Episoder
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“If you want to help a community, then by far educations is the best way to do it. I don't know if it matters so much what you teach, but as long as kids get excited about learning and get excited about going to school, that makes a huge difference.”
“Just by talking about it and it inspires other people to do something similar in their communities, you just never know what kind of ripples you're going to create, right?”
“Once you don't think so much about yourself and once you don't think about what you're getting out of it, especially maybe financially, and you just do something for other people, then a lot of things just become maybe a little bit clearer in terms of what needs to get done.”
“I didn't know what I was expecting, but for some reason I was a little bit surprised that those kids are just the same and they just happened to have been born somewhere else. If you look at people on TV you don't always realize how similar we all are, really.”
“I have this amount that I'm quite happy to give anyone who has a worthy cause. For me, it's more like a message to the people who are asking to say “Look, I support you, I'm behind you in this and I'm with you.” So I hope that many people will be with you because it's a great cause.”
“Music is a strange animal 'cause you can't touch it, you can't smell it, you can't eat it or anything else, and it's just there. Beethoven's Fifth just keeps coming back at you for 300 years, and that's very, very powerful, spiritual energy.” [Quincy Jones]
“The collective power of artists can be very impacting. If we all put our egos aside in the service of people in the world who are less fortunate. We're truly all one people. We are all in need of each other.” [Harry Belafonte]
“I think every individual in the world wants to contribute, and they don't know how. I got a feeling that we're creating a shift in what's going on in the world today, about helping other people. It's compassion. It's real new.” [Diana Ross]
“The ripple effect that "We Are the World" had was that everyone wanted to try and do it. And artists suddenly realized that they could now make a change in the world. It's one of those things that kids who haven't even been born yet will know about because it was a unity through music.” [Steven Ivory, Music journalist]
“We believe that artists have a valuable function in any society, since it is the artists who reveal the society to itself.” [Harry Belafonte]
“"We Are the World" was something that everybody could understand. Even if you didn't speak English, you could understand the melody. You could understand the feeling of the song musically.”[Steven Ivory, Music journalist]
Rondalla ensemble includes: guitar, bass, octavina, laud, banduria played together.
Ukulele
03D Gift page (for INSEAD Giving Day 2024 and beyond)
To make your donation just click here for the MBA'03D Diversity Scholarship.
https://forceforgood.insead.edu/class-giving/mba03d-endowed-scholarship
"Let's Play" fund raising page
https://give.asia/campaign/support-music-education-for-children-in-philippines#/
“Let’s Play” on Facebook
https://www.facebook.com/lets.play.malabon.ph?mibextid=ZbWKwL
Instagram: letsplayasia
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Top recommendations for Dean Veloso from the ‘03Ds:
“Just make sure that your education is raising the bar on future management, not only in terms of technical knowledge, but in terms of values.”
“The university has a great asset, it's the Alumni Network - invest more and with the expectation to get more out of it.”
“Keep up the education of your alumni and give them the opportunity to get back together, because at the level of the class is where you have the strongest bonds.”
Our 20Y reunion in a nutshell: Excitement, fun, connections.
“It's the life in your years that counts, even more than that it is the people in your life. To me INSEAD has brought a lot of important people and reunion was all about meeting the ones that we see often, the ones that we see less often and finding that old energy is still there, which is amazing.” Sofia Marimba
“When I think about the 4 reunions we've had - all of them a lot of fun. The 5 year was very much around what job have you got, what have you achieved in that period work-wise, where are you in your career. 10 years was a bit more like what's your family situation, have you had 5 kids yet, that kind of thing. 15 in Singapore was just a bit insane, people just wanted to be students again and largely behaved like that. This time, lots and lots of fun, but I found people in more reflective mood. I had more conversations about looking around what the next phase of life might look like.” Sophie Kent
“It was exciting to get back together with people and realize how much I enjoyed their company and being around them.” Jeff Clay
“The mood was different - there was no competitiveness anymore for sure, there was a lot more looking for cooperation.” Milena Ivanova
Favorite moments: the things that bind us together
“Life can be as fun as you make it up as long as you're blessed with health.”
“The feeling of the first hug that you give to people that you have not seen in a long time, this physical connection, the smiles and the happiness of just seeing again face-to- face people that you have not seen in a while.” Sofia Marimba
The fact that we can all get back into the Chateau and dance together in the way that we always did, that's definitely the first image that comes to mind.
I loved seeing the much older vintages also dancing with us and I was like “Okay, that's a message of hope for the future.”
“Fun and joy absolutely have no age. I actually took videos of our older colleagues on the dance floor jumping and dancing like they were teenagers and I basically shared those videos with friends back home and I said this is how I want to grow old.“ Sofia Marimba
“Just being on the lawn and having a beer right outside there was reminiscent of those conversations that you had that were kind of impromptu and ended up going for hours.” Jeff Clay
“Team work makes dream work and I think our class is best practice in that sense”
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Manglende episoder?
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For me there were two options. I can be very rich and lonely 10 years down the line, or I had to change something so that I'm happy and I'm not lonely and I'm with someone that I enjoy being with.
20 YEARS IN PERSPECTIVE:
I changed absolutely everything. So I was in the recruitment industry in Poland before INSEAD, and then I ended up in investment banking in Austria. The only thing I didn't change was the market, because my entire life, the theme has been emerging markets.
I spent two and a half years in Vienna doing corporate finance, and then love called, and so in 2006 I moved to London. In 2008 I got a call from a head-hunter who was chasing me for a job in Kazakhstan and in April 2008 I moved to Almaty, Kazakhstan and then I moved to Russia in 2011. The end of 2012 I got downsized, it was the best thing that happened to me, because I needed to exit Moscow, I needed to exit finance.
At the time I was also going through a divorce, which was “amazing”, it was a major shock to the system, took me a number of years to get over it, not in terms of the relationship, but in terms of the failure, I treated it for the longest time as something I failed at.
So what I did is I bought a ticket around the world and took off for six months, the end of this was our reunion in Fonty in 2013.
Where I am today is I serve on boards, I have my own small business in aroma therapy, which is a direct to consumer model, I help with my family's business, which means these days I've [also] opened a hotel. And then I do a lot of pro bono work.
I got a guy who landed on my balcony in London, and so we have a seven year old son now, and I'm mostly spending time in Bulgaria.
On topic: a woman in finance, overcoming adversity and life in general
For a woman to decide that she doesn't like where she is and to move on is a fact of life. I did not like entering a boardroom with 22 men and two women on a regular basis. I did not like eating lunch in the MD lunchroom where I was the only woman and the guys had to talk with me out of politeness. But what they can talk to me about was Sponge Bob, they didn't know what to talk about.
The biggest challenge was solving my personal life because I was 36 and getting divorced. I thought I'm 36 and starting a family, and then one day I'm 36 and getting divorced. So I went through the fear of would I be alone, I went through the fear of would I have children…
There are three things in life that ruin you - one is divorce, one is losing your job, and I forget was the third one, and then you die. So I had two of those at the same time. So you are pushed. You are pushed, and this is when either you grow either or you go back to your old self, but going back to your old self, it's going to come back to bite.
