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The HarbourVest Boston Team

Sydney Leavens

Vice President

Boston

About Sydney

Sydney Leavens joined HarbourVest in 2022 and focuses on tax-related communications with existing and prospective investors, as well as assisting with the tax structuring of HarbourVest legal entities and portfolios and providing tax transactional support to HarbourVest’s investment teams. 

Prior to joining the Firm, Sydney was tax counsel at Ropes & Gray LLP.  In that capacity, she represented private equity and hedge fund clients, as well as non-U.S., institutional, and high net worth investors in a wide range of tax matters, with a specialization in matters relating to the formation and operation of,  and investment in, private funds, co-investments and separately managed accounts.  Sydney was previously a tax associate at Bingham McCutchen LLP, where she primarily advised clients on the tax aspects of the formation and operation of regulated investment companies and state tax litigation matters. Sydney clerked for the Honorable Judge Jeffrey R. Howard, U.S. Court of Appeals for the First Circuit during the 2009-2010 term and the Honorable Judge Joseph A. Diclerico, Jr., U.S. District Court for the District of New Hampshire during the 2010-2011 term.

Sydney received a BA (magna cum laude) in Spanish and History from Yale University in 2002 and a JD from Harvard Law School (cum laude) in 2009.  Sydney is a member of Yale’s chapter of Phi Beta Kappa.

Continuation solutions encompass a host of transaction types in which a GP secures interim liquidity and/or additional primary capital for their LPs in a strongly performing asset, or set of assets, that the GP will continue to own and control. Specifically, they include continuation funds, new funds created by GPs for the purpose of acquiring the asset(s) that continue to be managed by the same GP and capitalized by one or several secondary buyers, or equity recapitalizations involving a direct equity or structured equity investment into a portfolio company. These transactions can also include a parallel investment from the GP’s latest fund into that same pool of assets (a “cross-fund trade”).