TRIUM Connects

What does being a fabulously successful, early stage VC investor have in common with being a world class CEO? The answer, according to Jihoon Rim, my guest for this episode, is the ability to select the right people and then, largely get out of their way and let them do their jobs.

Jihoon, after a stint at Softbank, founded his own VC firm – Kcube Ventures – in 2012 with an initial fund of USD 10M. In 2021, when the fund was liquidated, it returned more than USD 1B. In 2015, Jihoon was appointed the CEO of Kakao. In the 2.5 years of his leadership, Kakao’s revenues and operating profits more than doubled (from USD 932M to USD 1.972B and USD 88M to USD 165M, respectively). Such successes led to Jihoon being recognised in 2017 Korea’s number 1 CEO (by Insight Korea), and in 2018 as one of Korea’s Top Ten Heros (by Maeil Broadcasting Network).

He joined NYU’s Stern School of Business as an Adjunct Professor in 2019 where he teaches some of the most highly regarded elective courses in the entire School.  Between 2018 and 2022, he completed his Doctorate degree. This was all completed before he turned 43 years old.

In this episode we discuss what Jihoon looked for when investing in founders and how he took the lessons from that world and applied them in his role as CEO of Kakao. We also discuss how people routinely misunderstand the nature and scope of tech companies’ powers – which he believes is too great, and how transparency will play a crucial role if we ever want to do something about this problem. Finally, we explore why Korean content has been so successful on the international entertainment stage.

Jihoon is smart, articulate, highly accomplished and wonderfully humble. His candour and honesty in our discussion was refreshing. He is proof that wisdom does not need to rely on age. This episode is, in my mind, an exemplar of how a good leader sees the world and their role in it. Enjoy the conversation!

Citations

Frans Johansson (2014) The Click Moment: Seizing Opportunity in an Unpredictable World. Penguin

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Over the last 10-20 years we have seen the rise and rise of populist and nationalist movements in democracies across the world. This, in part, reflects a growing dissatisfaction with the state of our democratic institutions. Many people just don’t believe that democracy delivers for them.

My guest for this episode is Professor Alberto Alemanno. To combat the ever-increasing attraction of illiberal political movements, Alberto believes we need to work towards creating a more even playing field between companies and citizens in our civil society. If we could do that, so the argument goes, we would have a healthier polity and more effective democratic institutions.

A specific step toward these goals would be to expect private firms to make public all of their political activity – adding a ‘P’ for politics – to their existing ESG reporting requirements. As part of this, firms would need to report their support and membership of trade associations and the policies those associations work for and against. Like holding firms responsible for the ESG of companies in their supply chains, this type of political reporting would hold firms responsible for the interventions in the political system made on their behalf by others. Alberto argues that this would stop companies from playing a double game of supporting one policy publicly while simultaneously working to stop that policy through their support of other organisations and associations. The idea is a fascinating one, and Albertos knowledge and passion of the issues it raises shine through in our conversation.

Alberto is the Jean Monnet Professor of European Union Law & Policy at HEC Paris. He is also the founder of the civic startup, The Good Lobby, whose mission is to equalize access to power by strengthening the advocacy capacity of civil society and making corporate political influence more accountable and sustainable. He sits on the board of several civil society organizations, such as Friends of Europe, European Alternatives, VoxEurop, Access Info Europe, as well as the citizens’ campaigning movement We Move, which operates transnationally.

I hope you enjoy the episode!

Citations

• Alemanno, A. (2017) Lobbying for Change: Find Your Voice to Create a Better Society. Icon Books.
• Heimans, J. & Timms, H. (2019) New Power: Why Outsiders are Winning, Institutions are Failing, and How the Rest of Us Can Keep Up in the Age of Mass Participation. Picador.
• The Good Lobby (www.thegoodlobby.eu)
• Mancur Olson (1974) The Logic of Collective Action: Public Goods and the Theory of Groups. Harvard University Press (revised edition).

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I am joined in this episode by Professor Vasant Dhar where we talk about why social media platforms should be regulated and how we would go about doing so. Vasant argues that we have failed to install any rules of the game when it comes to holding platforms responsible for their demonstratable contribution to social ills. This, according to Vasant, leads to some truly egregious gaps in our ability to avoid negative outcomes and hold those responsible liable for their actions. For example, in our current settings, a social platform could be shown to be responsible for tens of thousands cases of depression, leading to hundreds of suicides but still to have not violated any rule or law and be completely free of liability. Vasant brings more than 30 years of study and research in this area to the table.