After the rain comes the rainbow, in the darkest hour, I need someone to just remind me, that.
On all things INSEAD and giving back
Why I do it, I will revert to what a lot of people in these episodes have mentioned, the word impact. And it's having an impact and working for something that's bigger than oneself.
Without education, society goes down the drain. And sometimes people tell me, “Yes, but MBA is a luxury good.” And I'm like, “But you need leaders, as well.” And it's not leaders in the arrogant sense, but it's people who have the courage, people who are willing to be honest. So, if you want to change things, we need education at all levels.
I keep on saying thank goodness for my healthy sense of self-confidence because otherwise some of the things people have done are like, Jesus…
You've also seen them dance without their shirts on, so that's a great equalizer.
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Running your own business is like a marathon at the speed of a sprint
Your mental health is under constant stress, what I realized early on is it's a very lonely space to do it, because there are very few people who do this.
Quite frankly, you're dealing with more failures than successes than from the outside people see.
I still remember sitting on my balcony with helicopters flying by, with soldiers and machine guns roads were blocked. You know buildings boarded up or you know it was, it was absolutely intense.
20 YEARS IN PERSPECTIVE:
We built the number one vitamin water brand in the UK and Ireland, it was bought by Pepsi several years later.
I worked for Pepsi for 3 -4 years in the UK and then we had this second big adventure together with the same wonderful business partner where we moved to Los Angeles.
I had immediately another and entrepreneurial bug, so I started the first low-cost gym chain in the UK, but I quickly realized how difficult it is to start a company when you don't have a business partner as incredibly fun and smart and nice to work with. So I decided to let that go.
And eleven years later we're still here thriving and building the business. We just increased our distribution footprint with a massive deal in Target which is super exciting.
On topic: vitamins, supplements, the supplements market opportunity in the US
We realized very quickly that the vitamin market was huge in America, yet it was extremely outdated, so this was ripe for disruption, which is why we settled here in LA, which is considered the centre of health and wellness. This is where the trends start they show up first on TV programs, or in movies and then they spread across the world.
It's not a multivitamin that will fix your unhealthy diet, right? The basis has to be right, you should eat your vegetables, your fruit, ideally you got your fiber, etc., that is really an ideal foundation. And then I would recommend to supplement or, as we say, complement with those micronutrients that are hard to come by with a regular diet.
Here in the United States there's a real shrinking of the gut microbiome, because the diets are not very well-balanced.
As you age your digestive enzymes deplete actually and this helps you break down the foods and foods have become more and more complicated, especially processed foods.
On topic: start-ups, entrepreneurial endeavors, INSEAD business partners
If you think about that, we have spent at this point 5,000 days together, which is a long time.
It's a very special relationship to have a business partner for many, many years. They know your real working life from a very unique perspective. It's not the same as having a report or having a boss is not the same as having a life partner, it is different.
When you start something you can develop a bit of luck and you develop opportunities and things that you wouldn't have known were going to start when you began the business
All things INSEAD and giving back
I honestly think that we have profited from the INSEAD connections almost more than anybody else.
We raised our seed money largely through INSEAD alums to get the V-water business off the off the ground.
So a lot of our seed investors were INSEAD, 2 of our board members of V-water were also INSEAD. Several of our INSEAD original investors have continued to support us with the HUM nutrition business in Los Angeles.
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“And remember, it’s not a judgement of your performance, it’s just we don’t need this position anymore.”
After selling the chain of clinics business twice, I got fired from day 1 to day 2 with the typical capitalist view, you put your things in a box and leave the premises in 2 hours type of thing. This put me in a very difficult position of trying to redefine myself as a business person, so I took a step back.
20 YEARS IN PERSPECTIVE:
5 years ago I joined one of my most recent investments, because I felt it has the potential to become something big. I raised about 120 mn in financing for our firm and it’s going well, fingers crossed.
You need a very tall building or a very slow elevator for this [elevator pitch]
I went into pharma, initially in Austria and then Switzerland. And Switzerland was so boring, I needed to go back home.
Joined a chain of clinics in Romania, sold the business to PE twice, made a little bit of money from ESOP. So this turned out very well and I had a little bit of money. So I decided why invest it prudently in real estate and stuff, when I can invest it similarly in small companies that will grow big.
I have the same 2 kids and the same wife I had at INSEAD, so that’s quite a success.
Nowadays I am teaching strategy, entrepreneurial growth to MBA students, I am teaching a fintech course as well.
On topic: Fintech, start-ups, fund raising, entrepreneurial endeavours
B2C, crypto, blockchain which are not in very good shape, and then the more traditional SaaS, B2B – the only thing that has changed is the multiple you get in the valuation. It just takes a little bit of time to adjust to the current reality.
Everything is pending on the bigger markets resuming tech IPOs for fast growing, loss making companies.
The base scenario is that we will be able to converge to breakeven with the money that we have and we would do it by the end of 2024. We’ve moved from 80% growth with significant loss, to 50% growth with very clear convergence to B/E.
We need to grow 5 to 10x more to even be considered for an IPO.
I don’t think it’s difficult frankly [being an entrepreneur] – it is so much fun.
The younger students and graduates are much smarter than we were and I think they’ve realised that our prudent way of joining a company is just a path to some sort of plateau, that is kind of convenient, but is just that.
My advise to everyone is not to get trapped in some sort of cosy job that pays the money and gives you no more thrills. We could build things that are meaningful. And every time I failed, it proved to be a kick in the butt that makes you leap forward. So don’t worry that much about the potential failures in the process, it is more about enjoying the opportunity to build something that is going to impact people in some way.
Our security net is pretty high and is given by what we know and how the CV looks like, and how employable you are if eventually the sh*t hits the fan. And you can aways jump in a secure job, maybe slightly less attractive that the one you would optimise for if that was your target.
All THINGS INSEAD AND GIVING BACK
INSEAD – kind of detached me from the imposter syndrome.
INSEAD brainwashed me in a very efficient manner, a person [me] came out that was willing to do things that are new and different and trusting himself a lot more.
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I'm sure when we started our first business together we were like “God, this is the learning one and we're just gonna smash it all the way through the rest of them”. Unfortunately hasn't quite turned out that way, it continues to be a learning experience. Turns out, there's new sh*t to learn every time.
20 YEARS IN PERSPECTIVE:
The journey is the destination.
If you ask me where I thought I'd be 20 years after INSEAD I think I've definitely, largely because of my wife, who I met at INSEAD and my business partner, who I also met at INSEAD, I am in a 10x better space than I could see, so I'm pretty happy.
So we built a great business plan, we ended up actually acquiring a series of money transfer businesses, about 11 businesses over about 7 years and built what was a pretty substantial – 4th/5th biggest remittance company in the world.
Built another business and actually just sold that business last year to a large Israeli tech company called Papaya global, which is a phenomenal outcome, actually a great deal.
We had some crazy ideas on the list, but possibly 1 of the stupidest was starting a bank.
