Category Archives: News

Real estate in London became REAL

I was born and grew up in Bulgaria’s second largest city Plovdiv, which is considered to be the oldest continually-inhabited city in Europe and one of the oldest in the world. This year Plovdiv is also the European Capital of Culture. I embarked on my international experience by enrolling at the American University in Bulgaria, which is a typical American-style liberal arts college. The school created well-rounded individuals, who had a wide range of courses. Afterwards students focused on a specific major. While studying there, I had my first international exposure, as not only the professors, but also many of the students were foreigners, including American exchange students. I already knew that I wanted to do and MBA, but I needed some experience beforehand.

Hence, after graduation, my intention was to spend a few years in the corporate world and gain some business experience. I started my first job as an investment consultant in the local Sofia office of Cushman & Wakefield (one of the global commercial real estate advisory companies). At that time (2008), Bulgaria had just joined the European Union and the economy was booming alongside expectations for convergence with Western Europe. Real estate and commercial real estate in particular was one of the main beneficiaries of the economic boom with lots of foreign investors. Commercial real estate was particularly attractive to me as this sector was just emerging in Bulgaria. I had the chance to have a real impact early in my career as the company and sector were new at the time and the environment was more entrepreneurial. I spent almost six years working there advising shopping mall, office, logistics and hospitality projects, preparing valuations and feasibility studies. I saw how this sector emerged in Bulgaria and coped with the aftermath of the global financial crisis.

Time flew by fast as I was also studying for the CFA exams and after completing the three levels I realised that it was about time to think about finally applying for an MBA. An MBA that would grow my experience and exposure to students from many different countries, jobs and cultures. I did a pretty comprehensive research of the top business schools and the more I was researching, the more I was realising that INSEAD was my dream school and top choice. It is Europe’s first business school with an established global network, prestigious reputation, but at the same time with friendlier and more collaborative culture than many of its top business schools peers. Needless to say, its unique double campus structure in Fontainebleau near Paris and Singapore was a huge plus for me combining the classic European experience, the exotic and at the same time futuristic Singaporean experience and a lot more. As it was my dream school, I applied only to INSEAD and was fortunate enough to be accepted. I started my INSEAD year in Singapore and then moved to Fontainebleau. Overall, it was definitely the best year of my life so far where I met new friends from all over the world, took interesting classes with some of the best professors and had the chance to explore Southeast Asia. It’s not without a reason that INSEAD is famous for being the “party business school”. I have fond memories of the welcome week, the first party on Sentosa Island, the parties in Heritage and Dover, drinks at Ku De Ta (Marina Bay Sands) and One Altitude bars and the numerous house parties in Fonty. I definitely enjoyed the most when I travelled to Langkawi Island (Malaysia), Angkor Wat temples (Cambodia) and Halong Bay (Vietnam). I also really enjoyed my elective course in Russia, where we visited both Moscow and Saint Petersburg. There we even had the luck of having a tour guide, who showed us the incredibly beautiful palaces of Peterhof, Catherine Palace and the Winter Palace.

My post-INSEAD goal was to move to London and transition from the advisory to the investment side of real estate. Apart from the job opportunities which London offers, it’s definitely the most international city in the world with amazing variety of things to do. I already had friends and classmates from INSEAD, university and high school based in London and this was one of the main reasons which attracted me to the city. I achieved this objective by joining the real estate investment team at the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development (EBRD) at its headquarters in London. The EBRD is a development bank which was established after the fall of communism to help Central and Eastern Europe transition to a well-functioning private market economy and invests in both debt and equity instruments. Since joining the EBRD, I have participated in a number of very interesting real estate investment deals and I am currently leading a few challenging and innovative transactions. Outside work, I try to get the most London has to offer in terms of going out to bars and restaurants, attending events and exhibitions as well as visiting London’s great parks. Since graduation, I was invited to join the leadership committee of INSEAD Alumni Association UK’s Real Estate Group managed to organise and participate in several events already.

The year spent at INSEAD really transformed my life as it helped me build new friendships, expand my network, move to London and find an interesting and challenging job.

