Cogent founder Myers resurfaces with new firm

Scott Myers, a founding member of secondaries broker and advisory firm Cogent Partners, has set up New York-based Hycroft Advisors and brought on fellow managing directors Loren Boston, Neil Banta and Patrick Shattenkirk.

Hycroft registered with the Securities and Exchange Commission in January 2013 and is expected to officially open in six to eight weeks.

The firm is “dedicated to providing solutions to complex problems faced by general partners and institutional investors worldwide”, according to company information on LinkedIn that notes the firm will assist with capital raising, secondaries transactions, and LP and GP advisory issues. Restructurings are expected to factor in, too, and Myers noted global expansion was not far-fetched depending on clients’ needs.

Hycroft will be “a multi-faceted investment banking firm catering to both LPs and GPs”, Myers told Secondaries Investor. “That was really the intention for Cogent 10 years ago, but what it became was a secondaries advisory specialist, more of a mono-line firm, rather than a broader firm.”

The four professionals now at Hycroft have together helped raise more than $65 billion in capital for clients and advised on secondaries market transactions representing more than $75 billion, according to information on their LinkedIn profiles.

“We’re starting off  by assembling a team of very senior fundraising professionals, and Loren Boston is clearly a part of that,” Myers told Secondaries Investor. “I went out and recruited people that I knew very well and trusted.”

Myers added: “These were people who I always wanted to work with, and that time was now: it was a great time to recruit top talent.”

Myers has more than 20 years’ experience in private markets, beginning at Bain & Co. in 1994 as a management consultant. He co-founded Cogent Partners in 2001 with Colin McGrady, Stephen Sloan, Ian Charles, and Brian Mooney, and stepped back into a senior advisory role in 2011. He still owns a stake in Cogent and Hycroft will not compete with the secondaries broker.

Boston is a long-time fundraiser for the private equity industry, having over the past 30 years worked for groups including Bankers Trust, Citi and Merrill Lynch. From 1999 to 2004 Boston was global head of the private equity funds group at Citi, a role he also held when he re-joined Merrill between 2004 and 2010. Merill’s private placement team later spun out to become Mercury Capital Advisors, and Boston joined placement firm Eaton Partners, which he subsequently left in July 2013.

Shattenkirk worked with Myers at Cogent for nearly four years until 2007, when Shattenkirk joined Vestar Capital Partners as managing director. He later joined SecondCap Partners for a year as managing director, before leaving to help set up Hycroft.

Banta, meanwhile, comes from Greenhill & Co, where he was a managing director for nearly five years.

Hycroft has also added a fifth managing director and has plans to recruit more senior and junior staff in the coming months.