“Life is not about what you get, life is about who you become.“
Mark Stoleson is the Chief Executive Officer & Partner of Legatum, a global investment firm based in Dubai with the mission to generate and allocate the capital and ideas that help people prosper. Prior to Legatum, Mark was a corporate finance and M&A attorney with Akin Gump Strauss Hauer & Feld.
“Hard work, a focus on service and looking after your neighbors” are guiding principles of both Mark’s personal life and Legatum. The firm manages only their own capital, which means they can have a longer-term perspective in their investments. Mark focuses on simple, big ideas: Where is the growth? What simple idea can they express with a really big company? Points of focus for Legatum include the expansion of China’s middle class by 300 million people over the next 10 years, as well as the 450 million unbanked people in India.
Philanthropy is a pillar of Legatum’s investment prospectus. “If we generate excess capital, how can we use it to help others prosper?” The firm has worked to eradicate neglected tropical diseases, like worms, that are prevalent due to a supply chain issue, not a shortage of capital or resources.
LISTEN AND SUBSCRIBE
SPEAKER
Mark Stoleson
CEO & Partner
Legatum
MODERATOR
Anthony Scaramucci
Founder & Managing Partner
SkyBridge
EPISODE TRANSCRIPT
Rachel Pether: (00:08)
Hello, everyone. Welcome back to SALT Talks. My name is Rachel Pether, and I'm a senior advisor to SkyBridge, typically based in Abu Dhabi. I'm also the emcee for SALT, which is a global thought leadership forum at the intersection of finance, technology, and public policy. SALT Talks are a series of digital interviews that we launched during the work-from-home period. And what we're really endeavoring to do with the SALT Talks series is replicate the type of experience from our SALT conferences, where we provide a window into the mind of leading investors, creators, and thinkers, as well as providing a platform for what we think are big ideas that are shaping the future. We obviously want to hear from you, our audience, so if you have any questions, please do just enter in the Q &A section of the Zoom screen.
Rachel Pether: (00:59)
And today's guest. We are very excited to welcome Mark Stoleson to SALT Talks. Mark is the chief executive officer and a partner of Legatum, a global investment firm based in Dubai with a mission to generate and allocate capital to help people prosper. Over the last 16 years, Mark and his partners have worked together to build a world-class investment fund while pioneering a number of high impact philanthropic endeavors, which I'm sure we'll hear more about later today. These include the END Fund, the Freedom Fund, Luminos, the Legatum Center for Development and Entrepreneurship at MIT, and the Legatum Institute Foundation in London.
Rachel Pether: (01:43)
Prior to Legatum, Mark was a corporate finance and M & A attorney with Akin Gump in Dallas, Texas, and also Moscow, Russia. He earned a BA in international relations from Occidental College and a master's in law from Duke University. Mark, it is a real pleasure having you with us today.
Mark Stoleson: (02:02)
Rachel, great to be with you. Thanks for having me on.
Rachel Pether: (02:06)
So I completely paraphrased your bio there, and I apologize for that. So maybe before we talk about Legatum, tell me a bit about you and your personal background.
Mark Stoleson: (02:16)
Well, I actually thought you did a great job. That's just about it. But just my personal background, so I grew up in just a great, but fairly normal American middle-class family in Phoenix, Arizona. And my both my parents were first-generation college graduates. My dad served in the military, and my mom was a pioneering young CPA in the 1960s. And I think from the two of them, I got a lot of who I am today. So hard work, a focus on service, taking care of looking after your neighbors, and just the values that I have. And I think some of the values that Legatum has just came from where most of us get our values, from our family. One of my partners has a great phrase that we've really adopted as kind of the firm motto, which is that life is not about what you get, life is about who you become. I really think my parents infused that spirit and those values in me, and you can really see them expressed in what Legatum is all about today.
Rachel Pether: (03:22)
I love that. And I guess that's a nice segue to Legatum itself. It's obviously quite a lofty name. What does the name actually stand for? Tell me a bit about that.
Mark Stoleson: (03:32)
Yeah. Legatum is Latin and it means legacy. But the Latin word for legacy is actually a legal term, and it means a gift or a bequest to the next generation. So if you were writing up a will, a legatum would be the gift. It would be, "I legatum Rachel my car." The car would be the legatum, you would be the legatee, that would be the legator. So it means gift. And the idea that we seized on was we've got a limited amount of time on this planet, we want to do our best to make it better for the next generation. We feel like we stand on the shoulders of giants that came before us. We inherited a bunch of wonderful things. What can we do to make it better for others? So that's what legatum means, and it really drives a lot of who we are and what we try to do.
