About the Founder

Olive DarraghZolio is the vision of Olive Darragh, a 20 year veteran of the investment management industry and thought leader in the fields of asset management and talent recruitment. Olive has 13 years of consulting experience at McKinsey & Company, becoming one of the first waves of women to become a Director/Senior partner in 2001. There, she co-founded and helped build the Investment Management practice and gained extensive experience working with leading asset managers around the globe.  She then moved on to Tudor Investments and spent six years as a partner leading Strategy and Talent Management. There, she learned first-hand about the challenges that firms face when seeking investment talent. Olive and her team performed numerous studies and interviews to determine the character traits of successful investors and what to look for in developing investment talent.  Today, Olive maintains Darragh, Inc., a consulting firm that works on strategic and talent recruitment issues with a number of clients.  These clients include banks, hedge funds, asset managers, and not-for-profit firms based in Boston and New York.

Olive created Zolio to address three persistent issues in the industry:

  • Determining if a young person will be successful at a firm based only on resume data and an interview is a challenge faced by many investment firms.
  • Increasing the pool of minority, women and folks with diverse backgrounds in the industry; diversity of perspective is an important aspect of success in investment management.
  • Giving young people interested in a career in the investment industry a chance to learn in a risk-free environment, as well as create an independently verifiable track record.

Olive is a graduate of Harvard Business School and received her Bachelor of Commerce from the University of Edinburgh, Scotland. Olive has also been profiled in the book, “How Remarkable Women Lead: The Breakthrough Model for Work and Life.” In addition, Olive is a member of the Board of Directors for the Boston Public Library Foundation and a visiting professor as well as a member of the Board of Advisors for the University of Edinburgh Business School in Scotland.