Hiten Patel: We're delighted to have with us today Lance Uggla, who's made the time to join us. Thank you so much for joining us today, Lance.
Lance Uggla: It's great to be here Hiten.
Hiten: Now this is an intro I've been very excited to give, but I'm just going to do the short version and introduce you as the co-founder of BeyondNetZero. And I want to invite you to give your own introduction around where you are now.
Lance: Okay. Well I have quite a broad role at General Atlantic. Of course, I'm the founder with John Browne of BeyondNetZero and we co-founded BeyondNetZero with General Atlantic, so it's a real partnership. And in addition to helping the capital partnering to raise the funding for BeyondNetZero, which is a 3.5 billion growth climate fund, helping us identify great entrepreneurs to back and invest in. And then of course once their portfolio companies helping them grow. I have a broad range of activities with the team, but I have a great team across the BeyondNetZero investing team, but also across GA to work with. I also help GA as an entrepreneur in residence, one of actually a GA entrepreneur given they backed me early, Bill Ford and I, along with Gabe and Martine, we really are, we have a great friendship and relationship so it really is easy working with them. So I help them around their portfolio companies or our portfolio companies broadly looking at new entrepreneurs that might become GA entrepreneurs, giving them my experiences. And then finally once they're portfolio companies, helping them be even better than what they already are. So if I can help, I'm there to help. So it's quite a broad mandate, but one that I'm really enjoying after IHS Markit.
Hiten: Awesome. Awesome. Let's go there. Let's talk a little bit about that journey because you've gone from being an incredibly successful entrepreneur yourself to now supporting and enabling that next generation of entrepreneurs as you describe. Talk to me a little bit about that journey, right? Probably rewind the tape even further back then. I think you started out at TD Bank [TD Securities] before people may even know where it began. I'd love to hear in your own words the journey that you'd been on.
Lance: Sure. Well, I came from Vancouver, Canada and I had no idea about financial markets. I can guarantee you that. I didn't even know we had to wear white shirts and blue suits. I had brown trousers, and sweaters, and jackets. So it was quite a learning experience. But I studied at London School of Economics and of course after doing a Master's there, finance is one of the streams. And I ended up joining an investment bank in Toronto called Wood Gundy right before the stock market crashed back then. But what was great is I ended up having this great fast global markets career where I was running global markets at CIBC Wood Gundy and then I shifted to run a global credit trading, but also the credit portfolio, trading portfolio within TD Bank. And like any entrepreneur, you have a light bulb moment. Recently on LinkedIn, somebody asked me to talk about light bulb moments and it really is true that something just happens and you go, wow, I’ve got an idea.
Lance: And of course many people have ideas every day, so you have to make it happen. And the light bulb moment came with the collapse of Enron 2002, 2001 and this whole lack of transparency around derivatives. And I was trading all sorts of credit derivatives, interest rate derivatives around unstructured products around the credit markets. And I kind of understood the problem quite well. It was kind of like switching from being a surgeon in the training room to why not be the person that does all the bed pans and tools and beds and work around the surgeons and help them. And I thought there's something here. It's a.com, it's called markit.com, and we're going to start a company that's going to bring transparency to the derivatives market.
Hiten: And at that point, how sure were you that this thing was going to work? How uncertain, how much of a risk? Talk to me through that mindspace at that point in time.
Lance: Well, 39, 4 kids, moved out of London to the countryside. Life was pretty good as a global markets head with a good salary, bonus, vesting and all the other stuff that you have and a great team. So you have to be really convinced to just drop all of that and say, let's do something brand new. And then you have to have a wife and family that supports you to be an entrepreneur because working in a global trading room. It's tough. It's early starts, it's four, five really long days and then you got your weekends off, you're thinking about things, but then you're back at it. But it's not all consuming. It's mostly consuming.
Hiten: How old are the kids at this point?
Lance: They're young. They're all nine and under.