These days one of us got a couple of businesses on the go and I'm obviously a shareholder in those and we are on the board together. I'm doing a bit of VC investing for a couple of funds actually and then we do lots of angel investing.
ON TOPIC: Start-ups, exits, entrepreneurship, partnership
I remember being worried that we might be on the front page of the FT for the first time for all the wrong reasons, having taken a regulated financial services business bust, because of the sort of leverage that we put in.
The best thing that's happened in the last 30 years is it's become okay to be an entrepreneur.
I knew when he threw the entire telephone at me, it smashed through a 32nd story New York window and went out in the pavement that maybe this was not going to be the perfectly peaceful business relationship that I'd once hoped for.
One thing the three of us all had in common, we all promoted club nights at university which is very much an entrepreneurial venture.
I just never really fitted in traditional jobs. I didn't get on with them, they sort of felt a bit either I felt I wasn't very good at them or I felt very shackled in working for someone else.
It was a good way of learning what not to do, wasn't it? We took on probably too much debt, one week we were having dinner in the CEO’s office at Barclays and they'd written us a big senior debt line and then the financial crisis came and they sort of took us into the basement and beat the living crap out of us because we'd breached the covenants.
Actually, when you hit the liquidity moment and either the company's no longer yours or the money lands in the bank account or you sign the docs, whatever it happens to be, that moment is very fleeting and actually what sticks with you is the good times and the bad times that you've had over the years.
Winning wasn't measured just by the money, or the fame, or the other stuff, but actually by having a great set of friends, enjoying good times with them and having really quality relationships in your life.
All THINGS INSEAD AND GIVING BACK
INSEAD gave me my business partner, gave my wife and gave me all the talent that has made me successful. I'm British, particularly Scottish and this still feels a bit distasteful to be this enthusiastic about something, but yeah, it's definitely been a great thing for me INSEAD.
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s sana in corpore sano - it's been a great awakening, a scary awakening but now I'm in a good place.
With a corporate job and globe trotting, moving international, living life as we would have dreamt of at INSEAD, you also need to have certain discipline which I did not have. When I just moved to Bangkok in 2019, I was basically living between Paris and Bangkok for close to eight months and then traveling in different geographies. This took a toll where I was living out of a suitcase for eight months, eating, drinking whatever I could get, sleeping whenever I could, working my ass off. I think it reached a point where my body at a certain point said “Okay, enough”. That evening I got to sleep, I woke up in the middle of the night, I can't get out of bed, I can't move. That scared the hell out of me and forced me to do something.
20 YEARS IN PERSPECTIVE:
Professionally, I'm still on the journey to find exactly what I want to do.
I've been automotive throughout, 2 big groups, 4 different brands, Fiat, Alpha Romeo, Maserati and now in Nisan.
On the personal side, beautiful family, two kids, 5 cities, close to 11 apartments and potentially contemplating a new one.
I might be the most healthy over the last fifteen years at this point in time
Would have been nice If somebody had told me how much patience you need to work in Asia before I started the role here.
ON TOPIC: Data driven marketing, dynamic creative in automotive
When it comes to cars, [buying one] is the most irrational thing a person can do. You work your ass off to make some money and then the day you say “Okay, I want this car”, you sign a check, the day you sign the check it's not even dry, 30% of the value is gone, it's the only asset that depreciates.
We’re talking about [a purchase] in tens to hundred plus thousands of euros per car, so the minimum you would expect is to have a great customer journey, but it's shite.
Data driven marking - in automotive we were lagging compared to the rest of industries, especially when it comes to cars. It's a huge ticket item in terms of spend, people leave a lot of data points. We spend billions on creating the website and the only thing we do is use that as a showcase.
ON TOPIC: The Automotive industry, disruption, data driven marketing, Tesla, electric vehicles, Formula 1 and more
86 million people buy a new car every year.
Automotive is at a crossroad, a lot of changes happening, but what you will generally hear is, for some time we've be talking about this is the CASE - which is Connected, Autonomous, Shared and Electric.
The main thing now is the growth of China. This year is the first year when China is forecasted to overtake Japan in terms of CBU exports and most of that is electric.
Europe is moving to electrified and the Chinese are coming in at a different price point, so there could be big changes in the brands that we see on European roads in a short space of time.
Is Germany in trouble? Yeah, I don't know if it's in trouble or not, it's too hard to say but the domestic China sales used to be a big driver for all the brands in Germany. Domestic China sales are taking a toll, because the Chinese are really coming up, especially with electric.
What [Tesla] did good was throwing away all conventional ways of looking at things. It potentially could be 1 of the most vertically integrated companies, so it's much easier for them to grab the better, the bigger part of profit, or manage the cost.
All THINGS INSEAD AND GIVING BACK
INSEAD has been the first point of contact in any country I've tried to have landed at.
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When you're moving as a family, the only common denominator you have is the family, so you stick together and you make sure that everybody goes through the experience in the smoothest way possible.
20 YEARS IN PERSPECTIVE:
Quite a ride, it brought me through 5 different locations (Switzerland, France, Spain, Andora, Bulgaria and now Israel), 9 or 10 different positions and all with this desire, this intent to actually revolutionize to some extent a quite old and legacy industry and move it into something closer to the twenty first century.
We've always wanted to be kept on our feet, to put ourselves in challenging situations, facing new unknowns over time probably in order to avoid complacency and comfort of just having a very, well-organed life.
The more the company was offering new locations, the more we felt it was just not the right thing to do. And the right thing to do was to stay here, to live in Israel, to become Israelis, to develop our kids here in this country.
The biggest challenge has been to advocate for this smoke-free world as part of Philip Morris, to come in as a representative of the largest, you could say, death enabler from some perspective of avoidable death, by selling cigarettes and being listened to and considered by anti-tobacco activists, by political stakeholders, by community leaders has been very challenging and quite painful and quite tough at times.
One of the biggest personal changes was also to manage our parents from a remote perspective, parents who are getting older and don't have their grandkids around them.
I had a stint at startup and eventually things weren't exactly the way I was expecting them to be. I found it to be way more complex than I guess I naively thought and actually quite cynical. Overall I understood what it takes to be an entrepreneur and to be part of a startup and to manage it and it turned out that it was not really my thing, so it was a great experience but it didn't really hit my DNA in the way I thought it would.
What I'm doing at Catalyst Investments is actually offering selling or setting up a platform in the form of a venture capital fund for corporates that want to create a portfolio of startups in Israeli innovation.
ON TOPIC: All things Israel, start-up scene, ecosystem, Israeli culture
You have now more than 90 unicorns out of Israel, which is the highest number for a single country in the world, number of startups per capita and investments.
I think it's the country that invests the highest percentage of GDP into education, over nine percent of Israel’s GDP is going to education.
Israel had always been a bit of a dream destination, something that I was, we were very keen in experiencing.
[Israel] is still a pilot project as a country, it's a 75 year old country made of a melting pot of people that have immigrated from over 80 countries so it's still all in development.
