Rabib Rafiq

About Rabib Rafiq

I focus on distressed M&A, deep market research and capital allocation - helping businesses restructure and position for long-term compounding. What that looks like:Designing and executing distressed M&A + complex turnaround strategies for owners, lenders, and buyers. Making businesses capital-efficient by restructuring balance sheets, streamlining operations, and protecting enterprise value when the stakes are high. Aligning stakeholders around clear, hard-edged plans instead of wishful thinking. Founding, operating, and scaling companies from zero through exit (two successful exits). Doing deep market and competitive research across sectors, from service based businesses to AI, prediction markets, and other emerging tech.​At Second Wind Consultants, we help owners and investors turn distress into opportunity by restructuring debt and reorganizing businesses in ways traditional bankruptcy paths usually can\'t. The work sits where complexity, creative structuring, and human behavior all collide.​A few things I\'m proud of:Leading transactions + restructurings for private businesses in highly distressed situations. Successfully exiting two businesses I founded and operated. Running a GP-only discretionary public markets fund, deploying my own capital with long-term time horizons.​How I think about 2026:2025 was the year of the AI agent. 2026 is when energy, AI, and real-world systems (hardware) start to collide in ways that show up in cash flows, capital structures, and operating leverage instead of just in demos. I\'m spending time on three things: helping distressed and over-levered businesses find paths to survival and growth that don’t destroy value, using AI as a force multiplier for research and decision-making, and reading and learning across finance, tech, physics, philosophy, and psychology, then pushing that knowledge into how I invest, operate, and make decisions.​I grew up traveling all over the world thanks to my dad\'s military career and was thus exposed to 7+ cultures before the age of 15, which trained adaptability, curiosity, and an instinct to listen before prescribing. I\'ve found that this background has made it easier for me to work with diverse founders, lenders, boards, and operators when the problem is messy and the data is incomplete.If you\'re working on a hard problem, whether that\'s distress, special situations, or a weird corner of the market where conventional wisdom doesn\'t apply - I\'m always open to a conversation. If you recently learned something interesting and relatively niche, please send it my way!

Experience

1. Finance Manager

   Second Wind Consultants

   May 2025 — Present

   Financier to our portfolio of consulting clients. Raising debt and equity in congruence with their scope of work at SWC