Vasant is a professor at NYU’s Stern School of Business and the Center for Data Science. He is the former Editor-in-Chief of the journal Big Data and the founder of SCT Capital, one of the first machine-learning-based hedge funds in New York City in the 90s. His research focuses on building scalable decision making systems from large sources of data using techniques and principles from the disciplines of Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning.

Citations

• Bail, Chris (2021) Breaking the Social Media Prism: How to Make Our Platforms Less Polarizing. Princeton University Press.
• Dhar, Vasant – Brave New World Podcast. See bravenewpodcast.com.
• Haidt, Jonathan (2021) ‘The dangerous experiment on teen girls,’ The Atlantic, November 21.
• Kramer, D., Guillory, J.E., and Hancock, J.T. (2014) ‘Emotional contagion through social networks,’ Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences: 111(24), pp. 8788-8790.

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Increasingly, company boards are expected to incorporate environmental, social and governance issues into their strategic choices and performance criteria. How, exactly, should they do this? One approach is to integrate the entire costs/benefits of the firm’s activities, including those which are currently unpaid-for externalities, into its balance sheet. But is that really possible? Or, even desirable?

In this episode I discuss this issue – and others! – with my guest, Helle Bank Jorgensen. Helle is an internationally recognized expert on sustainable business practices, with a 30-year record of turning environmental, social, and governance (ESG) risks into innovative and profitable business opportunities. She is the founder and chief executive of Competent Boards, which offers online climate and ESG programs that draw on the experience of over 150 renowned board members, executives, and investors.

Helle is also the author of the newly published book, Stewards of The Future: A Guide for Competent Boards. This book shows boards must have the insight and foresight to ask the right questions of management on complex issues such as climate change, ESG, corruption, cybersecurity, human trafficking and supply-chain resilience to realize long-term profits and sustainability.

Citations

• Jorgensen, Helle Bank (2022) Stewards of The Future: A Guide for Competent Boards. Barlow Publishing.
• Cornell, Bradford and Damodaran, Aswath (2020), Valuing ESG: Doing Good or Sounding Good? (March 20, 2020). NYU Stern School of Business, Available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=3557432 or http://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.3557432

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How should we view the current crisis in our supply chains? Did the external shock of COVID create severe, but relatively temporary problems? If so, then we should, slowly but surely, see a return to how things were before, with ‘just in time’ principles driving supply chain design and execution. Or, has the crisis revealed fundamental structural weaknesses in our pre-COVID practices? If so, we should expect significant changes in supply chain designs in a post-COVID world. Which do you predict?

Professor Michel Fender of HEC Paris, one of the world’s experts on supply chain management, joins me in this episode to talk about this question and a number of other related issues. The general theme of the discussion is on how supply chain management, once seen through a logistics lens as merely a support function, has evolved into one of the most important strategic factors determining success in competition and, ultimately, value creation for all stakeholders. 

I hope you enjoy the conversation!

Citations

• Fender, M. (2020) Next Generation Supply Chains: The Guide for Business Leaders. London: Choir Press.
• Read, L. (1958), ‘I Pencil: My Family Tree as Told to Leornard E. Read,’ The Freeman. 

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How and when should we decide today what areas of future public policy we are not prepared to trust our future selves to make wisely? In other words, when should we voluntarily constrain our future democratic choices by privileging our current democratic choices? This is the theme of my discussion in this episode with Professor Andrés Velasco, the Dean of the School of Public Policy at the London School of Economics and the former Finance Minister of Chile.

While somewhat common in monetary economic policy (think independent central banks immune to short term democratic pressures), Andrés and I explore how/whether this self-restraint framework can/should be applied to areas like quantitative easing, fiscal and environmental policy.

Andrés not only has the intellectual firepower, matched by world class academic credentials, to address these questions. As the former Finance Minister of Chile, he was responsible for the creation of two special sovereign funds which attempted to stabilize Chilean governmental spending at a long-term sustainable level. His mixture of practical political experience and academic skill make him the ideal guest to discuss these issues. I hope you enjoy the conversation!

As mentioned in the podcast:

Henrich, J. (2020) The WEIRDest People in the World: How the West Became Psychologically Peculiar and Particularly Prosperous. Allen Lane.

Haidt, J. (2013) The Righteous Mind: Why Good People are Divided by Politics and Religion. Penquin.

