Stephan Breban is Head of Research at Renewity, the Founder of Giants Shoulders Capital and a consultant to a number of different firms. He is known as one of London’s original (and legendary) private equity investors and advisors and has witnessed some of the good, the bad and the ugly of that the sector presents. We had the pleasure of working together, side by side in our own entrepreneurial ventures, for over a decade.

A vast discussion that touches on the African investment opportunity as well as the challenges of private equity today and how to address the diversity problem.

Michiel Timmerman is founder and managing partner at Mbuyu Capital Partners, which is an Africa focused investment boutique focused on financial services and agriculture, as well as Equity for Africa and EFTA, both focused on equipment leasing in Tanzania. He previously held a series of CIO roles across various asset management businesses in the City of London, including Ignis Asset Managemnent, where we met.

A deep dive into the SME investment opportunity in Africa, how Michiel himself discovered it and why investors outside Africa often fail to perceive the opportunity.

Deanne Stewart is CEO at Aware Super, an Australian superannuation fund with over 200 billion AUD in assets under management and the third largest superannuation fund in the country. She has held this role for close to seven years, and was previously Chief Executive Officer at MetLife in Sydney, and prior to that, held a series of financial services roles.

Have you heard about the fraud triangle? Do you know what graduate trainees look for in an employer? 

We are delighted to launch Series 5 of the Fiftyfaces Podcast this week. Featuring a range of voices from the Australian Superannuation Fund Aware Super to a legend of the UK local government pension scheme, we hear what drives their leadership styles, their insights on the dynamic backdrop to pensions the world over as well as novel approaches in which they see interesting opportunities. 

Karl Scheer is Chief Investment Officer at the University of Cincinnati, a role he has held for over 13 years. He previously worked in a series of consulting and other financial roles. Karl gave a wonderful overview of his career in this Capital Allocators Podcast with Ted Seides, so we wanted to take up where that left off, and hear about his evolution in the CIO role since that interview.

Cesar Collier is Managing Partner and Head of Latin America at Siguler Guff & Company. Based in Sao Paolo he previously worked in a series of private equity roles, as well as in retail at Wal-mart and Carrefour Brasil. Our conversation starts by tracing Cesar's...

Karey Barker  is Founder and Managing Director of Cross Creek, a late-stage venture capital firm headquartered in Salt Lake City, Utah.  She has over 25 years of broad public and private investment experience and holds a number of Board roles, including ARUP Laboratories. 

It has been an exciting summer, but we have managed to squeeze in a set of global guests for Series 4 of our 2025 Fiftyfaces Podcast – which takes us from the evolving world of hedge funds and the support infrastructure needed, to emerging market equities to late-stage venture capital to public pension pooling.

In Part 1 of this special series focused on our brain power and whether we are losing our minds, we addressed the slide we are reported to be experiencing in terms of attention span and critical thinking capacity.  

Now In Part 2 we ask what we can do now to address slide. We are joined again by Carolina Pacheco-Punceles. She is a Behavioral Economist, AI Survival Kit Creator, Executive Function Strategist and her Linked In bio states that she is Equipping Humans with the Skills to Think Clearly, Lead Wisely & Thrive in a Disrupted World.

Are we slipping in our intellectual abilities? Have we lost the ability to read, reason, analyze, and more importantly pay attention?

Over the past decade we have seen a deluge of challenges – from Covid and its disruptive effect on education, to the rising use of screens and smart phones to the more recent threat from LLMs and an increasingly proficient set of AI tools that threaten to compete with and ultimately replace humans in almost every dimension. Each of these threats is nuanced and subjective, but we are starting to see patterns emerge in terms of the impact  on our attention span, and ability to think critically and absorb new information.