The Israeli Innovation Authority is really fuelling and funding not only with money, but also with support and with networking capabilities the entrepreneurs and their ventures.
There's more 380 VCs present in Israel providing funding.
All THINGS INSEAD AND GIVING BACK
INSEAD is so intimately linked to most of the things that have happened to me. It's not only about giving back to be connected and to participate and to be active about it.
I don't see INSEAD as just a place where we learn things, or we developed a great network and friendships. It's really a foundation step in what has happened to me and my family over the past twenty years.
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It's surprising to me that people are still amazed at the fact that banks can go bust. It most definitely will not be the last time [a bank goes bust], it's a cyclical thing.
20 YEARS IN PERSPECTIVE:
“I try not to do stress.”
We had initially gone to Dubai to spend 4 years there. 4 years turned into 13. All in all can't complain, it's been a good couple of decades.
The challenge has been to maintain a good balance of finding stimulation at work, finding stimulation at home with your family, with your sports, with your activities and then obviously with your friendship. As you start to bring other elements into this equation, it becomes extremely complicated to find the right balance.
Sports [for me] has always been a huge part in terms of finding some kind of chemical balance I think there's a huge impact there.
It's important not to take yourself too seriously right?
If you were no longer around is your job that essential that there is a crisis and the answer - people will find alternative ways and the world continues to turn. So I think if you don't take yourself so seriously and sometimes have a little reality check it helps to deal with perceived stress. I try not to do stress.
I'm a bit of a stoic, so we don't do regrets, but learnings. There are too many learnings I think, to list them here.
“Retirement ever or never” – “Definitely ever. But I have a whole bunch of other stuff that I want to do, so it won't be retirement per se. But retirement from banking, yeah, that's coming up.”
ON TOPIC: Banking, private banking, neo banks, digital currencies, bank busts and more
The traditional model [of banking] is reaching the end of its journey.
When everybody knocks up, rocks up at your door and they want their cash at the same time the bank goes bust. It is honestly as simple as that. That is what happened to Credit Suisse.
We dealt with this in a very Swiss and pragmatic way: there's a bank run, it's Credit Suisse, okay UBS, you're buying them and that's just the end of it. And we will provide you with the necessary guarantees to do so please make sure it's done in 48 hours.
Some version of chat GPT whether it's 4 or 5 or 6 and they've already had some experiments will end up picking stocks way better than a human being.
AI will be able to process amounts of information that human beings are just not capable of doing and so I think that is going to make banks better, cheaper for the end user, right? And the winners will be those who will have invested and deployed this technology in an appropriate and applicable manner.
Crypto - I'm still not sure in the current state of things that it has any applicability whatsoever quite frankly.
Will we emerge from currency to some form of digital currency - one hundred percent we will and it's just a natural evolution of currency. We used to barter, and then used to use precious metals, and then currency came into effect, and then it was coins and bills, and all of that will disappear and it'll all be digitalized.
Does bitcoin take over from the US dollar and the Swissie? No I don't think so.
ON TOPIC: State of play for the world, geopolitics
Is it that the world is in a mess or is it that human beings are messy creatures?
Not to be cliché, but [the world] is getting more polarized at every level of society and in countries, exacerbated by social media.
All THINGS INSEAD AND GIVING BACK
In life the most valuable thing that you could possibly have are friendships. And INSEAD has undoubtedly given me extremely precious friendships of people that are like-minded, generous, extremely intelligent and towards whom I've been able to turn for advice for real kind of genuine conversation over the years.
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When I was very young I just was interested by politics because you can influence. It's very fulfilling when you see that you can make things change. So that's really the main driver now.
20 YEARS IN PERSPECTIVE:
From 2009 to 2020 I was having two hats - one was the local managing partner of EY in Luxembourg, a firm of about 1700 employees, the second one was to be the private equity leader for EMEA.
I always had also a kind of public vibe in myself which is that I was always very much engaged into politics - not in the first row, in the second or in the third row, but co-managing electric campaigns. I was appointed to the State Council in Luxembourg, which is kind of the Senate, or the Upper House and I am today the vice president of that chamber.
In 2019 I was approaching to be 50. Working for big 4 is great, but I have been there for 25 years, it's super intense and I came to a point where quite frankly I was quite exhausted. After a lot of sleepless nights I decided to leave EY.
I took a couple of boards, I have 5 today, where I actually can make hopefully a difference. I'm spending more private time, so I have more time to practice my dancing skills
It's true that when you have a portfolio of activities which are very diverse, it requires a lot of organization and planning.
My political engagement is strong, but not that strong that I would want to become a full-time politician. The interesting thing is this the combination between business and politics.
You do it a bit for yourself, because it's very interesting, but at the same time definitely you're not doing it for financial reasons. So in that sense you're giving something back.
Biggest regret… in life there are sometimes windows of opportunities and you say no or yes and then you regret it. And I had 1 or 2 windows like this on the private side, where I took a decision which today I would have taken differently.
ON TOPIC: Big 4, being a part time politician
They are 4 Big 4, so each one has a natural share of the audit market of 25% so there are 75% left where you can do consulting, it's the wrong debate. It's just the way its needs to be organized.
Most of these people went back into the industry after a couple of years, so it's making a kind of training for the entire ecosystem. It's a fantastic career opportunity and it's a very socialist / communist, egalitarian system, based on meritocracy - no matter who you are, who your parents are, whether you're black, white, whatever your religion, nobody cares. Only thing what matters is your performance.
You work 80 hours a week if you want to progress and it is a tough school. But that's also part of the natural segregation. Once I became a partner and specifically when I became Managing Partner, it's where it really went to the 80 hours.
There are people who are saying that you should not ask the “hours” question, it's a matter of organization. I think that's rubbish, it's just not true. The reality is if you take that type of job, you just need to know it's going to be a phase in your life, maybe 4 years, maybe 8, where you're going to work crazy hours. If you don't like it, don't take it.
All THINGS INSEAD AND GIVING BACK
INSEAD has been probably the best decision in my life, educationally and professionally, and overall probably. It has been probably one of the best, if not the best year in my life. And I think I would not be who I am today without INSEAD. I am very thankful, grateful to INSEAD as an institution, but I would say, to you and to everybody who I had the chance to cross on my path at INSEAD, to our community, our class.
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If you invested all of your tuition in Apple stock, last time I checked, it was about $22 million.
20 YEARS IN PERSPECTIVE:
Just over ten years ago I set up my own business with a partner from INSEAD and another friend to build, own and operate renewable energy power stations in the UK.
We invested about a half a billion dollars at that time, had some great successes. I moved then to the States in 2017 to set up our US business and that business has become a solar developer.
Hardest for me has been navigating macroeconomic trends and changes.
Mostly we wanted to have healthy and happy families. And so that was always the first priority.
When we started the business I always wanted to protect myself from failure, so I spent a lot of time thinking about downside solutions and managing through crisis and having backup plans, which has served me very well. I didn't plan for success in the same way. And it's just now that I'm starting to realize that thinking about what you're going to do when things go well is just as important, as thinking about how to manage when things go badly.
