David F. Browne is approaching 20 years of experience in private equity.  He has had a lead role in circa 15 completed buyside transactions, investing $1.5 billion of equity capital.  Of that equity capital, approximately $1 billion was GP-discretionary capital of various funds and $500 million was co-investor capital with David as the principal fundraiser and contact with co-investors. 

David began his career as an M&A analyst at DLJ prior to its acquisition by Credit Suisse. 

He joined Lindsay Goldberg for its inaugural fund as an associate and worked on a number of deals from selling a German pipe-fittings business to taking public an outsourced services provider to utilities to acquiring and recapitalizing the largest privately-owned radioactive waste landfill in the United States. 

His next professional stop was at GSC Group, a credit-focused alternative asset manager that approached $30 billion of AUM at its peak.  David was a Managing Director in GSC’s Recovery Fund, which was a private-equity style fund that sourced transactions by taking positions in debt securities with the expectation that the borrowers would either recover and repay the discounted debt at par plus accrued or restructure and provide GSC equity ownership at an attractive creation value.  While at GSC, David invested and managed investments in housebuilding, building materials, packaging, and automotive supply. 

From GSC, David returned to more conventional private equity at Paine & Partners (now Paine Schwartz).  Paine came to focus on food chain investing during David’s time there, and he invested in high-value fruit businesses in Australia and California, a biopesticide business headquartered in Australia, a specialty agricultural inputs roll-up in the United States, and a row-crop business with extensive holdings in the UK and Eastern Europe.

In 2017, David re-located to London and joined Terra Firma, the private equity firm founded by Guy Hands.  At Terra Firma, David was a Managing Director and member of the senior leadership team alongside Guy and Terra Firma’s CEO.  His portfolio responsibilities came to include chairing Terra Firma’s sprawling cattle business in Australia, assisting with the development of a hotel property in Italy, and monitoring hospitality businesses in Germany and the UK.  In addition to these responsibilities, drawing from his distressed experience at GSC, David led the Covid task force which monitored and managed the entire Terra Firma portfolio through the Covid shock and recovery.  Finally, David was co-head of the origination team at Terra Firma and led the acquisition of a UK homebuilder, underwriting the industry and laying the groundwork for further Terra Firma investments in the sector.

After some soul searching during various London lockdowns and realizing that he did not want to be a first-generation-last-generation American, David and family returned home to New York in late 2021 and launched Rannerdale in 2022.