"If you want to help a community, then by far educations is the best way to do it. I don't know if it matters so much what you teach, but as long as kids get excited about learning and get excited about going to school, that makes a huge difference." "Just by talking about it and it inspires other people to do something similar in their communities, you just never know what kind of ripples you're going to create, right?" "Once you don't think so much about yourself and once you don't think...

Top recommendations for Dean Veloso from the '03Ds: "Just make sure that your education is raising the bar on future management, not only in terms of technical knowledge, but in terms of values." "The university has a great asset, it's the Alumni Network - invest more and with the expectation to get more out of it." "Keep up the education of your alumni and give them the opportunity to get back together, because at the level of the class is where you have the strongest bonds." Our 20Y...

For me there were two options. I can be very rich and lonely 10 years down the line, or I had to change something so that I'm happy and I'm not lonely and I'm with someone that I enjoy being with. 20 YEARS IN PERSPECTIVE: I changed absolutely everything. So I was in the recruitment industry in Poland before INSEAD, and then I ended up in investment banking in Austria. The only thing I didn't change was the market, because my entire life, the theme has been emerging markets. I spent two and...

Running your own business is like a marathon at the speed of a sprint Your mental health is under constant stress, what I realized early on is it's a very lonely space to do it, because there are very few people who do this. Quite frankly, you're dealing with more failures than successes than from the outside people see. I still remember sitting on my balcony with helicopters flying by, with soldiers and machine guns roads were blocked. You know buildings boarded up or you know it was, it...

"And remember, it's not a judgement of your performance, it's just we don't need this position anymore." After selling the chain of clinics business twice, I got fired from day 1 to day 2 with the typical capitalist view, you put your things in a box and leave the premises in 2 hours type of thing. This put me in a very difficult position of trying to redefine myself as a business person, so I took a step back. 20 YEARS IN PERSPECTIVE: 5 years ago I joined one of my most recent...

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...

s sana in corpore sano - it's been a great awakening, a scary awakening but now I'm in a good place. With a corporate job and globe trotting, moving international, living life as we would have dreamt of at INSEAD, you also need to have certain discipline which I did not have. When I just moved to Bangkok in 2019, I was basically living between Paris and Bangkok for close to eight months and then traveling in different geographies. This took a toll where I was living out of a suitcase for...

When you're moving as a family, the only common denominator you have is the family, so you stick together and you make sure that everybody goes through the experience in the smoothest way possible. 20 YEARS IN PERSPECTIVE: Quite a ride, it brought me through 5 different locations (Switzerland, France, Spain, Andora, Bulgaria and now Israel), 9 or 10 different positions and all with this desire, this intent to actually revolutionize to some extent a quite old and legacy industry and move it...

It's surprising to me that people are still amazed at the fact that banks can go bust. It most definitely will not be the last time [a bank goes bust], it's a cyclical thing. 20 YEARS IN PERSPECTIVE: "I try not to do stress." We had initially gone to Dubai to spend 4 years there. 4 years turned into 13. All in all can't complain, it's been a good couple of decades. The challenge has been to maintain a good balance of finding stimulation at work, finding stimulation at home with your...

When I was very young I just was interested by politics because you can influence. It's very fulfilling when you see that you can make things change. So that's really the main driver now. 20 YEARS IN PERSPECTIVE: From 2009 to 2020 I was having two hats - one was the local managing partner of EY in Luxembourg, a firm of about 1700 employees, the second one was to be the private equity leader for EMEA. I always had also a kind of public vibe in myself which is that I was always very much...

If you invested all of your tuition in Apple stock, last time I checked, it was about $22 million. 20 YEARS IN PERSPECTIVE: Just over ten years ago I set up my own business with a partner from INSEAD and another friend to build, own and operate renewable energy power stations in the UK. We invested about a half a billion dollars at that time, had some great successes. I moved then to the States in 2017 to set up our US business and that business has become a solar developer. Hardest for...

The company I was working for, we were so extremely short-term focused and we almost changed strategy every three months, we were literally throwing money out of the window, just to get customers' market share, and somehow it didn't feel right to me. I didn't have the financial understanding to really put a calculator to it, and then the company also literally almost went bankrupt at the end of the 3 years and so I said, you know somehow this cannot be right, you can't run a business with...

