- Company
- Bain Capital Double Impact
- Role
- Managing Director
- Est. Net Worth
- $5 Million (Est.)
- Stage
- Emerging
- Industry
- Finance
Deval Patrick
Managing Director at Bain Capital Double Impact
About
Deval Patrick's career spans civil rights law, corporate leadership, government, and impact investing. After growing up on the South Side of Chicago and attending Harvard on scholarship, he served as Assistant Attorney General for Civil Rights under President Clinton, then held executive roles at Texaco and Coca-Cola. As the 71st Governor of Massachusetts (2007-2015), he championed clean energy, education reform, and healthcare access. After leaving office, he joined Bain Capital to lead its Double Impact fund, investing in companies that generate both financial returns and measurable social and environmental impact — bridging the gap between traditional private equity and social enterprise.
Current Company
Bain Capital Double Impact — Managing Director
From Civil Rights to the Corner Office
Deval Patrick's journey from a South Side Chicago housing project to the governor's office in Massachusetts is one of the most remarkable social mobility stories in modern American politics. Raised by a single mother in a two-room apartment, he won a scholarship to Milton Academy through A Better Chance, a program that places minority students in elite boarding schools. From there, he went to Harvard College and Harvard Law School, then joined the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, where he litigated voting rights and school desegregation cases across the South.
President Clinton appointed him Assistant Attorney General for Civil Rights in 1994, making him the nation's chief civil rights enforcer at age 38. After leaving government, Patrick entered the corporate world in roles that would have seemed impossible for a Black executive a generation earlier: he served as General Counsel of Texaco during its racial discrimination settlement and later as Executive Vice President at Coca-Cola, where he oversaw the company's diversity initiatives. His ability to move between civil rights advocacy, corporate leadership, and electoral politics made him a singular figure in American public life.
Impact Investing as a Second Act
After serving two terms as Governor of Massachusetts — during which he navigated the 2008 financial crisis, expanded healthcare access, and championed clean energy and education reform — Patrick joined Bain Capital in 2015 to launch its Double Impact fund. The fund invests in companies that generate measurable social and environmental impact alongside competitive financial returns — a category of investing that was gaining momentum but still lacked credibility among mainstream private equity firms.
Patrick's arrival at Bain Capital added political credibility to a firm that had been politically toxic during the 2012 presidential election, when Mitt Romney's Bain tenure became a campaign issue. More importantly, Patrick's investment thesis — that companies serving underserved communities and addressing environmental challenges could generate strong returns precisely because those markets were overlooked — represented a genuine evolution in how private equity thought about value creation. His brief 2020 presidential campaign notwithstanding, Patrick's most lasting contribution may be proving that impact investing belongs on the balance sheet at one of the world's most prestigious private equity firms.