The Wall Street Lab

Mathieu Chabran is Co-founder of Tikehau Capital, a global alternative asset manager with over 30 Billion USD in Assets under Management. Previously, he worked in the Real Estate Debt Market team of Deutsche Bank in London. He began his career at Merrill Lynch, firstly in Paris within the Principal Investment team, then in London, in the High Yield Capital Market department. He received his education from ESCP Europe.

This episode is about Mathieu's journey as a founder to scaling his alternative investment asset management company across the global. We talk about Private Debt, Real Assets, Private Equity, and Capital Markets Strategy. We cover the importance of people and culture and the effects of covid on the business. And of course we talk about the requirements to grow as an employee and climb the ranks.

Andrew Scott is a founding partner of 7percent ventures, a London & San Francisco-based technology VC. Before founding 7percent ventures in 2014, Andrew founded six startups of his own. Among these was the world's first location based social network (Playtxt 2001; patented), online digital news archive (BritishPathe.com, 2002), trust graph/recommendation engine using machine learning (Rummble, 2007; patented). In-between he did strategy consulting for VCs and Corporates including Astra Zeneca, AT&T and Alcatel Lucent. Andrew is also co-founder of ICE, a global non-profit network of tech founders and investors, established in 2009. In this episode we talk about Andrew's journey from serial entrepreneur to Venture Capital investors. Along the way we learn about his selection criteria for investments, lessons learned from being an entrepreneuer, CEO, and then investors. We also talk about how to stand out as someone looking to get into the VC industry.

Salim Ramji is a Senior Managing Director and Global Head of iShares and Index Investments for BlackRock and a member of the firm's Global Executive Committee. Prior to that he was Head of BlackRock's U.S. Wealth Advisory business. Salim joined BlackRock in 2014, serving initially as the Global Head of Corporate Strategy. Before joining BlackRock, he was a Senior Partner at McKinsey & Company where he led the Asset & Wealth Management practice areas. He started his career as a corporate finance and M&A lawyer in London and Hong Kong. Salim earned a bachelor's degree in economics and politics from University of Toronto, a law degree from Cambridge University and is a CFA charter holder. He is also a trustee of Graham Windham, a New York-based child care agency. This episode is about nothing less than finding one's purpose in life. For Salim that is making investing easier for millions of people. We talk about ETFs, passive, and index investing, new trends in technology, the recent trading boom and how startups helped facilitate that. We took about the influx of new investors that never before have participated in the markets. We talk about sustainability and it's relation to ETFs, we talk about corporate governance and BlackRocks innovations to let clients vote even in passive vehicles.

Barney Coles is a Managing Director, Co-Head of the Clean Energy team and member of the Executive Committee of Capital Dynamics. He is also a member of the Responsible Investment Committee. He has over a decade of renewable energy financing experience across Europe. Prior to joining Capital Dynamics, Barney spent over six years in energy corporate finance at Ernst & Young in London, working across lead advisory, project finance, and M&A in the clean energy and utility sectors. He also provided transaction advice to both the private and public sector on large-scale clean energy infrastructure procurement processes. Barney has a bachelor's degree in Economics from University of Cambridge and is a member of the Institute of Chartered Accountants of Scotland. In this episode we dig deeper into a topic we brushed with Capital Dynamics CEO Martin Hahn before: Clean Energy. Private Investments in renewable energy assets, like wind parks and solar farms all across Europe. We dig into lifecycle of such assets, value drivers, and buyers and sellers in the market. We go deep into the mechanics of the power market and what it means for asset pricing. Barney tells us how he experienced the complete change in the market when subsidies suddenly stopped and much more.

Rasa Karapandza is a Professor of Finance, Vice Dean of Education, and the Academic Director of the Master in Finance Program at EBS Business School in Germany. He is also a visiting Professor at New York University. He was previously also visiting scholar at UC Berkeley. Additionally, Rasa is a Member of the board of directors and member of the audit committee of RS2, a payment processing company. The general focus of Rasa's research is investments, empirical asset pricing, and portfolio management. He advised members of the US congress on the topics of regulating cryptocurrencies Rasa received his PhD in Economics and Finance from Graduate School of Economics Barcelona (summa cum laude). He holds a Masters degree in Economics and Finance from University Pompeu Fabra and a Bachelors degree in Astrophysics from the University of Belgrade. In this episode we cover a lot of ground. We get into Rasa's research about empirical asset pricing aka trying to predict future asset prices. We talk about how he utilises machine learning and language processing methods to extract sentiment from public news sources. We then speak about the controversial topics of High Frequency Trading and Payment for order flow. We cover cryptocurrencies and Rasa debunks some myths about blockchain. Rasa shares insights into his past and encouragements he wants to give to students.