Rachel Pether: (04:17)
And I know that you were previously in Moscow before, when was it that you made the move to Dubai? How did you come about moving to the UAE?
Mark Stoleson: (04:33)
Well, it's a bit of a funny story, but I was sitting in my office. I was a young lawyer working in an American firm in Moscow doing corporate finance work, and a recruiter just called me out of the blue. I was sitting in my office. I don't know, it was probably a Saturday. And she said, "Look, I have this very off-the-wall opportunity, but it's in Dubai. So just stop me right now if that's completely off the table and if you have no interest moving to Dubai." This was 2004, maybe 2003, 2004. And I was interested. I was just immediately keen to know more, but I had no idea where Dubai was.
Mark Stoleson: (05:10)
So I remember holding the phone to my ear saying "Absolutely, no problem with Dubai. Tell me more." And I was Googling Dubai. Where exactly is Dubai? So that's how it all started. And that was 16 years ago. And it has been an incredible adventure. One that I didn't expect. I came for a job, but I really wound up teaming up with some incredible partners and an amazing team that has a purpose and a sense of mission to not only build a world-class investment organization but to use the capital that we generate, like you said, to express our mission, which is to help others prosper.
Rachel Pether: (05:47)
I love that. And I remember doing the same when I first had the opportunity to move to Abu Dhabi. I mean, I couldn't even spell it at first. So when you were ... you were active in emerging markets as Legatum before many people were even venturing there. What drew you to the emerging markets initially?
Mark Stoleson: (06:07)
Yeah, I think some people, when they look at our history, they instinctively think that we're an emerging markets fund or that's a focus of our business. And it is, but it really isn't. Something that makes Legatum quite distinctive is that we only manage our own capital. So it's all proprietary capital. And that gives us a huge competitive advantage in that we can take a very long-term perspective, and we can invest in any sector in any country and really are the masters of our own destiny. So that's the core of what makes Legatum different. And because of that, we do ... because we have long-term capital, we have a longterm perspective, and we're looking for companies that can create long-term value. That's just a good fit for our capital.
Mark Stoleson: (06:50)
So historically, we've been looking for, great secular growth stories in companies or companies that are innovating and disrupting, creating long-term value. It just so happened that for several decades, you could find those types of opportunities in the emerging markets, but we're not wedded to that. And today, we would be looking for a more nuanced view of emerging markets within global markets today. So you might find an emerging technology or maybe in a subset of some country that's really emerging and really beginning to innovate and create value. So we don't think of ourselves as emerging markets investors, but we are looking for emerging trends and emerging opportunities.
Rachel Pether: (07:31)
So what would be some examples of those that you mentioned within emerging opportunities? What are some areas that you're currently looking at now?
Mark Stoleson: (07:43)
Currently, for us, the way that we look at opportunities is through a very big lens, a very simple lens, actually that we call a simple, big idea. We say that we stand on the moon and look back at planet earth and say, "Where are the opportunities today?" And so just try to make it really simple. Where is there growth, and what kind of simple, big idea can we express with a really great company, and just looking at a country like China, for example. Lots of people have different opinions and perspectives on China, but the reality is that it's expected that China's middle class will grow by another 300 million people over the next 10 years. It's expected that they'll add about $5 trillion worth of consumption over the next 10 years.
Mark Stoleson: (08:29)
So if you think about that for a second, that's like almost the entire population of the United States moving into the middle class in China. So we sit around thinking, "Well, what's that going to do? What are those middle-class people going to want to do?" Well, they're going to want to do what all middle class people want to do around the world. They're going to want to buy things, and they're going to want to improve their lives. And so when we ponder that and think, "Well, how can we express that in a company that's well-run and that really has amazing opportunity to grow and create value over the long-term?" It would look like a company like Alibaba. So that's a very well-known story, but in our opinion, it may not be known as well as it could be or should be. We just feel like it's got a very long runway and has a lot more value that it can create.
