on a panel is a much heavier thing to hold than one shared with someone else. It is also, in practice, how composition on these panels tends to shift: not gradually, but in steps, when more than one seat changes at the same time.

If this made the sector interesting rather than the celebrity, start with how to begin investing — and, if private companies are what caught your eye, how angel investing actually works.