Can you tell me about your time at Kearney—your offices, titles, practices, and years?

I joined the New York office in 1992 as part of the newly created financial institutions practice and stayed there until 1994, when I relocated to San Francisco. At that time my wife, Alison Davis (now chairman and managing partner of Blockchain Coinvestors), was a senior partner and I was about to be made a partner.

Then I was asked to take over running the West Coast, which I believe was in 1995. By this time, Alison was on the North American management committee and I was on the North American accounts planning committee (or something along those lines!). I had responsibility for the West Coast—San Francisco, Los Angeles, and Silicon Valley. By the time I left we had three offices on the West Coast with around 350–400 people, and Alison and I were coleaders of the global financial services practice.

I left Kearney in 1999 to become global head of strategy and corporate development at Gap.

What’s a favorite memory or lesson from your time at Kearney?

I very much enjoyed coming to the West Coast when Alison and I first arrived. There were maybe 80 people and a number of partners, but very few local clients. We needed to create a new team, not just geographically but across industry groups. That was a very enjoyable experience; I got to know a lot of people extremely well. Some are still with the firm—like Ben Smith and Alex Liu.

We developed a very collaborative, team-based approach, which was very enjoyable to be a part of, and by the end of the 1990s there were a lot of clients on the West Coast.

How did Kearney prepare you for your subsequent career?

There are some things that consulting provides and there are some things that Kearney specifically provided. In terms of consulting, a successful consultant has a diversity of experiences that’s almost unparalleled in business. You’ll work for the most senior executives of some of the world’s largest companies on the issues that are most important to them and in a relatively short timeframe you’ll get many, many exposures and experiences across industries and topics and issues that give you a breadth of knowledge that most executives don’t have.

Kearney, when we were there, was highly entrepreneurial. We helped to create the financial services group, and we relocated to the West Coast, which was a very small part of the firm. We were able to build the region with new clients, industries, offices, and had the feeling of being part of a larger firm.

By the time I left Kearney, I was knowledgeable about a number of industries, including financial services, retail, consumer, and technology. And I had worked on strategy, organization, marketing, mergers and acquisitions, cost reduction, sourcing, and so on for a lot of the most prestigious companies in the US, which was very valuable.

But the entrepreneurial spirit was the thing that I thought was a differentiator even then. And today, when some consulting firms have tens of thousands of people, the one thing you know is they’re no longer very entrepreneurial. Whereas I think being in a privately owned firm like Kearney, there’s probably still a lot of white space and opportunities for people to build practices and to grow, which was very beneficial for me.

What advice would you give somebody starting at Kearney?

First off, they should know that they’re very fortunate to be in an environment that provides so much diversity, experience, and exposure. Their challenge is to figure out how to do their job well, because it’s not easy to be a consultant.

You’ll want to become a focused, results-oriented, high-performing consultant, and to gain a diversity of experiences so that you make yourself a better rounded person and partner because most clients want consulting partners to have a breadth of knowledge and experience to serve them across a variety of topics and issues. Getting diverse experience early in your career is important because it will become very valuable later.

Probably the most important thing of all is to think like a partner every day. Don’t let yourself think like an analyst or an associate; always imagine you’re a partner and get into that mindset of trying to understand what priorities your client should be focused on. Figure out to what extent they’re focusing on those things and what gaps they have around the places where they should do more and do better. Ask how the work that you’re doing fits in to the CEO agenda and what else we could be doing that would be beneficial to this client to help them with their goals and expectations.

If you think like a partner every day, when you eventually become a partner, you’ll be very good at it. You’ll also raise the probability that you become a partner because everyone will say that you think like a partner. Start building that muscle, that capability, from your very first project.

What opportunities do you see in your industry, or how would you like to see change occur?

I work in blockchain now, and this ties to something that Kearney understands very well, because for at least 40 years Kearney has worked to help companies digitalize communications and content through the Internet. And this digitalization of communications and content is almost complete.

But it’s not fully complete because today only about two-thirds of the world is online, and only about 40 percent of people use electronic commerce. And as we’re seeing, there are new opportunities surfacing all the time.

For example, the world hasn’t really started digitalizing finance and commerce. We’re right at the beginning but still most payments are slow, costly, and difficult, and that’s the most digitalized part of financial services. By the time you get to investments, most investments are still paper-based and they haven’t been digitalized at all.

Blockchain is a technology that enables the digitalization of finance, commerce, and value. Over the next 20 or 30 years we’re going to complete the digitalization of all the world’s economy. Every industry, business, and individual will be upgraded in terms of the products, services, and platforms they use.

This is huge, but it’s also very difficult and it’s going to take decades. For us at Blockchain Coinvestors, it’s a very worthwhile place to invest because the tailwinds are so strong now. All the trends are moving in the right direction. The metrics are going up almost everywhere in the world and almost everyone in the world is fully supportive.

