What I learned in politics is, you need to work with everybody

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”

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.

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.

“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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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