Shahar Yona '27

Shahar Yona is an MBA candidate at Columbia Business School. Before CBS, he spent five years at Grit Mind Partners, a lower-middle-market PE firm focused on education and healthcare services, where he led buy-and-build strategies from sourcing through post-merger integration and served as a board observer across portfolio companies. At CBS, he is an MBA Associate at MFG Partners through the PE field study, running commercial diligence and building investment theses in industrial and business services. His long-term focus is on entrepreneurship through acquisition — buying and operating small businesses with a hands-on, PE-informed approach

Connect with Shahar Yona on LinkedIn.

At CBS, I  consistently attended the PE Club breakfast sessions, speaker events, and anything else that gave exposure to how investors think and make decisions. In parallel, I chose to take the PE class to put structure around concepts I had mostly learned on the job, and joined the field study to stay close to real deal work. The combination of being out in the market and staying engaged on campus helped me build both context and pattern recognition in a way I hadn’t done before.