You're basically creating miracles that fit in the palm of your hand and you're helping reimagine life for patients. 20 YEARS IN PERSPECTIVE: Givers are not good takers. I don't think of the 2000s as twenty years ago, I still think of the 80s, or the 70s as twenty years ago. I started in Singapore, then went back to the US and lived and worked in New Jersey and Chicago, then Munich, London and back in the US. I was fortunate enough to have those opportunities with the same company, so I...

The story of someone about to disrupt a part of medicine. "What if we were able to invent a technology, basically a new material, that would allow to repair and reconnect tissues without trauma, in an atraumatic manner, in a non-penetrating manner." What you're trying to do is big, it is going to take time and we're going to give you time. 20 YEARS IN PERSPECTIVE: I love the last twenty years, I'm very excited for the next twenty to be honest. I would have never described myself at the...

The adults were so weak they had to be carried off the shipwreck onto shore… Today, I lead the diabetes business in Medtronic, a global leader in medical devices. The business is about 2.3 billion, with over 5,000 employees. The story of "the person most likely to rule the planet in the future" 20 YEARS IN PERSPECTIVE: I find myself not in the mainstream part of these companies, but having a big impact on the future of those companies. A bit of a nomad - three million miles of travel...

The rocket was emblazoned with the INSEAD logo and underneath that it said KacificOne, the name of our satellite, and a FORCE FOR GOOD and so it was the force for good logo from INSEAD. Force for Food is part of the famous John Kennedy speech, when he declared that by the end of the decade he would send men to the Moon. I like that reference that space can be a force for good; money can be a force for good, capitalism can be a force for good and you can use money to do the right thing and to...

But when I genuinely enjoy what I do, then I do a really good job at it and then the financial side tends to take care of itself. 20 YEARS IN PERSPECTIVE: I had realised that rather than trying to be someone else, or trying to fit into a system, the best thing I could do was focus on what I thought was right and follow my instincts. We spent what probably is the best 5 years of my life and career living in Dar es Salaam, working in a nonprofit. I had been doing stuff in order to have a...

We'll break the rules because we're rule breakers 20 YEARS IN PERSPECTIVE: It was one of those things where I've always believed that you need to look inside yourself and figure out will you regret saying no to this one. And this was just one of those ones where I said yeah, this one is something I have to do. Global marketing director for De Beers diamond jewellers, an LVMH company, an amazing kind of training ground, because if anyone knows how to do luxury branding and marketing, it's...

20 YEARS IN PERSPECTIVE: "People don't remember books; they remember sentences. More specifically, they remember stories." Four different places in the last 20 years. I married for the second time and hopefully the last time, I also fell in love with running, so I became an avid marathoner, hopefully I'll complete the 6 majors. Corporate culture matters quite a lot, so all those OB classes were actually quite helpful. On Credit Suisse - one of the key takeaways is how a centennial brand...

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...

20 YEARS IN PERSPECTIVE: I told myself I'm going to be a hotelier. Okay so how do I become a hotelier? Well, no hotel owner in their right mind will ask me to run their hotel. So I guess I need to be a hotel owner myself. In my thirties I was kind of a Parisian nightlife kingpin and had a lot of fun, a lot of fun. I probably had a little bit of a delayed teenage crisis and threw my career out the window and decided to go into nightlife. Money came and then went even faster, but I...

20 YEARS IN PERSPECTIVE: Success is a balanced life, I'm not sure I'm there yet, but that's an aspiration. I don't think I was fully aware of the challenge for international couples of moving around and managing two careers. Sometimes he's followed me and sometimes I've followed him and it's worked out pretty well, but it hasn't been easy. I feel very lucky because I love the work that I do, I love the fact that I get to work with candidates who are all over the world, who have that...

20 YEARS IN PERSPECTIVE: I never intended to start a space rocket company. I started to literally Google "How do you build a moon rocket" Consulting has never been my kind of thing, you don't have enough responsibility I think in consulting for execution, I quite like the responsibility of execution. Rule 3 was "Don't f**k it up". CEO role in that kind of company is 24 / 7 / 365. Stubbornness and stamina are really massively important in any entrepreneurial task. "You're really...

20 YEARS IN PERSPECTIVE: I had at some point of time to decide whether I wanted to have a career, or to be a mother whose children can recognize her. Being a banker, I was really very risk averse, so starting my own thing was the last thing I thought I would do, but mothers do so many things that we wouldn't do in normal circumstances. Institutions might come and go, but people stay. Credit Suisse had the amazing ability to attract some absolutely brilliant people and then the amazing...