We kept meeting the same gap. So we built the firm that closes it.

Travis Callahan

LinkedIn → Co-Founder & Partner

Founder · corporate acquirer · seller · M&A and restructuring lawyer

On your mandate: the buyer’s case – buyer thesis, negotiation strategy, structure, and the internal logic behind what an acquirer’s committee can actually approve. He does not hand a mandate to anyone else once it has started. If he cannot lead yours, we will say so before you engage.

Where his judgment comes from: to understand the buyer’s internal case before the buyer states it. More than 110 transactions closed across twenty-five years – some $30 billion of value, buy side and sell side, from single-digit-million bolt-ons to $4 billion acquisitions – including the years he spent inside a global acquirer’s own M&A programme. So when a term sheet arrives, he reads the approval, valuation and risk conversation sitting behind it: what the committee is told, where the flexibility hides, and which “standard terms” are nothing of the sort.

As a founder: three companies of his own, founded, built and sold, run out of Hong Kong, Switzerland, Luxembourg, Prague and the United States. He knows what the year after the wire actually feels like, including the parts nobody warns you about.

On the sell side: his own founder exits; the divestitures inside ABB’s programme, which is the half of a corporate M&A function that sells what no longer fits; and the sell-side mandates he leads here. Selling is not the second half of his career – it has run alongside the buying the whole way.

As an acquirer: Group Vice President for M&A and Venture Capital (Senior Legal Counsel) at ABB, negotiating and structuring transactions inside an acquisition programme that took in forty-one businesses in five years, around eight a year.

As counsel and counterparty: across restructurings, acquisitions and joint ventures he has been opposite, or alongside, more than a hundred institutional investors. When a fund of that kind explains its model to you, nobody on your side of the table is hearing it for the first time.

As a restructuring lawyer: US-bar qualified, and one of a team of five recognised with two International Financing Review awards for the Parmalat restructuring, the largest corporate insolvency Europe had seen. Restructuring is where you learn what a business is worth once the optimism has been stripped out of it. It is the discipline behind the downside questions we ask before a buyer gets to ask them – and the reason we will take a mandate that begins under time pressure, a covenant test or a shareholder split, and give you our first view on whether the timetable is achievable – and what would have to be true for it to hold.

AwardsGlobal Restructuring Deal of the Year – International Financing Review, 2005 · European Restructuring Deal of the Year – International Financing Review, 2005. Both for the Parmalat restructuring, as one of a team of five.

RestructuringsParmalat – $19B (2005) · Delta Air Lines – $28.3B of liabilities (2005) · US Airways – $8.8B (2004) · Scotia Pacific – $740M of timber notes (2007) · Corporación Durango – $647M, the landmark Mexican concurso mercantil (2005).

ABB, 2010–2014Programme transactions during his tenure, shown for the scale of the programme he worked inside. A named transaction here is not a claim that he personally worked on it unless stated. Buying: Baldor Electric $4.2B · Thomas & Betts $3.9B · Ventyx, more than $1B · Power-One $1B. Selling: Meyer Steel Structures $600M · Thomas & Betts HVAC $260M · the Full Service business. Forty-one businesses acquired across the five years; the full programme is listed on Sources & evidence.

Institutional counterpartiesAs counsel, counterparty or joint-venture partner – never as their adviser – more than a hundred institutional investors and capital providers – the names that recur across sponsor-backed acquisitions, restructurings and complex corporate transactions – among them Cerberus, Contrarian Capital, KKR, Blackstone, BlackRock, New York Life, Marathon Asset Management and Ontario Teachers’.

Boston College Law School · Trium Global Executive MBA (NYU Stern · London School of Economics · HEC Paris) · Executive Program, University of St. Gallen

Sebastian Koepp

LinkedIn → Co-Founder & Partner

Founder · operator · investor · economist

On your mandate: the numbers – valuation, financial preparation, the quality-of-earnings work and the data room. His job is that every figure on your side of the table reconciles before a buyer’s analyst tries to make it not.

Where his judgment comes from: to make the numbers hold. A trained economist with more than fifteen years of M&A experience at every level, and more than a hundred closed transactions – over seventy on the sell side, more than twenty on the buy side, and more than ten capital raises. He brings the financial discipline of someone who has run institutional M&A, the founder instinct of someone who has built and sold three companies of his own, and the board-level judgment of someone who evaluates companies for a living.

As a founder: three exits of his own.

As an operator: he went into a distressed technology business as a member of its executive team, stabilised it, and drove the process that ended in its sale – the internal architect of that outcome.

Inside institutional M&A: fifteen years at every level, including over $1 billion of M&A led inside one of Switzerland’s largest companies.

As an investor and adviser: he founded his own M&A advisory practice, built a record of selling companies for their founders, and is a partner in a venture capital firm.

The record, in numbersMore than 100 closed transactions: 70+ sell-side · 20+ buy-side · 10+ capital raises. Fifteen years of institutional M&A, including over $1 billion led inside one of Switzerland’s largest companies. Three exits of his own. Partner in a venture capital firm.

Selected transactionsThe sale of the business he stabilised, to a NASDAQ-listed acquirer · founder-side sales run through his own advisory practice, in industrials and technology · his own three exits. Private-company transactions under confidentiality: named in conversation, not published.

University of St. Gallen · fluent Spanish

Ryan O’Sullivan

LinkedIn → Co-Founder & Partner

Founder · operator · investor

On your mandate: the process – execution from the first call to the final signature: buyer coordination, the question-and-answer discipline, and a timetable that holds from preparation to wire.

Where his judgment comes from: because founders feel the difference between a firm that advises and one that executes. He has built, scaled and sold three times, in three different roles, and he knows what it takes to get a founder to the other side.

As an operator: chief operating officer of a technology firm he joined in its earliest days, grown to a hundred people across three countries before its exit; and, at a start-up where he and the technical founder were the only two people in the building, the commercial engine behind the growth that ended in a major acquisition.

As a founder: he co-founded a company that expanded into investments and operations across five countries and sold it, and exited a company of his own in 2023.

In transactions: ten years in private equity and M&A, on both sides of the table.

Selected transactionsMore than $200 million of M&A and property transactions across seven deals · a Series A featured on CNBC and the sale that followed · the exit of the three-country technology business he ran as chief operating officer · his own exit, 2023. Private-company transactions under confidentiality: named in conversation, not published.

HEC Paris, Executive MSc