Lance: Three to nine, three to nine at that time. And this was this idea of let's do something completely new and let's start a company and leave all the nice spices that you have on the shelf every day in a big corporation to something really where the cupboards are bare. And so you need to be convinced, you need to be excited, you need to be able to motivate both the people you hire as well as yourself to every day try to make an idea a reality. Because I look now at companies, most companies I look at, they're just too early. They've had the light bulb moment, but they're still in the venture world and we're investing growth capital. And I remember that stage perfectly. That's the stage of fear and excitement and you got to get over that, but you have to be convinced.
Hiten: And how long does that opening stage last for? How long did it last for in your situation where you've taken the leap, you've stepped away, but you’re still not totally sure you've got the traction of the scale yet, how long did that play out for you and how did you navigate that?
Lance: Well, a bit of two points into there. You started with how long does that last, which I think it lasts as long as you have money and capital because just think of the.com, all those great ideas, some of them, they just vanished. They ran out of money. I was thinking the other day about a company called boo.com, which was this online clothing. Online clothing's huge now to be boo.com today. But at that time they ran out of money and a great idea disappears. And many great ideas disappear. And I can tell you we had 17 million reasons why markit.com was going to just shut down and fail. We were in minus 17 million before we raised the first 25 million.
Lance: And that's why TD Bank was such a great partner. I was really close to them. There was no performance issues. I wanted to do this, they wanted to back me. And we did it together. And I had of course, unvested stock, they had capital, we put it together and we said, let's go. But it went all the way to minus 17 and we sold half the company to a group of banks. And that's what shifted to let's be market partners, let's create a partnership. 12 banks bought half the company, TD stayed on - that was 13 and the economics of 50:50 changed to two thirds: one third, but I had 13 of the biggest banks in the world, all partners. And partners back then were “Let's design, create, build together.” The shift as you went into global financial crisis to a lot more scrutiny around partnerships and antitrust came later, and we had to adapt to that. And we had lots of challenges. You can read them in the press where people said we had antitrust issues that we had to deal with. And so I really had to kind of fine tune myself to how do you run a partnership, grow and prosper without crossing any legal or regulatory boundaries. And that's something that I had to learn really early on. And I think IHS Markit navigated that world really well.
Hiten: Yeah, and I must admit, when people talk about picture an entrepreneur, particularly in the data space or the cap market space for many an image of you will come to mind. You kind of epitomize what's been achieved here. Through that journey, which bits of you do you think stayed consistent? Which bits of the instinct of the entrepreneur stayed consistent and which bits do you think you had to change? Right? Suddenly you got 12 banks on your cap table, then you run up to an IPO [Initial Public Offering]. Which bits did you have to evolve and which bits when you cut Lance open kind of stayed a hundred percent pure, through and through?
Lance: Okay, that's a good question. That wasn't on your list. I like that. Well, the first bit I'd say is that every day that I've worked since I was 24 until today when I woke up, I'm actually excited to go to work. If you're an entrepreneur with a team, you need to wake up positive and you need to motivate the people around you to great success. And so that's never changed in any part. I think it's something that it's free. You don't have to go to university to learn positive vibe. You actually just have to do it and practice it. So that was really it, good manners don't change. Always find a way to be polite because when you're hiring people, you're approaching customers, you're solving customer problems, solving people problems, nobody likes somebody that's disrespectful. So find your way to good manners. Again, free. You don't have to go to university.
Lance: Hard work. I always say work hard, but I don't believe people need to work. I don't believe these 80 hours and a hundred hour a week stories. Maybe in a law firm or investment banking analyst in their first year or two, they do work up to these kind of crazy hours. But in general, in a corporation or a bank or wherever, just be a little more than average. Don't be average, be a bit better than average. And when you're better than average, you're already 50% better than the world. And so those things I've always kept in my career, I kept them at IHS Markit. Those were things that I preached and talked and mentored and I said, we need to maintain this real positive fuel behind our ideas in order for us to win. And that always was a constant. I think what changed is I went from 39 to 49 to 59 and now 61.