Mark Stoleson: (09:14)
For example, when you look at Alibaba, people think of it, I think, in shorthand as sort of an amazon.com of China. And that's not totally unfair. Like Amazon, it has an AWS cloud-based service. Amazon's is worth, recently when I checked, $750 billion, and that's the whole market cap of Alibaba. So that gives you just a sense of the growth potential of Alibaba as both an online consumer platform and AWS and FinTech. It's just a great way to express this simple, big idea that the Chinese consumer is rising and will do so for a long time.
Rachel Pether: (09:54)
I mean, 300 million people coming into the middle-class. As someone from New Zealand, that number just blows my mind. I mean, that's a hundred times our entire population.
Mark Stoleson: (10:04)
It's hard to wrap your head around it. I'll give you one other example real quick. And that is when we look at a country like India, it's expected that by 2030, India maybe, or should be, the third largest economy in the world. So what happens as an economy of that size grows and expands? Well, you're going to see changes in the capital markets and how businesses are financed. So one of our other investments today is in a company called the National Stock Exchange of India. It's the number one stock exchange in India. And as you see bank financing beginning to morph into capital markets financing for growing businesses, this company should be well positioned to be a leader. And it's got EBITDA margins of 78%. It's highly profitable, well-run, number one in its space, and in a growing country. When we have long-term capital, we're looking for long-term value creation, it's those types of companies.
Rachel Pether: (10:59)
And is that related to micro-financing or is that more like SME corporate lending?
Mark Stoleson: (11:09)
National Stock Exchange of India would be like the New York Stock Exchange of India. It's everything. It's equity, it's credit, it's derivatives, and they are either number one or number two in all of those spaces. So it's just well positioned to capture that entire market in India. But you mentioned microfinance, that's another great story. So that's a great example of the type of thing that Legatum invests in. And many years ago, we were captured by this simple, big idea that there are 450 million unbanked people in India, so people that have no access at all to any banking services. Well, that's a problem, but that's also a huge opportunity. And you saw the emergence of private sector, microfinance companies getting out there into rural areas of India and offering basic financial services.
Mark Stoleson: (12:00)
So we wanted to support that development both from a philanthropic perspective but also just because this has all the hallmarks of potentially a great business. And our first major foray into microfinance was a disaster. It wound up being a complete zero. It was us trying our hand at a private company. We were new to India as well. We got several things wrong, and it was a total write-off. But I think part of the way that Legatum is put together is we invest on the basis of our beliefs. We invest with the posture of hope, and we learn. And we try to apply what we learn, whether it's good or bad.
Mark Stoleson: (12:43)
And so in that case, we took that institutional knowledge that we had built up from what looked like a failure and applied it later. And several years later, we wound up helping recapitalize the company called SKS, which was the number one, and a publicly listed, microfinance company. And that stock went up 4X from our investment, and we wound up making back all of our money and more. And it was a great end of the story, but the key pivot point was a commitment to the space, but also a commitment just to applying what we've learned.
Rachel Pether: (13:16)
That's fabulous. And I think I've heard you ... we've discussed before about how you invest on the basis of your beliefs, not your fears, which is obviously an excellent investment thesis, but I want to go a bit further into what you were talking about, these big ideas made simple. And I know that philanthropy is an area of importance for you personally and for the firm. Can you tell me more about some of the work that you've done here?
Mark Stoleson: (13:44)
Yeah. Sure. So just going back to our mission statement, and you said it very well, it is to generate and allocate the capital and ideas that can help others prosper. So to express that mission, we've got to do two things really well. First, we've got to generate capital. We've got to run a world-class investment organization, and we're super blessed to have a world-class team and a group of people that's been together for a long time. And when we stick to our knitting and operate within our core competencies, we can do that well. If we generate excess capital, how can we use it to help others prosper? And over the last 15 years, we've done that in a lot of different ways. And just like in our investment activities, we've learned a lot of things the hard way, but some things have really fired and have done really well.
Mark Stoleson: (14:29)
And an example of a simple, big idea is our work in global de-worming. So one of my partners, Alan McCormick ... it's a story that's become lore at Legatum. He was reading an article in the FT. It said that 1.5 billion people have intestinal worms and that the medicine is free or almost free, and you just basically have a logistical sort of supply chain management problem, but that this is a solvable problem. It cost 50 cents per person to treat them. So doing some quick math, we thought that's a solvable problem. That's the problem that could be solved in our lifetimes. Let's go for it. And that started us off on a ten-year plus odyssey that started with Burundi and Rwanda. We allocated about $10 million, did a seven-year project and saw the disease prevalence in those two countries come down radically.