If you are interested in sharing your alumni story, please contact the UK alumni association at [email protected]

2019

Startups and Zombies

Things turned out much better than I could have imagined. I was supposed to follow in the footsteps of my family – leave university, get an advanced degree, and then enter a nice stable job with a large company. Or… I could spend spring break sleeping on the floor of my sister’s girlfriend’s flat in San Francisco, crash a job fair at Stanford, and get a job as a coder even though I was actually a chemical engineer and thought Java was an island.

I fell in love with the startup world and made it through the entire Silicon Valley checklist: from the company milestones of going public (or more commonly, going bust…) to the personal millstones of sleeping under my desk and getting fired. I joined in a company’s European expansion and started thinking about learning the business side of startups.

I went to visit a friend at INSEAD and had such fun this seemed like the right move. I took the daring move of applying just to INSEAD and was ecstatic when I got in. Arriving in Fonty was another story… I felt that I had made a terrible mistake for the first four months and regularly considered dropping out entirely. I felt I didn’t fit in with the well-dressed consultants and bankers that made up the majority of my class. By P3, a lucky housing switch and move to Singapore meant I was able to ‘find my people’ and I still enjoy the company of those friends on a regular basis though we’re spread across the globe.

Despite graduating into the opportunity of the pre-financial crisis market in 2006, I decided against a job and wanted to start my own company. Reality caught up with me three months later when I realised I couldn’t earn enough to pay off my business school loans, so I went into someone else’s startup company.

Almost a year later, timing worked out better and I co-founded a new games company in London – Six to Start. Mind, I was still working a day job to be able to pay those business school loans, but I had co-founders, who were able to take the company forward until a point when we had enough money that I could join full-time. The INSEAD alumni network was particularly crucial in solving problems like finding people in Moscow, Dubai and Tokyo to hold a copy of the book The Great Game for the band Muse’s worldwide treasure hunt. My classmates were mostly understanding about receiving very strange requests from me on a regular basis!

After a time, I pulled back from the day to day Six to Start operations, remaining on the board, and went to work with a few other startup companies. Not of all of them survived, but I learned a great deal from raising money in Silicon Valley to the vagaries of 3D mobile software development. Six to Start carried on and found success with the creation of Zombies, Run!, the world’s most popular fitness game. If nothing else, I feel confident saying that of all my INSEAD entrepreneur classmates, I win for having generated the most fun for other people as part of my startup journey.

My interest in starting new things hasn’t ended (or maybe I just haven’t learned…). I’m now exploring a new idea with helping people make better startup companies. The new company has co-founders in Oslo, Norway and Singapore, so it’s getting a proper INSEAD international start. We’re still in the research phase on the problem, but you can keep track of what we’re up to on Twitter by following @beforeyoucode. To all my classmates, consider this a heads up that many more weird requests are on their way to our class mailing list!

If you are interested in sharing your alumni story, please contact the UK alumni association at [email protected]

December 2018

Keep going and keep growing…

So, as my father once said to me, “Son, if you ever write an autobiography you should call it -The Path of Most Resistance.” My personal journey to INSEAD was not a particularly obvious one. For one thing, I enrolled when I was 46, which happens to be the same age Jack Nicklaus was when he won his last major, for another my INSEAD time was spent on the AMP Programme, not the MBA.

My career started off in Edinburgh, the “Athens of the North”, but without the associated climate. I graduated from Edinburgh University with a surprisingly good degree and an emerging interest in the world of Finance. Now Edinburgh is / was not a bad place to foster that interest given the plethora of large investment houses based there. I think back then Standard Life owned 2 or 3% of the UK Stock market. My own uniquely mad path actually saw me combine working for one the aforementioned august institutions with doing a Ph.D. in…Finance. Four more or less happy years followed juggling three things at once (including a year “off” in Cambridge picking up a Masters degree from what is now called the Judge Business School) before I officially “retired” from academia and moved to London for challenges new.

For me that meant the world of consulting and Bain and Company. An amazing place is Bain. I’d say most of the really clever stuff I learnt in my career I learnt there. I also met my wife, who sadly chose to graduate from Europe’s #2 business school based not too far from where I am sitting now. Bain led me to Private Equity, like many of my peers, and I now run the EMEA operations from a group called Hamilton Lane here in London. There’s never a dull moment.

