Story | Ryan Li

At first I wanted to do research. Here are some pictures of me at a lab at UCLA:

How I got here

Three internships

Coming into college, I wanted to pursue a PhD. This quickly changed after my internships at GambitBio and Soar Capital, where I found my love for financial analysis. GambitBio was a client of Soar Capital, which made the move between the two a natural one. I wanted more formal experience after that, and Wellesley Hills Financial is where I decided on investment banking.

01

GambitBio

Business development, 2025

GambitBio is an early stage biotech in Los Angeles. Its main product is a lateral flow cancer detection test, which has done well for prostate cancer and is now expanding into other cancers. I worked in business development, building a database of more than seventy venture contacts, running PitchBook diligence on investors, and writing the outreach I sent myself. At the end I presented a go-to-market strategy for the test, built on PESTLE and SWOT analysis and interviews with clinicians. Until then I had only looked at companies as science. That internship taught me to look at one as a business.

02

Soar Capital

Financial advisory, remote

Soar Capital is a London-based financial advisory firm providing fractional CFO services to early and growth stage startups. I joined as an associate intern, working remotely. I ran an end-to-end assessment of a pre-seed medtech company working on brain-computer interfaces, scoring the team, the product, the market and the go-to-market plan against a thousand-point framework. I then built base, best and worst cases and valued the company three ways against its cap table, which showed how dilution, ownership and returns moved together. This is the internship that decided things for me.

03

Wellesley Hills

Analyst intern, return offer

At Wellesley Hills Financial I work on live sell-side and financing mandates in payments and financial infrastructure. My work has covered market sizing with TAM, SAM and SOM analysis, business overviews and teaser decks, Excel exhibits tracking processing volume and take rate, and buyer lists running a few hundred names deep. Client and transaction details are withheld.

Where I am now

What I learned and what I am missing

Wellesley Hills Financial is where I got my first taste of investment banking. I worked on business overviews, market sizing, building out CIMs and preparing meeting notes. Across three live deals I found that I love the intensity of the work.

I am still hoping to round out my modeling skillset by learning buyout mechanics properly. I can build a three-statement model, run comparable companies and put together a discounted cash flow I am willing to defend. I have not built an LBO, and that is the piece I am missing.

That is where Recalc Academy’s Finance Accelerator comes in. Its technical classes cover accounting fundamentals, business analysis and LBO modeling, which is the gap I just described.

The other reason is less technical. Switching into finance late means I am recruiting without the group of people most candidates have built up by now, and I am looking for a community I can work through the process with.

My resume

View resume (PDF)

How I pivoted from PhD research to finance