Sasha Grutman ’89

Following graduation, Sasha went to Italy on a Fulbright Fellowship to continue the studies on Dante he began as a Humanities major. He then turned to the financial world, working for Corporate Decisions, Inc., a strategy consulting firm, first in Boston and then in Paris. After attending the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania, he continued his work in the financial services industry at a number of companies: Boston Consulting Group; Frontline Capital Group, a publicly traded venture fund that invested in venture companies; Goldman Sachs’s private equity group; Citigroup’s strategic investment group; and TH Lee Putnam Ventures, a growth equity fund that focused on financial services and outsourced business services. In 2008 he founded Deucalion Advisors, an investment and advisory firm focused on financial and business services.

On the Humanities major: I selected the Humanities major because I was looking for a way of organizing my studies in an interdisciplinary manner. I found that studying questions of how literature, history, and history of art interact had a profound effect on me. I ended up focusing my studies on Dante, who appealed to me because he could serve as my “guide” to my studies. As a medieval man whose model was Virgil, he was rooted in the classical world. And as the first writer to write a “high” literature in the vernacular, he was a very modern individual.

Since my years at Yale, I have put my Dante studies on the back burner and spend most of my time as an investor and advisor to financial services companies. But the interdisciplinary approach that we used at Yale I still use today in how I evaluate companies and investments. I try to see business problems from multiple points of view, and I feel my studies at Yale helped me learn how to do this. And when I have a spare minute, I still like to read (and reread) the texts that would naturally fit into the Humanities program.

Graduation Year: 
1989