My INSEAD story begins a couple of years ago as I was doing some reflection on where I was at professionally and where I might like to go. I had a definite sense of “what got you here won’t get you there…” which led to a number of conversations around my own development needs, notably with an old friend from Bain and an INSEAD alum whose professional world this is. Enter the AMP. For those who are unaware this is a month long programme for “senior” leaders that’s designed to help you focus on leading yourself and your organization in the increasingly volatile and disruptive world in which we live. It also focusses a lot on the “you”. Professor Ian Woodward who, frankly, is a genius leads the programme. I joined a cohort (the #110th) of 80 other like-minded folk from around the world and off we merrily went on our personal journeys.

I have to say it was pretty much the best thing I have done. It is a totally different experience and, for many it is a pretty cathartic one. It was a special experience to spend the time with such a diverse and talented group, getting to the answers on the challenges we all faced. Interestingly, as a group, we could not have been more eclectic but our issues were all remarkably similar.
Coming out of “the bubble” our group returned to respective homes very humbled by what we had had the opportunity to learn on the programme from the Faculty and from each other. I am happy to say the group of us manages to stay very connected (thank you What’s App) and so the bonds that we made in summertime in Fontainebleau seem set to last for a very long time.

I know for my part that month in the sun has definitely made me a better and more effective leader, helped me understand what getting to “there” really is for me personally and given me the tools and perspectives to have a decent go at it. I also know that I’ll never conduct an orchestra! (…if you want the whole story here, drop me a note! Sorry Ian…). The fact that I now have a wonderful bunch of crazy, wonderful, talented fellow INSEAD classmates to call on is just a huge bonus and something I feel pretty humbled by.

If you are interested in sharing your alumni story, please contact the UK alumni association at [email protected]

October 2018

Business as a force for good

INSEAD opens up choices and I chose variety: in the 27 years since I left Fontainebleau my career has taken me to many different workplaces, including car assembly lines, oil tankers, trading floors, prisons (though never overnight…) and now some of the world’s largest nuclear installations. Always surrounded by smart, dedicated professionals, I have loved testing out what the commercial profession can bring to the table: how can we help to provide the goods and services that people need, or help solve some of society’s most intractable challenges?

An engineer by profession, industry appealed to me because I liked the idea of many diverse people coming together to make something which other people wanted – that neat cycle that keeps so many of us entwined as creators and consumers. I started my working life running an assembly line at Jaguar Cars – I was determined to learn what it was really like at the sharp end of manufacturing. After three and a half mind broadening years at Jaguar I decided that an MBA would be a great way of building a wider understanding of the business world, essential if I was to progress. I also hoped that it would give me some of the confidence which all senior people (i.e. men) seemed to have – this was very much the era of the glass ceiling and female role models were nowhere to be seen in my working world.

Having grown up in a multinational household, INSEAD was the obvious choice and it turned out to be everything I had hoped for and more. Yes, you certainly grew your skills in marketing, accounting, corporate finance and so on, but you also learnt how to lead in unfamiliar situations, how to engage diverse groups and you realised that what you had to offer really did have value even among very smart people! Best of all, the diversity of backgrounds of my fellow students opened my eyes to the range of opportunities to be explored.

Of course, choice means making decisions and I have been fortunate in always being able to work for organisations whose values I felt passionate about and whose mission I believed in wholeheartedly. They have also supported my desire to be active in the not for profit sector – I am on the Boards of a theatre, a large local charity and a UK business school (not a serious competitor of INSEAD’s yet, but one day…). The learning here has worked both ways – while I bring commercial and corporate experience and expertise to these Boards, my not for profit work has broadened my ideas and, I believe, made me a better leader.

From INSEAD I joined BP where I spend 22 very interesting years in jobs as varied as running a chemicals business, negotiating the commercial contracts underpinning the construction and operation of an international gas pipeline and leading the internal Group engagement around the launch of BP’s new Helios brand. And finally having the Commercial Director role in BP Shipping, which introduced me to a fascinating world of complex, high risk operations combined with a proud history and deep sense of tradition.