Mark Stoleson: (15:23)
So these worms, they're not just small things. These are major neglected tropical diseases. They can kill you. They can make you lame. They can make you blind. And they're only in the poorest communities on the planet. And so we felt like we can make an outsized difference, an outsized return on investment in that space. They're called neglected tropical diseases because they're neglected. People don't think about them because in Western economies, worms are not an issue anymore. You just don't find them in New Zealand or in Switzerland or in the U.S. So we tackled that problem. And what I love about this story is not only did we see amazing success in that first 7 to 10 years in Rwanda and Burundi, but once we had the case study and the data that showed that it worked, we thought, "Well, we need to scale this. So how can we bring in more partners?"
Mark Stoleson: (16:13)
And we took our name off of it and worked with just a small group of other co-founders. And we launched what's called the END Fund, ending neglected diseases, and it started small. But as of today, it's issued more than a billion dollars worth of medicine. It's treated over 900 million people. And this year is amazing. In 2020, with all of the restrictions and lockdowns and challenges, we're on track to treat a hundred million people in 2020.
Rachel Pether: (16:45)
Wow. That's an incredibly impressive statistic. And I know that when we were speaking just earlier, we did notice that you do in fact have a sample of some of them behind you in the bookshelf that have been very, very well-traveled.
Mark Stoleson: (17:04)
And I assured you that that wasn't put there as a prop. It actually does reside here in our library here at work. So we're a hundred percent back in the office here in Dubai and that jar of worms, it's obviously not pretty, but it's very effective at helping people understand these things exist. And this is what it can look like inside of a child's belly. And it can do a lot of damage. And so the CEO of the END Fund, Ellen Agler, was invited to be one of the only outside speakers at a Gates Foundation all staff meeting, and she brought that jar of worms. And so for us, it's very meaningful, it's well-traveled, but it reminds us that we're not just working on statistics or big numbers, but every life is supremely valuable, and we want to tackle these types of problems.
Rachel Pether: (17:54)
And so when you ... a lot of people ... it's almost like CSR and ESG are almost becoming catchphrases nowadays. And many companies have CSR manuals that sit gathering dust. When you look at companies to invest in, is the impact piece or the CSR piece, is that important to you as an investor as well?
Mark Stoleson: (18:20)
So it's not important to us, and I'll tell you why. It may be important to that company. And we don't be grudged what those companies are trying to do or their motives, but from a Legatum perspective, given that our mission is to generate capital, and then for us to use that capital to express our mission to help others prosper, we want as much capital as possible returned to us so that we can control how that money is used to express our mission. We feel like if the company keeps some of the shareholder returns that should be returned to us and they use it, then they're expressing a totally different mission. We would rather have the money and use it for things that we verified, that we trust, and that we have confidence in, and that that's a better use of capital.
Mark Stoleson: (19:06)
And maybe we have a little differentiated view, but when we look at someone like Bill Gates, for example, or Microsoft, I'm grateful to Bill Gates, we use his operating system. In my opinion, he's changed the world for the better. We all use this to communicate and connect, to do business and work from home. And so we should be grateful to Bill Gates for Microsoft and these operating systems, if that's all he did, that would be super noble and just super admirable. But the fact that he then did that, and then started the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and takes capital and does more good, to me, is not giving back.
Mark Stoleson: (19:47)
You shouldn't operate out of guilt or out of a sense of duty. That's like giving again. He's already given the world something great, and he's giving the world something great again. And I like that paradigm and Legatum likes that paradigm too where giving should be cheerful, giving should be joyful, not out of a sense of guilt or some heavy sort of duty. And that's kind of the spirit that we have at Legatum that we try to express with all of our partners in the field.
Rachel Pether: (20:12)
That's fabulous. And I guess that sort of leads to another question then. When you're looking at your philanthropic vehicles, and I know you have a number of them, so I would like to talk about some of the others as well, how do you measure success then? You don't use these quantitative metrics because that is separate from the investment side of the business. How do you look at that in terms of success with the philanthropic vehicles?