ON TOPIC: Renewable energy, sustainability, regenerative agriculture
When I started in renewables, I was slightly kidding that nobody knew what they were doing, but only slightly.
It was a time when renewable energy was an exciting place to be, there weren't a lot of very capable professionals in it, which is why I could fit in so well and there was a huge amount of profit to be made from doing it and so we set up a renewable energy investment business.
Now energy isn't renewable energy, renewable is just part of the mix, in fact it's the cheapest part of the mix, it's the most economically obvious part for everyone to build and it's where the investment capital is going in.
There is clearly still economic opportunity left in renewable energy and because of inflation reduction act and similar policies around the world and a need for battery storage and potentially a new hydrogen economy and grid upgrades requirements, there's still a lot of work to do.
We used to look at curves for solar and wind deployment globally and in the UK when we were starting the business. And every time you looked at a forecast curve for deployment, it was significantly understated.
And so the drive now, which is an economic drive as opposed to just an ethical drive, is creating big change in the sector and I see a path towards significant change in the grid structure to a much, much higher use of renewable energy. And then the same thing on the automotive side and transport side.
That transfer from people feeling obliged to change to things becoming mass market, I can feel that change happening. I know it's not going to happen as quickly as we need it to happen and I would like it to be quicker, but I think good people are working on these problems and consumers want change and so I'm hopeful.
In renewables that was driven by subsidy; in regenerative organic farming that's driven by consumers’ willingness to pay. And so the fact that organic produce in the US costs significantly more than non-organic is because consumers see value in that.
Soil is a natural sink of carbon, there are lots and lots of studies that suggest that it could be the solution, the silver bullet to stopping climate change by effectively putting carbon back into the soil and so that's a core tenet of regenerative farming.
All THINGS INSEAD AND GIVING BACK
INSEAD has been a huge part of my work life since I started and it’s been fundamental to what's happened over the last 20 years. And so I had a great time there, I continue to have a great time with other people all the time and I know how unbelievably lucky I was to be able to go and be able to afford it
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The company I was working for, we were so extremely short-term focused and we almost changed strategy every three months, we were literally throwing money out of the window, just to get customers’ market share, and somehow it didn't feel right to me. I didn't have the financial understanding to really put a calculator to it, and then the company also literally almost went bankrupt at the end of the 3 years and so I said, you know somehow this cannot be right, you can't run a business with such a short-term horizon.
20 YEARS IN PERSPECTIVE:
Going to INSEAD, I had two clear views in my mind - I wanted to work for a family owned, or a privately held business that offered me a real international career.
Altogether 9 years abroad, we came back to Holland, a family of 5, which was probably the hardest move we ever did, going back to what you thought was home.
I'm still with SHV, almost twenty years, I am on my ninth or tenth job at the moment. I've worked in cash & carry retail, switched to the energy division, liquefied gas, I've been on the board of SHV, and now I am CEO of Nutreco, which is one of the global leaders in animal nutrition.
ON TOPIC: Fossil fuels, energy transition, agriculture, animal nutrition, sustainability
Energy transition is probably one of the 2 or 3 large transitions that we are going through and that we will have to go through.
We really started to drive, I would say, a twofold course towards sustainability: 1) we set the goal to become a fully sustainable, so a fully renewable provider of LPG. And the second leg is to provide other sources of energy, like solar energy.
I've had my fair share of industry conferences, where there's on the one hand a group of companies that really wants to change; there's also a group of companies that are either in denial, or that they cling on to vested interests, or they see no need, or they see no opportunity. And so that brings tension, but I think it also can bring a lot of creativity
“You know, we are about to launch the first totally renewable LPG in the world”
This is why in-person education cannot be replicated in another form
The purpose of our company is feeding the future
Agriculture is responsible for about 25% of all emissions in the world.
The system that we have today is so super-efficient, for any new technology it is really challenging at the start to beat those economies of scale.
We're trying to really work on creating more sustainable solutions for current farming practices and at the same time we are investing and there I dare to say we're at the forefront of our industry. We're investing also in creating feed for lab grown meat.
That is an industry that, in the next 5 to 10 years will start to grow and I think once it starts growing it will grow exponentially.
Where we now provide nutrition to animals, we would then provide nutrition to cells. These cells, they need to eat, and so we provide, what we know about feeding an animal is pretty useful to feed a cell.
All THINGS INSEAD AND GIVING BACK
Life is about learning, earning, returning and I didn't want to wait with returning until I stopped earning.
INSEAD for me has been – firstly, it was an amazing year to be together with such a great energy, I don't think I've ever seen the positive energy around me that was there during that year. People were so motivated, people were in for fun, people were in for serious things, creative ideas, the international dynamics. But it also really helped me make a jump in my career. I'm honestly convinced that I wouldn't be where I am today without INSEAD.
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You're basically creating miracles that fit in the palm of your hand and you're helping reimagine life for patients.
20 YEARS IN PERSPECTIVE:
Givers are not good takers.
I don't think of the 2000s as twenty years ago, I still think of the 80s, or the 70s as twenty years ago.
I started in Singapore, then went back to the US and lived and worked in New Jersey and Chicago, then Munich, London and back in the US. I was fortunate enough to have those opportunities with the same company, so I have actually been with one company since I left INSEAD.
The biggest challenge is, I'll call it kind of “recognizing my own power” and what I can contribute versus being told or accepting my situation. I think the biggest challenge for a lot of women in leadership, from a career standpoint, is stretching without hesitation for those bigger roles.
For the last several years I've made mentoring both within the company, as well as outside the company a priority for me.
Being able to talk about yourself is something that I'm not comfortable doing, but I've had to do it, so I've learned to do it.
Carving out a half a day or even an hour to go do something that I want to do, it doesn't come easily, it does not come easily at all.
ON TOPIC: Pharma, healthcare, lifespan, longevity
My biggest frustration with how the industry is viewed is the cost of drugs in the overall healthcare system is maybe 10% of the total cost of health care. Yet, where we try to push for savings is on the cost of drugs, which doesn't fundamentally solve the problem of access to care and cost of care.
The frustration is, we're not picking the right battles to fight to change the health care system model. But that doesn't change the fact that what we do every day as an industry is work on products that hopefully just provide more for patients.
The process that works is, in the early stages of development you pick certain disease areas that you feel like have a strong unmet need and you try to find targets to battle that disease.
What we're seeing now in the industry, which is different from before is, the FDA is much more open to looking at real-world evidence and shorter-term studies to give access to products for patients compared to before.
So even the regulatory pathways are trying to allow for faster innovation than what we had before.
It is a very competitive industry, even in spaces like oncology, because 10 - 15 years ago you might have had 1 option, now you have multiple options, which is great for the patient, because now you can have your choice of products whether it's better side effect profile, even potentially better efficacy, and companies will continue to invest in it.
Luckily in developed countries you do see an increase in lifespan, but you still have a lack of access to care in a lot of, whether it's sub-Saharan Africa, even India.