Lance: So all of a sudden you start to analyze yourself each chapter. A trading room leader is leading a bunch of very highly paid people. And that authoritative type approach of leadership is very common in a trading room. And it almost has to be sometimes you're managing huge amounts of capital, not yours that you're responsible for. And you have these very high paid Formula one drivers that you're managing that are producing a lot of revenue for the institution. And so you need to find the balance of how do you manage that? But you need a stronger hand. When you're building a company as an entrepreneur, you actually need to really motivate people to the idea and their upside a lot of times is tied to the equity value and therefore you need to share your equity and then you need to motivate the team to the value proposition behind that so that they can keep going three years, five years, seven years, 10 years, none of this stuff happens in one to three years.
Lance: It happens in three to five and five to 10. Those are the jumps. And what I learned is that I had to change my people skills to be a lot more humanistic, a lot more passionate, a lot more gentle, team oriented, empathy. A lot of the things that I think the world and this new group of people coming into the workforce now in their twenties, they really want to learn and be an environment that's accommodative and one that is very encouraging. And so that shift, I did learn and change. And I think by the end, especially with covid and working online and dealing with people that had all sorts of challenges around them, that became new challenges. I think that was a transformational shift for me. And I tried to hold on to those new behaviors because they helped me in all parts of my life.
Hiten: I love that answer. It feels like it's the things that are centuries old, right? Positive vibes hard work, well-mannered. It's crazy how
Lance: It's easy, right?
Hiten: How sophisticated the world's got and how everyone's obsessing over these micro elements to make themselves better. And what you've just described is kind of foundational behaviors that have kind of stood the test of time for centuries.
Lance: And so you can teach them. When I meet, you probably read a bit about I have a hundred perpetual scholarship students. They're really like family members to me. They're in Canada, at my university, at the London School of Economics, or they come from a high school in Zambia called Shitima School, which my ex-wife founded. And so there's a hundred of them all the time. But their fees, their food, their lodgings, their travel, everything is on the scholarship. So it's a very special scholarship. I want to, and as it grows, we now are up to a hundred scholars and it'll stay a hundred perpetually, but every year 30 fall off now. So you just keep growing. And we've created a collective of Uggla scholars that are all helping each other with internships and jobs. And I'm always teaching those skills that I said here I only have one other one try to be interesting.
Lance: And they always look at me and they go, how do you be interesting? And I said, the only way you're interested, I don't care if you live in Britain, just read The Week and know what's going on. Know a snippet. If you can read The Economist, you're going to do even better if you can't do that, get the Espresso, the short version of the Economist. Read newspapers, listen to music, go to things that aren't natural for you. Don't ever be that American or Canadian that goes to Australia, New Zealand, South Africa, India, Pakistan, and says, oh, what's cricket? Right? And India has just played Pakistan in a World Cup and it's watched by a billion people globally and you don't know the result. Unacceptable. So if you want to be interesting, you got to read and just find time every week because you're going to sit next to somebody that's relevant to you and you need to find, what are you going to talk about? They might not be interested in the NFL, or the Premier League, or Sumo wrestling in Japan. I don't know. Choose what you're interested in, choose what the person's interested in and then find a way to actually communicate. So reading is my kind of final free piece of advice.
Hiten: Hearing you describe that reminds me of the scene in Ted Lasso when he plays this darts match and he hustles this guy and at the end he just says, dad always told me to be curious, ask questions. I think it was a pretty powerful statement.
Lance: Fantastic.
Hiten: Let me keep us moving. I guess there's two punctuation points in your journey. I do want to stop at, I think a lot of listeners to the show are involved in private companies, and I think I want to hear you talk a little bit about what it was like to take a company public. How did you navigate that transition? What were the pros? What were the cons? What would you wish you would've known at the time? I think a lot of people in our community are straddling that boundary, so it'd be great to hear your views and perspectives on that.