Mark Stoleson: (20:41)
Yeah. Well, it's difficult. I mean, it's a real challenge, but it's a challenge that we all ... if you're going to give away money well and do no harm is your first obligation, you have to be serious about measuring what it is that you're doing. I mean, Aristotle said that it's harder to give money away than make it. And we think that that's actually true because you're in the business of intervening in people's lives and that should be handled with great care. And so I would answer in that we do are very, very best and we give it a lot of attention. With something like the END Fund, and really across the board in all of our philanthropic activities, we're not asking the question of how much money is required or how much money have we given. That's a metric that the world ... it's a crude metric, and it's a metric that the world uses.
Mark Stoleson: (21:29)
Our question is much more of an investment mindset. What's the return on investment. Running Legatum as an investment organization, if I sat here and told you, "This is how much money we invested," you would say, "Well, that's great, but what were your returns like?" It should be the same question in the philanthropic space. And so that's the mindset with which we approach everything that we do philanthropically. So at the END Fund or the Freedom Fund or the other things that you mentioned, where we infuse into the organizations and work with the leadership and the board just to make sure that we establish baselines right at the very beginning of any project and understand where we're starting from, and then do our best to track the progress so that we've got great numbers that have integrity and that can give us good feedback mechanisms so we can make adjustments to get the highest return on investment.
Rachel Pether: (22:17)
You mentioned the Freedom Fund again. We've actually already had quite a few questions coming in from the audience, which I do want to address, but before I move on to those questions, tell me a bit more about the Freedom Fund and how that's one of the big ideas made simple.
Mark Stoleson: (22:33)
Okay. So the Freedom Fund from a Legatum perspective was doing two things at the outset. One was Legatum had a long history, and really that predated even my arrival here, in fighting modern day slavery, human trafficking, modern day slavery all over the world, including in South America and Eastern Europe, Western Africa. And so we looked at this issue and felt like the latest data coming out of the U.S. and government agencies is that you've got 30 to 40 million slaves in the world. And given the ethos of Legatum and the primacy that we placed just on freedom, just on the sanctity of the individual and freedom, we felt like that's just a scourge and an evil that has got to be addressed.
Mark Stoleson: (23:24)
And the manner in which we're going to address it is to be targeted and focused and take that long-term approach. So what we did with the Freedom Fund was took a page out of our playbook from the END Fund and said, "How can we collaborate with other philanthropists and pool our capital and pool our resources and our experience, and really a serious push here?" So we joined forces with an organization called Walk Free and another one called Humanity United, and together with Legatum, the three of us launched the Freedom Fund. And the goal of the Freedom Fund is to work with front line organizations.
Mark Stoleson: (24:02)
So instead of top down approach of saying, "We know how to deal with issues of slavery," we're coming alongside in partnership and supporting those who are already doing it on the front lines, in their communities, who speak the language, who understand the culture, and who have a passion for this work. And instead of scatter-gunning around the world in lots of small projects, we focused all of our efforts really in sort of the South Asian corridor, where you see a high prevalence of slavery and trafficking. It felt like, "Let's make a big dent there."
Mark Stoleson: (24:35)
And so that's what we've done. And the Freedom Fund has been directly involved in liberating nearly 30,000 people from slavery. And their education programs and rehabilitation and awareness programs have touched over nearly 700,000 people. And we feel like we're just getting going. That's something that we won't stop doing until we're gone or until that ends. And so we have amazing partners in Humanity United and Walk Free that are in it for the long-term as well.
Rachel Pether: (25:07)
And so how do you define slavery, modern day slavery?
Mark Stoleson: (25:13)
Yeah, I mean, I think there are probably different definitions out there, but our definition is people who have lost their freedom and are being exploited for profits. So, again, there are different opinions, but when we look at it on a very fundamental basis, on a simple basis, anyone who's been deprived of their freedom of movement and their ability to express their individual life as they see fit, can fall into that category. But very specifically, when you see people in forced labor or child labor or the issue of brothels in some countries, these are ... you don't need a definition, and you don't need a PhD, you know it's slavery, you know it's bondage, you know it's wrong. And so that's what we're going after.
Rachel Pether: (26:03)
Thank you so much. We have a question. Well, we've had a number of questions coming in from the audience. And I would just like to address some of them. We've had one from David Wagner. And thank you for your question, David. He said, "Mark, Legatum does fantastic work. The Prosperity Index as always a must read each year. What criteria do you use to decide how to allocate capital?"