Family ties then called and I took a year’s sabbatical in order to be with my parents, which was a special time I will never forget. However, once I came to consider ‘what next?’ The ideal opportunity came up when I saw that the UK Civil Service was looking for Commercial Directors.

The commercial teams in each Government Department negotiate and manage the UK Government’s contracts – each year it spends almost £50 bn on goods and services. The idea is to harness the creativity, resources and expertise of the private and not for profit sectors in order to address some of the most difficult challenges in society. As a Commercial Director I sometimes feel like an interpreter between two very different cultures and it draws on every ounce of my previous experience and expertise.

After two years as Commercial Director at the Ministry of Justice, a year ago I moved to become the Commercial Director of the Nuclear Decommissioning Authority. In each instance I have had the privilege of learning from experts about how we are trying to solve complex social challenges – from the criminal justice system seeking to reduce reoffending to the nuclear sector dealing with the legacy of nuclear infrastructure. If we are successful, we achieve the ideal cycle of society benefitting from innovative solutions, provided by thriving businesses, generating good jobs…all the while providing good value to the taxpayer. I believe that I may be planting the INSEAD flag in new territory….

If you are interested in sharing your alumni story, please contact the UK alumni association at [email protected]

October 2018

In July, it will be twenty years since I graduated from INSEAD with the 98J promotion. We are the promotion who went on strike when they announced the opening of a new campus in Singapore – how times changed! Since then, I have lived on two continents, changed careers several times, had three children, and added a new passport. I also met my husband Fred at INSEAD so I can truly say that that one year in Fontainebleau had a profound impact on my life.

I grew up in Ireland and came to INSEAD after working in banking in Dublin and London. Like so many INSEADers I have met, I only applied to the INSEAD MBA. The internationally diverse student body had a unique appeal and sharing a classroom with fellow students from radically different academic and professional background was fascinating. I had been warned about the challenges of group work by previous Irish students and they did not exaggerate. However, twenty years later, I think that the group experience is the unique thing that sets INSEAD apart and creates alumni who can succeed in the most diverse work environments.

After INSEAD, I joined Bain and Company in the San Francisco office. I learned a lot and enjoyed the collegiate atmosphere at Bain. At the time, the alumni community in the Bay Area was tiny so it is amazing to hear that INSEAD is coming to San Francisco in 2019. When life gave me three children in 15 months (yes, twins and another baby closely after) I decided that it was time to adopt a more flexible working life. I started volunteering in the non-profit sector, mostly in education and have ended up with an expertise in fundraising and non-profit governance from my various board roles. I quickly learned that the skills we use in the for-profit world are just as relevant in the non-profit environment. Fundraising in Silicon Valley is big business and left me well placed to apply these skills in other geographies.

A move back to the UK in 2013 was promoted largely by our desire to expose our children to a new cultural and educational experience and the INSEAD network made this move so much easier. Fred had recently had a bad accident and broken his neck. He made a full recovery, but suddenly the lure of corporate life held less appeal. Today, we live in rural England where I manage our horse farm, Manton Grange Stables. We followed our passion to start a breeding and training business for showjumping horses and spend a lot of our time on the road with our team at horse shows across Europe. We have also been building a real estate portfolio in Ireland and watching at close hand the rehabilitation of the Celtic tiger. Fred has started his own private equity business, Hattington Capital, with one of our classmates from 98J, Barney Burgess, while I continue to be an active board member on several arts and educational organisations.

I recently became Chair of the INSEAD Alumni Fund (IAF) and joined the Board of INSEAD. The IAF is the group of alumni volunteers who work with INSEAD to raise funds for the school. For me, the vision of Dean Ilian Mihov in supporting “business as a force for good” seems highly relevant today. In particular, I am excited by the development of the INSEAD Institute for Business and Society, which will support research and teaching across a wide range of initiatives such as income inequality, sustainability and gender diversity.

If you are interested in sharing your alumni story, please contact the UK alumni association at [email protected]
April 2018