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)