Greene, J. (2014) Moral Tribes: Emotion, Reason and the Gap Between Us and Them. Atlantic Books. 

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Are we at the start of a new and glorious age of space tourism led by private investment? Is this the first step to a potentially massive space-based economy to support humans in earth’s orbit with colonies on the Moon and Mars? Will all of this be built and financed through private, mega-companies? 

My guest for this episode is Dr Andrew Aldrin (TRIUM Class of 2005). Andy is currently the Director of the Aldrin Family Foundation and has literally an entire lifetime’s experience working at the interface between private and public involvement in the creation of a space economy. In our conversation here, Andy helps to demystify and debunk many of the more grandiose claims and hype created by various billionaires’ recent vanity projects. The picture of the future of space-based activity which Andy sketches is both more interesting and more realistic. Enjoy the show!

Citations

• Aldrin Family Foundation at Home - Aldrin Family Foundation (aldrinfoundation.org)
• Aldrin Space Institute Aldrin Space Institute > Aldrin Space Institute | Florida Tech (fit.edu)
• Adams, Douglas, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. Pan, Main Market edition, 2020. First published in 1979.
• Sarang, Mehak & Weinzierl, Matt, The Commercial Space Age is Here. Harvard Business Review, 2021.

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My guest this episode is Aigboje Aig-Imoukhuede (TRIUM Class of 2016). Aig is a world class finance and social entrepreneur. In 2002 he acquired (with his friend and colleague Herbert Wigwe) a struggling Nigerian bank for around US$10 million. After 11 years of his leadership as the CEO, the bank had a market capitalisation of around US$1.3 billion and had become one of the most important banks, not only in Nigeria, but across Africa. He tells the story of the acquisition, turnaround and rapid scaling of Access Bank in his new book, Leaving the Tarmac: Buying a Bank in Africa. In this episode we discuss this fascinating story of success. It is one of the best examples of the power of process innovation, values, and vision, as drivers of business success, that I have ever come across. Aig’s true genius is his ability to engineer opportunity from what others would see as almost unsurmountable obstacles to success.

In addition to business lessons to be learned from his experience, Aig is one of the most thoughtful and careful commentators on African development challenges and opportunities you will find. From discussions on the consequences of corruption, to the proper role of civic institutions and regulatory bodies, to the role and responsibility of the private sector for economic development, Aig’s insights and knowledge are unmatched.

This is one of my favourite episodes yet – don’t miss it!

Citations:

• 93 Days (2016). Directed and co-produced by Steve Gukas. Written by Paul Rowlston
• Aig-Imoukhuede, Aigboje (2021) Leaving the Tarmac: Buying a Bank in Africa. Red Door Press.
• Okonjo-Iweala, Ngozi (2018) Fighting Corruption is Dangerous: The Story Behind the Headlines. MIT Press.

Host: Matt Mulford | Guest: Aigboje Aig-Imoukhuede | Editor: Théophile Letort

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My guest this episode is Chris Burggraeve. Chris is a practitioner scholar of the art and science of marketing. His corporate marketing career culminated as the Chief Marketing Officer for AB Inbev from 2007-2012. In 2013 he founded Vicomte, a marketing advisory and micro-ventures firm. He is also a former Capstone Project Director for the TRIUM Global EMBA.

In this episode, we discuss his latest book, Marketing is not a Blackhole. For Chris, if you have a business model based on a branded product or service, then marketing is at the heart of everything you do as a company – or at least should be. Great marketing gives a firm the ability to consistently raise prices without losing market share (pricing power). Pricing power, in turn, is a key to long-term profitability and growth.  If you could effectively rank the marketing excellence of the firm, then you could use this as a predictive tool of the future profitability of the firm. Chris has created just such a marketing excellence rating – αM 2.0. He hopes/dreams that this rating will be as useful and used as other, more established ratings (think Moody’s, Fitch, FICO scores, Altman’s Z score, ESG ratings, …etc.) when analysts are valuing a firm. Join us to find out more!

Citations

• Burggraeve, Chris (2021) Marketing is not a black hole. Great Britain: Amazon.
• Damodaran, Aswath (2017) Narrative and Numbers: The Value of Stories in Business. Columbia Business Press.
• Hadfield, Chris (2015) An astronaut’s guide to life. Pan, Main Market Edition.

Host: Matt Mulford | Guest: Chris Burggraeve | Editor: Théophile Letort

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