What I'm hopeful for is that we will have more longevity. What I'm worried about is that we don't appreciate that and we don't take advantage of that extra time that we will hopefully all have right and about what we're going to do with that time.
I'd rather see us be able to enjoy that extra time rather than just continue to work our asses off during that time.
ON TOPIC: corporate life, cultural differences
“Do not schedule a meeting during lunchtime, because nobody will come to your meeting and they will be pissed off at you.”
All THINGS INSEAD AND GIVING BACK
Milena: So you're not buying an Amphi.
Guest: I'm not buying an Amphi, no.
I feel like I'm doing some small part to ensure that the future is more positive for some of those individuals.
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The story of someone about to disrupt a part of medicine.
“What if we were able to invent a technology, basically a new material, that would allow to repair and reconnect tissues without trauma, in an atraumatic manner, in a non-penetrating manner.”
What you're trying to do is big, it is going to take time and we're going to give you time.
20 YEARS IN PERSPECTIVE:
I love the last twenty years, I'm very excited for the next twenty to be honest.
I would have never described myself at the time as an entrepreneur, to be honest. So maybe people see things through you that you didn't even see about yourself when you look in the mirror.
One part of the [INSEAD] journey was to ask myself whether I was really certain I wanted to stay in healthcare and towards the end of INSEAD I was convinced that this was the industry I wanted to stay.
The best way to have an impact is to be with people you know yare gonna be able to contribute.
To be honest, I really love what I do, so I don't necessarily see it as work and because I don't see it as work, I can spend too much time on it, by definition.
MIT [scientists] had invented quite a profound technology in the domain of tissue repair and we decided altogether to start Tissium, which is a medical device company. So this is how I moved from biotech to medical devices.
We have raised a total of 170 million in the last ten years. We did the last fundraising in March 2023, it was between SVB and Credit Suisse, so it was an unusual period.
We build the company from day 0 with a very optimistic mindset saying if it works, it should work in many areas so let's build it, so that when we get there we can replicate and develop multiple solutions for patients. We operate in the space of peripheral nerve repair, where we can reconnect the nerve after a trauma, an accident, together.
We are developing implantable devices. It came from an insight from the MIT at the time, they invented a new material to try to reconnect tissues during surgical procedures.
We are a bit unique in the MedTech space. We are not proven yet in terms of business model. Today we have more than 20 families of patents, which have already generated a 60 or 70+ patents and we keep inventing every year.
ON TOPIC: Start-ups, entrepreneurship, founders, investors
We built Tissium to remain independent, we never build the company hoping to get acquired. You need to identify investors that believe in that vision, because if an investor is hoping to have an exit in the next two years, or 3 years, the discussion will be very different at the board, as someone who tells you “What you're trying to do is big, it is going to take time and we're going to give you time.”
When you build important things, or novel things, it takes time, it doesn't happen overnight. And because it's long, because it's hard, it's always easier to be with someone else, or a few other people.
ON TOPIC: MedTech, disrupt, healthcare, biology, science
You're about to disrupt a part of medicine.
Working with scientists – science is a domain which is, in theory, data driven in the sense that data is at the core of the discussion. Yet, what is a bit surprising, and it took me a certain time, scientists can be somewhat emotional, not on the data, but on the way they perceive their work and the way they try to achieve.
Sometimes scientists try to seek for perfection, which is in reality not achievable and one of the big challenges is, you need to make sure that they move their mindset from perfection to excellence. Because excellence you can reach it, perfection you will never [reach].
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The adults were so weak they had to be carried off the shipwreck onto shore… Today, I lead the diabetes business in Medtronic, a global leader in medical devices. The business is about 2.3 billion, with over 5,000 employees. The story of “the person most likely to rule the planet in the future”
20 YEARS IN PERSPECTIVE:
I find myself not in the mainstream part of these companies, but having a big impact on the future of those companies.
A bit of a nomad - three million miles of travel approximately, 3 continents, 3 children, 3 C-suite roles, 7 cities and 10 addresses.
My background is in software, in tech, Microsoft was really formative, doing all things on consumer software and services, the precursor to cloud technologies. I then joined Tyco electronics, and then Honeywell recruited me to be its first Chief Commercial Officer, and then I was promoted to lead the software business.
A lot of people say [about Medtronic] “Well, that's very different from some of the industrial companies, as well as the software world” and the funny thing is, the concepts are exactly the same.
I used to think working on software apps was really exciting and was going to change the world... Let's say, if you make a game on the iPhone, is that as thrilling as applying your brain power and your energy towards something like the area of diabetes, where you can really help people's lives? It's just not!
The biggest challenge… I think actually having kids and having a career is a juggling act for everybody, it always comes back to the question of how much should you work.
ON TOPIC: Grit and leadership, rags to riches, the making of a leader
When you grow, life gives you certain tools depending on how you get brought up. And when you grow up poor, you get a lot of tools. I had to support my mother, I had to find a way to go to college. So I had to think about how do I make a lot of money while going to school.
At 16 I started a business and after about a year I had a hundred students. So I converted the garage, my bedroom and the living room into classrooms and I taught all weekend. I made more money doing this than when I got my first job at McKinsey.
It takes courage to confront necessity and accept that bad things happen. Half my life I was living in poverty or close to financial ruin and I missed out on a childhood, but every day I picked myself up...
Changing the events that are outside you is not possible, but you can change how you view them, that's possible. So why don't you go and focus on changing what's possible and I think to me those lessons help you deal with adversity.
Don't be a poser, actually contribute, figure out what is your unique contribution, be really, really good, build your talent stack and then the opportunity will find you. You can compete by being political, by being self-promotional, but you're not really adding value and I want to go to bed every night knowing I did my best and contributed.
It's helpful to have a personal board of directors, it's people that you trust and you've built relationships over time that can pull you back from the brink of your excesses or when you have blind spots.
Cultivate relationships, do it because they're your friends or they're people you respect and admire, not because it helps you get ahead.
ON TOPIC: Diabetes, medtech, health
25% of healthcare is spent on diabetes, that's a lot, in the world.
There's about 7 million people that have type 1 and type 2 insulin-dependent, that's a lot of people. If you then go to the broader type 2, you're talking about 200 million people that need some sort of medication.
Innovation here is: you're putting something in someone's body.
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The rocket was emblazoned with the INSEAD logo and underneath that it said KacificOne, the name of our satellite, and a FORCE FOR GOOD and so it was the force for good logo from INSEAD.
Force for Food is part of the famous John Kennedy speech, when he declared that by the end of the decade he would send men to the Moon. I like that reference that space can be a force for good; money can be a force for good, capitalism can be a force for good and you can use money to do the right thing and to use the capital markets in the right way.
20 YEARS IN PERSPECTIVE:
I don't think I would change anything, I don't think I would be able to, honestly, I think fate has taken me where it's taken me.
After INSEAD, I was quite lost for about a year. In December 2004 I had a big wake up call. After a frivolous year of not knowing what I wanted to do, after a sailing regatta in Thailand I was caught in the Asian tsunami and laughing was over in a matter of seconds. I guess I lost the taste for partying at that point and I really wanted to change my life and do something useful.
