My three learnings from shadowing the CEO of Europe’s leading listed growth investor for a year
For one year, I have had the chance to work as LUMA, or CEO trainee, at Kinnevik AB, Europe’s leading listed growth investor. It is almost a mythical position that Kinnevik has had for over 40 years. As LUMA you work with a great variety of projects, both the highs and the lows, getting the opportunity to lead and execute large operational projects, manage teams and be a part of making investments into growing start-ups all over Europe and the US.
Nonetheless, what I believe is the most unique aspect from being in this role is working closely with Kinnevik’s CEO, Georgi Ganev, and Kinnevik’s management team for a year. I have been shadowing Georgi, able to join in on almost all his meetings, with Georgi generously sharing his thoughts on practically everything. I have had the possibility to participate in discussions and decisions at the highest strategic level, gaining a true helicopter view of what it means to run a listed, globally competing investment firm. Now, almost 11 months into my year, I would like to share my three key insights and learnings from my tight collaboration with Georgi — and my view of what it means to be a CEO at a company like Kinnevik.
1. Undivided Attention to Divided Topics
Coming straight out of university, I never understood how few things I spent my attention on. I was used to managing a couple of university courses at the same time, sometimes a part-time job as well. For me, it was quite easy to quickly shift my focus between this limited number of topics.
However, as a CEO of a listed company, there are hundreds of topics that are important, requiring his or her thinking and opinion. I quickly recognised Georgi’s ability to shift his focus extremely switfly between seemingly unrelated topics, always with undivided attention. During just a few of minutes, it could be an investment manager calling about a complex but interesting investment case, a shareholder asking about a governance decision, a newspaper asking about our recent sustainability initiative or even me asking for advice in a professional development matter.
If you as CEO remain ‘stuck’ thinking about a previous topic in an upcoming conversation in my examples above, there could be easily imaginable consequences. I think the skill of being able to conjure undivided attention to divided topics at a high speed is extremely valuable, given the vast amount of different, albeit highly important ones, I realised a CEO of a listed company encounters.
2. Prioritising People
The CEO without a doubt needs expertise in many aspects of the business. And even in an investment firm, where you might think it is all about the numbers or technologies, it is surprisingly much more about the people. When investing, especially in quickly growing companies, it is all about understanding the founders’ vision, motivation, and capabilities to take her or his business to the place of the vision she or he describes. Understanding the people is far more important than understanding the last quarterly numbers (although not unimportant, of course).
But also in internal matters, it is more about people than I ever could have imagined. As the CEO of a company managing +$10bn of investments, you can in very, very few cases be the expert. When being presented with an interesting investment case, you can never run all the facts by yourself.
Instead, you have to know how to trust the team that you have built, and their expertise. And especially, you have to be able to assess their conviction — Do I trust this person, and do I trust his or her conviction for this business being the winner in the long term? In that sense, when being the faced with so many decisions, both in investments and more corporate matters, it all seems to be about your ability to first read and understand the people you hire, but then more importantly assess and trust people’s conviction of what they argue is the right path for Kinnevik.
3. Time for Thinking
Clearly, from the text above it seems like a CEO has a quite busy life, managing people and a multitude of different matters on the daily. But, Georgi early on advised me to make sure I don’t get too stuck in the daily errands and becoming event-driven when prioritizing my time, and instead missing out on spending time thinking about key issues that might matter not only in the upcoming quarter, but also the next two or ten years. Questions that are fundamental for the CEO to decide and execute on. Matters that tend to be complex, requiring intense thoughts and tend to be hard to reverse — what is the next dominating consumer behaviour for the coming years? How do I manage so our team executes our largest transaction ever during the upcoming six months?
Therefore, as a CEO there seems to be immense value in managing your calendar, not getting stuck in the ever-streaming flow of urgent and semi-important tasks, ensuring there is always some room for conscious thinking about the absolutely most important topics in the longer term. Because this thinking will lay the foundation for the successful decisions that are to be taken, in each of the divided topics that may pop up on the agenda or people that you need to have conviction in on a daily basis.
On an ending note, reflecting upon my year, while you as a LUMA get the chance to do a multitude of other stuff outside of shadowing Georgi, such as participating in investments and strategic projects with portfolio companies, I believe the tight collaboration with Georgi, and the learnings thereof, will be one of my most important professional experiences that I will bring with me in the rest of my career — regardless of what I do.
LUMA #35
