Vitali Kalesnik – Factors, Fads and Formative Advice
Vitali Kalesnik is a partner and senior member of the investment team at Research Affiliates, a Newport Beach headquartered investment firm. Vitali is based in London. He has focused his career in equity based research and has a Phd in economics. He has written extensively in academic journals and has received various industry rewards for his content. He is originally from Belarus.
Rachel Green – Lessons from the Skills Workshop of Life
Rachel Green is Director of Institutional Sales at Nuveen. She started her career in risk management and moved into a sales role in 2014. She has been a prominent voice in the City of London on issues of diversity and inclusion and is the founder of The Skills Workshop, to help women and young people understand their career options, share stories and to identify with others as well to create a sense of belonging.
David Hutchings – Private Equity Expert – Bearing Witness to the Creation of an Industry
David Hutchings recently retired from Albourne Americas where he was most recently Partner Emeritus having spent over 14 years at the firm where he founded the private equity research practice when he joined. He previously held a range of senior private equity roles in a career that spanned over 50 years.
Kimberly Smith – On the Transformative Power of Listening and the Transformative Impact of Education
Kimberly Smith is Head of Capital Formation at Techstars. She was previously Director of Marketing and Investor Relations at Owl Creek Asset Management and before that worked at Davidson Kempner and ABN AMRO. She holds a number of Board Roles and is an active advocate for education.
Series 1 2022 – Impact & Legacy
Welcome back to The Fiftyfaces Podcast in 2022. In this first series we meet with ten more inspiring guests and draw out in particular themes relating to impact and the importance of education. For some of our guests their commitment to educating the next generation – whether through personal sponsorship, Board Roles, teaching decision making or the founding of The Skills Workshop – there is universal belief in its importance.
Impact takes many forms, and includes investment in education, but for some of our guests it also includes solutions to alleviate homelessness, house vulnerable women and adults with learning differences, or address the problem of climate change.
Toyin Oluwole – Opportunity Knocks on the Journey Home
Toyin Oluwole’s last role was as a Senior Strategy Manager with Royal London. She previously worked in a range of financial and marketing roles at Standard Life and Moody Monday. She recently left Scotland and returned to her home country of Nigeria, and it was a moving Linked In post that she wrote that led me to her.
Obi Ozor – Disruption, Innovation and Building Resilience as a Founder
Obi Ozor is Founder of Kobo360, a privately owned, pan-African technology company disrupting the African third-party logistics industry. Kobo360 was named one of the Top 100 SMEs in Africa in 2018 by Business Day and Disruptor of the Year at the Africa CEO Forum on 2019. The company uses big data and agile technology to reduce friction and scale efficiency in the African logistics ecosystem. He previously held positions at Uber, JP Morgan and Bezmo Global, an international, socially-minded investment firm focused on the African continent.
Raymond Onovwigun – How Recycling Metal is Key to Achieving Each of the E, the S and the G
Raymond Onovwigun is founder and CEO at Romco Group, which trades and processes non-ferrous metal. Founded in 2015, it now employs over 180 people in Nigeria, over 50 in Ghana, and another 15 in the UK and is on track to have revenues of £40m by the end of this year. Ray has a fascinating journey that has taken him from South London, to founding a successful plumbing business while still at university to his current quest to help to close the sustainability gap in Africa.
Our conversation starts with his Nigerian heritage, how he learned the meaning of hard work through following his mother around in her cleaning business in London, what interested in him in plumbing and how he perceived a business opportunity.
Eric Idiahi – Honesty, Humility and Hard Work as a Recipe for Success
Eric Idiahi is co-founder and a partner of Verod Capital, a private equity firm based in Lagos, which he founded in 2008. He is Chairman of the Board of Tangerine Africa as well as Eleva Group and holds a number of Non Executive Director positions. He was previously a Managing Parter of FountainHead Media Group as well as a Financial Derivatives Company.
Our conversation traces Eric’s move to the US where he completed his high school and university education and what drove his decision to move back to Nigeria. This was an exciting time, and we look at some of the surprising aspects of re-integration – and how the fact that he wasn’t married initially was relevant.
