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.