David J. Grain founded Grain Management in 2007, building an investment firm focused on telecommunications. Its work includes broadband networks, wireless spectrum and cell towers, the infrastructure that carries communications between people and businesses. Before founding the firm, Grain worked in investment banking and then moved into operating roles at AT&T Broadband and the tower company later known as Global Signal. He also serves on corporate and institutional boards, including the Dartmouth College Board of Trustees, to which he was elected in 2024.
Grain earned a bachelor's degree in English from the College of the Holy Cross and an MBA from Dartmouth's Tuck School of Business in 1989. He had worked in municipal finance before business school. After Tuck, he joined Drexel Burnham Lambert, where he had previously been a summer associate. When Drexel entered bankruptcy in 1990, he worked briefly at Kidder Peabody before joining Morgan Stanley. His assignments there included mergers and acquisitions, corporate finance and high-yield finance, with exposure to technology, media and telecommunications companies.
After considering a cell-tower investment while at Morgan Stanley, he joined AT&T Broadband to gain operating experience. He later led Pinnacle Towers, which was renamed Global Signal, through a turnaround. The company became publicly traded and was subsequently sold. Those assignments preceded the formation of Grain Management, where he combined his investment background with experience managing a telecommunications business.
Grain's public service includes appointments to the National Infrastructure Advisory Council in 2011 and again in 2024. His institutional service has included trusteeship at the Brookings Institution and membership on the advisory council of the National Museum of African American History and Culture. He was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2022, and Dartmouth's trustee biography records eight years of earlier service as a trustee of Holy Cross.
In 2004, Grain and his wife, Dr. Lisa Butler Grain, established the Grain Fellows program to fund SAT preparation and college preparation services for students from low-income families. Their later support for Tuck included a contribution to its student scholarship campaign in 2024. Tuck awarded Grain its Distinguished Achievement Medal in June 2025, recognizing his business career and service to the school, where he had joined the Board of Advisors in 2016.