Mark Stoleson: (26:30)
Okay, great question. Well, if I can, I'd love to, first of all, say thank you, David, for the question. And the Prosperity Index has turned out to be a very, very powerful tool. The story there is if Legatum's mission is to promote prosperity and to help others prosper, we want to understand what that even means. And so many years ago, we worked with some amazing minds at Oxford University to deconstruct the meaning of prosperity. A lot of people think that means money or just material wealth. And the meaning of that word is just much more complex and nuanced. It means your health, and it means the quality of your relationships and your feeling of opportunity. It's just a very multifaceted term.
Mark Stoleson: (27:17)
And so part of what we wanted to do is help people understand prosperity is good because certainly it means wealth, it means growth, but it means a holistic sense of wellbeing as well. It means all the reasons that life is worth living. So that's prosperity. So then we thought, "Well, if we can define it, how can we measure it?" And the Prosperity Index is now run by a team in London at the Legatum Institute who are super brainy. And they use regression analysis and super technical stuff that's way over my head, but they have 82 different variables. They run this slide rule over every country on the planet, and they are beginning to help policy makers understand what drives prosperity and what restrains prosperity. And this to us is a gift. It's a tool, hopefully, to policy makers and decision makers. If they're interested in creating more prosperity in their countries, this would be a tool that serves those interests.
Mark Stoleson: (28:09)
Now, that's the Prosperity Index. The other part of David's question was what's our investment criteria. And our investment criteria just coming back to the beginning of this conversation is just really simple. We look for those simple, big ideas. We look for secular growth stories. When we find things that match up, and we find a great opportunity, we then allocate a significant amount of capital behind our high conviction ideas. So we go narrow and deep. We felt like the way to multiply our capital is not being right 100% of the time, it's being right a few times, but really backing those high conviction ideas with everything we've got. So as a consequence, we tend to run a very concentrated portfolio. Sometimes as few as a handful of names, three names, five names, usually never more than 10.
Mark Stoleson: (28:59)
And to us, that's the way that we manage risk is rather than diversifying with 50 or a hundred names, we just want to have a handful of names that we know extremely well and have high conviction behind. And that's how we invest. And that's all great. We have the ability with long-term proprietary capital to hold through volatility, but our team is amazing. And they've also got the courage and boldness to pull the trigger when opportunities present themselves like we've seen even in March of this year.
Rachel Pether: (29:28)
Definitely. And I think that we've actually had another question come in, which relates almost follows on from what you've just said about these concentrated and contrarian bets. So it's ex alum, and he said the Chandlers, founders of Legatum, are well-known for taking these super concentrated and contrarian bets that sometimes took a long time to play out and had to volatility along the way. The question is would Legatum be able to run a strategy the same way if the firm managed outside capital?
Mark Stoleson: (30:01)
That's a great question. Well, in terms of our history, so Legatum was really launched independently in 2006 with four partners. We have Christopher Chandler, Alan McCormick, Phillip Vassiliou, and myself. And today, it's a partnership of equals. It's a partnership that's tied together. We're not related by blood. We've just worked together for 15, 16 years, but what unites us and actually what unites everyone at Legatum is this sense of mission and the purpose for why we're here. And so we feel extremely lucky to have this job because we get to work in a great investment firm, but we get to use the capital for things that matter.
Mark Stoleson: (30:43)
It's a great question about whether or not we'd be able to execute on Legatum strategy, which is long-term, un-levered, and just looking for really high quality names and letting them compound value over time. It would be really difficult to do this with outside capital. If we had limited partners calling and wanting their money back every time the market has a hiccup that would hugely complicate our investment approach. And so in March of this year, for example, we were carrying a very significant amount of cash coming into this year, had absolutely no idea what was on the horizon like the rest of the world. And with a concentrated portfolio, we saw names in which we have huge conviction, we know very, very well, really take a hit just from sentiments and the market reacting.
Mark Stoleson: (31:35)
And so in those moments of time, we can definitely hold or we can back our beliefs and invest on the basis of our beliefs and not our fears. And that's what we did. And so I'm extremely proud of our team because we basically went fully invested in March and that's worked out well so far. But our time horizon is not just trying to get to the end of this year, we're looking at 3 years and 5 years and 10 years and building a legacy of Legatum for the next generation.
Rachel Pether: (32:03)
What's always impressed me about the story of the founding partners at Legatum as well, you have a very similar ... or you share the same investment thesis. You also share very much the same values. I don't think you'd be able to do all the work that you do on the philanthropic side, if you didn't really, truly believe in the mission statement. So how do you ... and sorry, I shouldn't say statement ... in your mission, how did it work with all of you coming together, and was it always so aligned at the very outset?