As an example, there’s pro-innovation regulation rolling out in almost every country and financial center in the world. The exception is in the US, and that’s the one thing I’d like to see change. The US won the battle for the Internet because we had pro-innovation regulation at the beginning. But now the US is losing the war for digital finance because we don’t have pro-innovation regulation for digital finance, and we need it.

America can’t afford to lose the war for commercial innovation globally because we need to be a global financial leader as well as a global innovation and technology leader. That’s the one thing I’d like to see changed. We have some people in the US who’re behaving like Luddites; they’re anti-innovation even though innovation is driving GDP and job growth everywhere in the world. For some reason America is trying to slow down innovation in finance and commerce.

How do you differentiate yourself from competitors?

You want to try and be the best at what you do and you need to think about what’s your strategy, what are your differentiators, and what’s your edge? And in the case of Blockchain Coinvestors, we asked ourselves those questions when Alison and I decided to launch it.

We had long been Internet and fintech investors, but 10 years ago when we were moving into blockchain we asked ourselves how we were going to show up in a strong and differentiated way. And that led us to our current investment strategy. We wrote down on a sheet of paper that our goal would be to invest in all the best blockchain opportunities globally.

The challenge then was how to get to that result, and we came up with our fund-of-funds strategy, one of the three investment strategies we now have. Our fund-of-funds strategy puts us into all the best blockchain venture funds globally, so we’re deploying capital through those best-in-breed venture capitalists to the best investments. And today we’re in more than 1,000 blockchain companies and projects. About 80 of these are blockchain “unicorns,” and we are partnered with more than 40 of the best blockchain venture capital firms in the world.

We had a goal of being the best by investing in all the best projects globally that are building on blockchain. Then we had a strategy to partner with and invest in all the best venture capitalists working in blockchain around the world.

And then we had a big operational challenge, which is that we had to put in a lot of work in the form of relationship building, meetings, due diligence, and much more to get to where we are now, which is, we believe, the most diversified global blockchain investors anywhere.

How do you define success?

Ultimately we’re an investment firm, which means the one thing that matters is that we deliver high financial returns to our investors. We’re very proud that we have some of the highest performing funds in the world right now and that’s very important to us. So that’s the number one priority.

The second is our value proposition to our investors, who can make a single investment and get global diversified early-stage venture exposure in blockchain in both equities and tokens. So that’s second and we need to deploy all of that. Making these global, diversified, early-stage, best investments and attracting the top investors takes a lot of work.

We have to deliver all of that and then thirdly, obviously, we want to have an elite team and be a small, leading firm that does its work exceptionally well. That’s always a challenge. But if we deliver fantastic financial results and if we deliver our value proposition consistently, then that’s most of the work. Building a great firm is the third part.

Where do you find inspiration and purpose?

In my first career with McKinsey, then Kearney, then later at Monitor and Booz, I was helping clients digitalize their businesses, communications, and content.

I think the journey we’re on is very important for humanity. We have to get to a digital economy that really works, and we can’t get there without digital commerce. And so for me this is a continuation of the journey I’ve been on with my clients for 30 years. The only change is now I’ve chosen to be an investor instead of a consultant.

As an investor, I’m bringing capital to the entrepreneurs that are going to complete this journey. I think it’s very important for the world at large and I think it’s the biggest single driver of GDP and job growth. But there are challenges and some unexpected negative consequences related to the digitalization of the world’s economy. Innovation always creates disruption and we have to deal with that.

I can’t imagine a world in which it’s good that you have to do things on paper when it’s expensive, slow, and difficult. It’s not in the consumer’s interest; it doesn’t deliver value to consumers to have inefficient, old-fashioned, difficult ways to do finance and commerce—they need to be upgraded, and that’s what we’re working on.

What books, movies, or other content do you recommend?

As an author I have to start off with my own books! Alison and I have coauthored several that are available in hardback, paperback, and audible. These include Corporate Innovation in the Fifth Era, Blockchain Competitive Advantage, The Fifth Era, and Build Your Fortune in the Fifth Era.

For anyone who wants to learn more about blockchain, we have a page on our website at https://www.blockchaincoinvestors.com/resources where, if you have free time and if you click through the links and just sort of scan and read, you’d become pretty knowledgeable about everything we’ve just talked about.

In terms of my personal reading, I’m really enjoying books about the Napoleonic war and the British navy. I like to use my free time to get away from work. Of course, I’m also looking forward to seeing the new Napoleon movie.

If you could work from anywhere, where would it be?

I’m already virtual—we work wherever we want and we do the work we want to do.

Geographically, Alison and I split our time between California and Europe. And we work virtually all the time. I feel like we have our cake and eat it too.

I already have the footprint I want, so I don’t dream about relocating to New Zealand, for example. I think California is an amazing place and I want to be a Californian (and I am for much of the year). But Europe is also great, and I travel to Asia and other places as well.

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