It was a huge transformation I think, both INSEAD and of course this tsunami, that put everything in question again for me. So that took quite a bit of time to find my path, my way forward.
I'm here, a consultant on a bicycle, and I would need to raise 250 million dollars for this.
I needed to go back and convince my wife, which was probably the most difficult thing of all.
It took me five months to raise about half a million dollars, it took me another 6.5 years to raise 230 million dollars. So we snowballed that project from a little bit of money, and the more money I raised, the more contracts I got and then that was a nice kind of virtuous circle that we got. We bought a Boeing satellite in 2017 and completed all the financing and launched it at the end of 2019 on a SpaceX falcon 9 rocket.
And that was an amazing day that I'll remember for my life - it was like the birth of a third child, it was incredible.
Q: “What if the rocket blew up?” A: “It would have been a wonderful, a faithful firework and people would have clapped I guess.”
Raising money was a challenge but in the end I found a talent in me to be able to raise money.
ON TOPIC: Satellites and rockets, broadband, internet and more
There will always be, for I guess I don’t know how many thousands of years to come, this little satellite. And if nothing else comes out of this company, this little satellite will be floating in space and telling the story that this has happened and that I was the one starting this whole and putting this machine in space and it will be the testimony of the journey.
In remote parts of the world people want to be connected, people want to spend money, they just don't have the means. If you were to put fibre to all these places it would cost billions of dollars, but with a satellite you have the distribution system built into it, so that's the beauty of satellite.
We are providing sometimes lifesaving connectivity for critical cases that are seen in these regions, people live in very precarious conditions.
You can reestablish huge amount of connectivity in a blink, but we've also provided disaster response after many tropical cyclones, typhoons in the Philippines, Vanuatu, Fiji and even in New Zealand recently.
ON TOPIC: Entrepreneurship, start-ups, snowballing
The most difficult is to be lonely at times.
Raise more money than you really need because you'll need that money.
It's a bigger sandcastle, but it's still a sandcastle that the tide keeps chipping at it and denting it, tide after tide, and I'm on top of it, just piling up new sand on top of it to make sure it keeps growing. So it's an interesting journey.
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But when I genuinely enjoy what I do, then I do a really good job at it and then the financial side tends to take care of itself.
20 YEARS IN PERSPECTIVE:
I had realised that rather than trying to be someone else, or trying to fit into a system, the best thing I could do was focus on what I thought was right and follow my instincts.
We spent what probably is the best 5 years of my life and career living in Dar es Salaam, working in a nonprofit.
I had been doing stuff in order to have a better future life, rather than actually realising that this was it, it wasn't going to get any better.
I got picked up by a VC firm, that was a disaster from day one and got fired from there two years later, feeling like an abject failure at 42. I think I just read that Blair and Clinton both became leaders of their country at 42 and I was unemployed and feeling pretty sorry for myself.
The CEO was right to fire me, because I wasn't very good at what I did.
The biggest change for me over the past 10 years has been understanding the importance of sleep. I figured out that if I'm in bed reading a book at ten o'clock, tomorrow is probably going to be a pretty good day, and if I'm up at one o'clock, watching a film, it's less likely to be so.
So many things that I'm both grateful and frustrated with are the result of luck.
I admire deeds more than people
ON TOPIC: Film, film-making, Oscars and more
Someone once likened making a film to fishing with 13 fish hooks and needing to be able to pull all out at exactly the same time.
The big learning that I've had over the last 7 years is there are a lot of people who cultivate an image of being fantastic and Mr. Nice guy, and in reality are arseholes, or have been corrupted by the industry. It's like sometimes meeting your heroes and then realizing they're not nice people at all.
Most people work in this industry because of a passion for the product that they make, rather than a belief that this is a way to riches.
One of the things that I think Europe and other parts of the world have got ahead of them is to be a low-cost producer of English language content, because the Americans have just lost the plot in terms of the way they structure and the way these things cost.
The number of series that are being produced in the US today is basically 6 times the number of TV series that's been produced at the end of the 2000, and the budgets are probably 2 to 3 times the size of what they were too.
Our revenues have increased by about 1400% during that time. And that growth has been fantastic, but where it's both been felt has been at the cinemas, because cinema volumes are down. They've been one of the most steady industries over the last hundred years and have been almost recession-proof and suddenly we found a situation where that may no longer be the case.
We've changed our behaviour, so that's one serious dynamic in the industry.
Almost everyone is trying to cut costs and I think we're going to have a look at a very different industry in 5 years.
The industry needs to become much more thoughtful around costs.
In any industry where there's an extreme hierarchy, there's risk that people abuse their power.
The reason why we love our actors is because half the time we dream of being with them.
All THINGS INSEAD AND GIVING BACK
Scandinavia is an INSEAD wasteland.
That is my most treasured possession after INSEAD, is the people that I met.
References, mentions:
The black swan (Nassim Nicholas Taleb), Why we sleep by Matthew Walker, Nelson Mandela, Tom Hanks, SF Studios, Sony, A man called Otto, A Man Called Ove (film), A Man Called Ove (book by Fredrik Backman, En man som heter Ove)
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We'll break the rules because we're rule breakers
20 YEARS IN PERSPECTIVE:
It was one of those things where I've always believed that you need to look inside yourself and figure out will you regret saying no to this one. And this was just one of those ones where I said yeah, this one is something I have to do.
Global marketing director for De Beers diamond jewellers, an LVMH company, an amazing kind of training ground, because if anyone knows how to do luxury branding and marketing, it's LVMH.
Going into the hotel industry, I thought, oh you know, I stay in hotels all the time I totally know what goes on. But no, mornings I was with housekeeping, I was with banqueting, I was with kitchens, I was with stewarding, all these functions I didn't even know existed in a hotel. In the afternoon I did my job but, so it was a bit of a hotel school in six months that I got to do.
As Hong Kong started selling out of masks, I decided to go to New Zealand on the beginning of my sabbatical year. The sabbatical year didn't turn out exactly as I thought it was going to be, so I quickly kind of hurried back to Hong Kong as the pandemic expended around the world.
It was 20 jobs in 9 years for me.
If you want to make change, you have to figure out how the actual organization is structured.
I actually took a step backwards role-wise, but it felt like the right thing to do, because it felt like a really smart humble group of people, that were trying to do things really differently. And that began my almost 9 year journey at Netflix.
The way we live, the way we work is fundamentally different now, so I think retirement is now or never.
ON TOPIC: The world of travel and entertainment
If you look at travel and entertainment, we've gone through a boom and a bust exactly in inverse order.
The world of travel and entertainment do mix very, very well together, as evidenced by the White Lotus, and how everyone's obsessed by it.
The intersectionality of opening people's minds, whether it's via travel or telling stories from around the world and really, I think, Netflix allowed people to travel when they couldn't.
The thing right now is that everything changes so quickly and believe me, actually the hotel industry in general is not one for fast changes.