Jens Bernhardt is the Founder and Managing Partner of Bernhardt Advisory, a multifamily office, an M&A service provider, and placement agent for private equity funds in Germany. Before founding his own company, Jens was Chief Investment Strategist of the family office service provider subsidiary of Sal. Oppenheim, which at the time in 2008, was Europe's largest independent private bank. Jens previously has been a member of the Board of Deutsche Wohnen, a property company listed in Germany's main index, the DAX. Before that, he was Chief Investment Officer for Germany at Zurich Insurance Group, Switzerland's biggest insurance company. And before that, he was Chief Investment Officer at Skandia Life Insurance. And even before that, Jens was a management consultant and fund manager. Jens holds an MBA from Cambridge and a PhD from the University of Kassel. In this episode Jens gives us an overview of the Private Wealth space. This includes similarities and differences between Family Offices, Wealth Managers, and Private Banks. As an industry veteran, Jens gets into the benefits and struggles of Family Offices.

Jascha Samadi is Co-Founder and Partner at Greenfield One, a Berlin-based early-stage venture fund dedicated to blockchain and crypto. Greenfield One makes long-term bets on early developer teams building towards an open, decentralized and more robust architecture of tomorrow's web. Prior to Greenfield One, Jascha was Co-Founder and CEO of apprupt, which was acquired by browser maker Opera Software in 2014. He is also Co-Founder of Flux, a scalable open market protocol. Jascha holds a Bachelor and Master of Law from Hamburg University. This episodes combines two topics we have talked about in the past, Venture Capital and Crypto and how the two can go together. We talk about how crypto VCs invest into new technology, teams, and tokens. We learn how the decision criteria for a crypto VC, the differences, and the similarities between crypto VC and traditional VC. And we learn how the blockchain helps the transparancy on which VCs are all in on the project. Enjoy this deep dive into Web3 Investing.

Our guest today is Mohnish Pabrai. Mohnish is a legendary investor, a shameless cloner and an effective philanthropist. He is both, the author and the subject of several books.

Mohnish is the founder and Managing Partner of Pabrai Investment Funds, Founder and CEO of Dhandho Funds, Founder of the Dakshana Foundation. He is the author of "The Dhandho Investor" and "Mosaic: Perspectives on Investing".

In this episode we talk about how Mohnish cloned his investment style from legends like Benjamin Graham, Warren Buffet, and Charlie Munger. Mohnish shares lessons from his book about businesses and investing. We talk about deep value investing, great compounders and the difference in mindset those styles require. We get into his investment funnel, investing mindset, and what Mohnish focuses his attention on. We talk about other great investors like Nick Sleep, Zak Zakaria, and more. Mohnish shares investing lessons from the sitcom "Seinfeld" and fantastic advice on personal and career development.

Our guest today is Laurie Menoud. Laurie is a Partner at At One Ventures, a VC that finds, funds, and grows deep-tech startups to catalyze a world where humanity is a net positive to nature. Laurie also joined the board of directors of several Startups, and is a multi board observer. Throughout her career Laurie was a Microbiologist, a Biochemist, and Biotechnologist. She was involved in the characterization of the giant virus, "Mimivirus," at the French national laboratory, which shed new light on the origins of life and optimized new biological processes for wastewater treatment. All that, before she turned to VC, where she co-founded A DOZEN! deep-tech startups related to computer vision, Natural Language Processing, diagnostics and robotics during her time at SRI International and later as Co-lead of BASF's North America Venture Capital efforts.

In this episode we talk about Deep Tech VC Investments. We learn how to invest in Biotech, robotics, AI, and much more. Laurie tells us how her background in research, biotech, biochemistry and biology has helped her be a better investor. We talk about investments in companies to lead humanity to a state where we are a net positive to nature. We learn about sourcing deep tech investments, doing due diligence, and helping net positive companies grow.

Our guest today is Luis García Álvarez. Luis is an Equity Portfolio Manager at MAPFRE Asset Management. MAPFRE is the world's largest Spanish insurance company and the second largest insurance group in Latin America. Luis has recently received the 'Fund Manager of the Year' award at the Third Edition of the RankiaPro Awards. The economic-financial publication has recognized Luis as "anticipating volatility and creating a portfolio consistent with the long-term view" in an adverse context in financial markets such as that experienced since March 2020. Luis is also the Co-Director and Professor at the Executive Program in Value Investing and Behavioural Finance at ICADE Business School. Since 2013 Luis is a CFA Charterholder. Luis also has co-authored several papers on the field of finance which he has presented at the University of Warsaw, University of Munich, Humboldt University of Berlin, the European Central Bank and the Spanish Finance Association. Before joining MAPFRE, Luis worked at Banco Santander as a Market Risk Analyst and also at BBVA as an Equity Research Analyst. Luis holds a Bachelor's degree in Economics from the Francisco de Vitoria University, a Master's degree in Economics and Finance from CEMFI and the Value Investing Diploma awarded by the Ben Graham Chair at the Richard Ivey School of Business.

In this episode Luis explains to us what Value Investing, Behavioural Finance, and Investing in sports have to do with each other. Luis talks about combining the Value Investing approach with knowledge from Behavioural Finance and how that helps him invest into European Football (Soccer) clubs. He explains his investing approach, idea creation, systems to keep his own emotions in check while gauging the emotions of greed and fear in the market to make successful investments. We deep dive into the financial side of European football and sports in general.