Mark Stoleson: (32:37)
It was aligned at the very outset. And how does that happen? I'm not sure, but when it does it, don't miss it would be my advice, grab a hold of it with both hands. And I have two grown sons who are just in university. And part of my advice to them is a lot of ways life is less about what you do, it's more about who you do it with. And that's definitely been my experience. And so I look around today and feel like the things that mean the most to me are my relationships. And within the Legatum context, that really starts with my partners. And we started as colleagues, but we became friends and we became partners and more, and so we're connected within our families as godparents. And we've been to funerals and weddings and graduations and everything else.
Mark Stoleson: (33:32)
We're doing life together, but it's not limited to just these four partners and owners of the firm, it's open and available and we wanted for everyone that works at Legatum, that comes in contact with Legatum because to us, relationships are a core part of a prosperous life. And so I think we recognize that in each other. I talked about my parents at the beginning and that sense that life is about who you become, it's not about what you get. I don't know how they got that programmed into me, but I just knew it. And when I came into contact with other people, with whom that resonated, we were like, "We can do something great." And we did. We sat down with a blank sheet of paper.
Mark Stoleson: (34:12)
We were blessed with ... we had capital, but we said, "What kind of business do we want to create?" And it generated one of those deathbed conversations with yourself where you're like, "Hey, when I'm on my death bed and I look back, what do I want my life to have been about?" It's pretty short. You should stay awake for it. And we all were of the same mind that let's do something special. Let's try to make the best use of our time and this capitol and be excellent at what we do. And so the Legatum story so far is an attempt to fulfill that belief or that mission. And it's had a lots of fits and starts. It's had lots of failures and challenges along the way. We've had a few successes, and we're all still together, which to me is probably the number one success.
Rachel Pether: (35:00)
That's definitely a very good sign. It was interesting when you were talking about the Prosperity Index and the sort of things you look for with regards to prosperity. I feel that in this modern world, we're so hungry to chase down success that actually we become miserable people or people with bad values. And so it's really about how you define prosperity to you rather than just, as you say, financial success or monetary gain.
Mark Stoleson: (35:30)
Yeah. Well, I think that's right. I mean, when I look back over the Legatum experience, I feel like the main takeaway is that no one here came from money, so this is a bootstrap, first-generation environment here. And so it's kind of like "if it's going to be, it's up to me" atmosphere. And yet looking at what we've done together, I feel like therefore, there's nothing special, we're not PhDs in development economics. We're just normal people that came together around an idea, agreed that we were going to try to execute on this together, and then we just never gave up. Maybe we're just very stubborn, but I feel like that formula is available to everyone. Find something that you believe in, find people you want to do it with, don't give up, and you might be surprised what happens in 10, 15, 20 years.
Rachel Pether: (36:26)
I would like to give you the final word, Mark. What is one thing that is exciting about the next 12 months in terms of investing with Legatum?
Mark Stoleson: (36:40)
Well, I mean, one of the things that we try to focus on is, again, like I said, that concentrated portfolio with high conviction ideas. So ideally, we'll be doing very little over the next year in terms of our investing. Now, that's a bit of a joke because we're constantly working. We're constantly scanning the globe looking for new opportunities. We're keen and eager learners. So we're constantly trying to learn about new disruptive technologies. You would find us sort of investing in companies that fit with our profile and our strategy, whether it's in financial services or in tech or in consumer, but you would probably find us trying to learn about crypto and about FinTech and about DeFi, and what are emerging markets within the broader market of global finance.
Mark Stoleson: (37:27)
And so those are some of the themes that we would be excited about and looking at over the next year. But really, Legatum doesn't really even think in terms of the next year. We think in terms of the next 10 years. And what I'm excited about is working with my incredible colleagues here at Legatum to see Legatum multiply our capital, multiply our impact, and multiply our influence, and do it together over the next 10 years.
Rachel Pether: (37:54)
Thank you so much, Mark. It's been a joy to speak with you as it always is. And I think you really do make this amazing case or great example of values based investing and the true impact that you're having. So thank you so much for giving up your precious time today to speak with us. And I hope that we can continue the conversation at some point in the future as well.
Mark Stoleson: (38:16)
Rachel, a real pleasure. Thanks so much.