Every trend inspires a countertrend and so we will soon crave human contact and we will soon crave personality and senses of humor.
ON TOPIC: Entertainment, Netflix, AI and more
What's been so much fun about Netflix was just the tech forward mindset of it.
Netflix had been one of the early pioneers of pivoting and changing and starting new formats.
We pivoted probably every six months and with that came a reorg probably at least once a year, if not more and figuring out what skill set do we need from our team.
Netflix has been using AI since we started the service. All it did was that was what gave you the recommendations and it's a learning engine.
In some ways the future is the past
ON TOPIC: Marketing and branding with a capital B
I think everything that a company does is marketing and branding, right?
This advent of CMO to CEO starting to pick up speed is pretty prevalent
There's also a very kind of numbers and data-oriented nature in marketing. Being a very data-driven marketeer has served us both very, very well
Authenticity is never a bad value to have
References, mentions:
American express, LVMH, Peninsula, Rosewood hotel and resorts, Michelle Goss, Levi's, Starbucks, GAP, Vodaphone, Netflix, Mr Beast, Kim Kardashian, Anna Karenina (LeoTolstoy), The Boy, the Mole, the Fox and the Horse (Charlie Mackesy), Enlightenment Now (Steve Pinker), Tim Cook, Apple, Taylor Swift
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20 YEARS IN PERSPECTIVE:
“People don’t remember books; they remember sentences. More specifically, they remember stories.”
Four different places in the last 20 years. I married for the second time and hopefully the last time, I also fell in love with running, so I became an avid marathoner, hopefully I'll complete the 6 majors.
Corporate culture matters quite a lot, so all those OB classes were actually quite helpful.
On Credit Suisse - one of the key takeaways is how a centennial brand or franchise could vanish in a matter of months.
ON TOPIC: Finance, alternative investments, seeding managers
We're always looking for PHD: Poor, Hungry and Desperate to make money people.
Lack of humility is actually like a cancer, it eats you over time.
Humility, to know what you know and what you don't know, humility to keep learning and know that you know you still need to continue to develop yourself.
Even more important than being a good investor is to be a good psychologist.
The top 20 companies in the S&P500 index, they're worth more than the total of all private equity, venture capital, infrastructure investments in the world.
Today about one quarter of the whole stock trading that takes place every single day is performed by machines, by computers and algorithms and so forth.
Out of every 10 new managers that I meet, it's probably 1 or 2 to have some likelihood of becoming successful down the road.
it's very important to identify how the person behaves when things are going sour.
We all know that the first 2 to 3 years is the key period for knowing whether the business will take off or not, and the mortality rate across alternative asset managers in the first three years is probably 60% - 70%.
ON TOPIC: Capital markets and the future direction of investments
The improbable is different from the impossible.
The cost of capital measured by interest rates became very low during the last fifteen years.
When capital is easily accessible people make a lot of stupid mistakes
We're basically migrating to a different regime - we're going to a period where interest rates will remain high for a certain period of time because of high inflation.
We need to be much more cautious about how we allocate capital; we need to think a lot about allocating more capital to real assets because these are the assets that protect us from high inflation.
One of the things that I think people underestimate is inflation. Inflation can get very sticky over time, it doesn't revert to the mean.
One of the consequences of that is that the income distribution gets more unequal over time, because inflation is basically a tax that primarily affects the less wealthy people. And with more income inequality social unrest becomes more likely right.
One of the ways to preserve purchasing power over time is investing in real assets. And one of the real assets that I think still has a lot of good value embedded in it is public equities.
ON GIVING BACK
All my donations go for institutions that are related to education. Talent is somewhat overrated, what we really need to care about is providing the opportunity for people and I think education is probably the best way to provide opportunity for people to develop themselves and grow.
If you look at all cases of emerging markets that evolved over time and grew, that was because of education.
Outlive (Peter Attia), Credit Suisse, Psychology of money (Morgan Housel), Berkshire Hathaway, Warren Buffet, Lifespan (David Sinclair), Alternative investments, Venture capital, hedge funds, private equity, Elizabeth Holmes, Bernard Madoff, FTX, Sam Bankman-Fried, Crypto, INSEAD, INSEADAlumni
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20 YEARS IN PERSPECTIVE:
Mike Tyson, the philosopher, says that everybody has a plan until you get a punch in your face.
INSEAD was a big part, a big success factor for us. We got the family out of it, but we also got pretty good jobs after.
I learned to code and I wanted to go back into trading and I went into systematic trading for 5 years and then developed models for cryptocurrencies as well and then I fell completely in love with that and fell into the rabbit hole of blockchain, web 3.
I get bored very easily, so I can't have the same stuff every single day and just trying to reinvent myself all the time.
In my twenty plus years of professional life, the people that did best and the people I admire most, they all had a really good balance between being intelligent and having a good amount of emotional intelligence.
One regret that I have is that, five years ago my father passed away, I didn't have enough time to spend with him. We always have this romantic vision that you control time, you control your destiny and it is so not true.
ON TOPIC: Making it work as a couple, an INSEAD couple
It's not just the kids, not just the marriage, not just the job, but you kind of have to fit everything into life and once in a while even find time for yourself, which has been very challenging for many years.
One thing which is very important, is to understand that career and life, it's a journey - there'll be times that one of the partners is going to be ahead of the other one and we think this is a little bit like a relay race at different points in life. The career of one is going to be,
The one of the two is going to be the stable income earner, whereas the other one is retooling, relearning and preparing for the next moonshot.
So you take turns and as long as there is mutual respect and understanding and we work almost as a team, while one is retooling, the other one is really working hard and it's how it should be. If you keep this balance right, it works, it simply works.
Allow yourself to fail and don't be afraid just go for it. What's the worst thing that can happen to you expect the worst and then hopefully you're positively surprised after. And if you need to fall, fall forward. Never fall backwards.
ON TOPIC: FINANCE, FINANCIAL SERVICES, START-UPS, VENTURE, BLOCKCHAIN
The job I used to do when I started, which was FX, now they are done by machines, you don't need people anymore. After the great financial crisis the industry changed a lot and became almost like a sausage factory.
I do think the next evolution of finance is going to come from improving payments, streamlining, removing the middlemen, the rent seekers, which a lot of times is the bank.
Whenever there is a gold rush, people that make most of the money is the people that sell the picks and shovels. We invest in the picks and shovels.
ON TOPIC: START-UPS, SCALE UPs
I think it's good to actually start out in the more corporate space because you get proper training and I think that nobody can take away from you.
When I made the big change from a, tens of thousands of people company into a 4 people company, the most important learning from me was that you don't really need all of the support that you thought you needed desperately before.
To build a scalable business like that you need to take a couple of baby steps before actually getting to something that works and then figure out how to scale it.
References, mentions:
Bound, FX hedging, Lehman brothers, Nomura, Barclays, CBDCs, Blockchain, Bitcoin, Ethereum, Smart contracts, Autistica charity, Siddhartha: An Indian novel (Hermann Hesse), Emotional Intelligence (Daniel Goleman), Give and Take (Adam Grant)
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