Lance: Well, if you're in a great company and you have big vision for your company to be 5, 10, 15, 20, or like IHS Markit going all the way to 44 billion and now it was a stock trade, so now it's a percentage of the combination, which is now S&P Global. So you have to really believe that your journey has this huge TAM that you're going after, many levers to your upside and that you can continue to grow. So my first piece of advice is don't IPO sub 5 billion market cap. That's my number one piece of advice. And the reason I say that is because you'll become an illiquid or low liquidity stock. You are a snack for anybody else now. So you're starting to lose control of your company and all of a sudden you're going to find that you're a takeover target if you're really good, you're a merger target from somebody slightly bigger, a merger of equals or something that could take control your company away.
Lance: And to tell you the truth, the costs of being a public company, it's not a million a year. It's five or 10 million per annum more than being a private company. And it's expensive and there's more points of failure, single points of failure, and your CFO becomes equally important to anybody else in the firm. And so my view is wait till you have enough scale. We didn't go public till 5 billion. And I think that was one of the key positive pieces of advice that I had from my board, including General Atlantic, CPPIB, Temasek were my three big shareholders. They didn't pressure me to go early. The other thing is when you go public, if you really believe in your story, you're not a seller. Set limits. If you were a strategic partner of mine like Temasek, CPPIB or General Atlantic, you could sell over three years if you were a bank strategic partner four years.
Lance: Now, how did I convince 'em to do that? I said, if you're an employee, you can sell after five years, believe in yourself, believe in your partners. It's not a prison. People have to get out. So show 'em a pathway, but do it in a way that doesn't scare your investors. I can tell you from 5 billion till I merged, we became six, IHS was seven. We did a merger of equals. The reason I did that is I needed to create scale because even at five we were a snack for the 20 billion market cap players. And so you really have, once you're public, you're out there, but you have currency, you've got PR, you are well-known, you've got access to areas that you probably didn't have access to before. And so yes, there's some real positives. I loved having the currency, the ability to raise debt or equity, the ability to acquire something with equity and let people know that that's the real price, the real value to see market clumps, to set benchmarks.
Lance: Sometimes we were the highest peer, sometimes we're the lowest. And when you're the lowest, everybody's looking at you. Why are you the lowest peer in the group? You have good growth, great gross margins. Because we issued too many employee options and they're now, as we grow, we're not getting the earnings per share growth. We're getting earnings growth, double digit, but our EPS growth was single digit. You're not going to be a top peer there. So you learn a whole bunch of things on the way. And I would just say, make sure you've got enough scale. Don't go early.
Hiten: Super, super helpful. Talk to me about, you mentioned there a couple of the key mergers. Just talk to me about, I guess the emotional state of mind, the decision making when you go through, again, those two probably big punctuation moments, right? The merge with IHS, then the merge with S&P. What goes through your mind? How do you wrestle with some of that decision making? You're probably one of the privileged few on the planet who's been through some of those moments. As a founder, I think it's very different sometimes than we see it approached by career CEOs who play a different way. I'm particularly keen to hear your view as a founder who's taken something from the start and navigated a couple of those junctions.
Lance: Yeah, no, that's a good question. No, I feel privileged to actually have made it that far and been able to reinvent myself a few times. But one thing I'd say in the merger, so in the merger, are you an entrepreneur and founder for your shareholders or for your employees, your customers or yourself? I think many entrepreneurs put themselves as the number one slot, and I think you have to put yourself in the number four slot or five slot. You got to be thinking about your customers, your employees, and your shareholders. And you are a steward as a public company for shareholder value. And shareholder value becomes from great people working in the company, great customers, long-term revenue opportunity set, great shareholders that are willing to hold your stock and grow with you. So you need to really think about all these things. And if you put yourself first, you will make the wrong decision because it'll be self-serving.
Lance: So for me, when I merged with IHS, I was 53 and the merging CEO was close to 70. And in order for Jerre and I to put that deal together, I had to agree to be president and COO for a year before he retired, completely not on the board, retired from the company for me to be CEO. So I had to do a transition. I did that for shareholders because I saw the opportunity of this global information company and not many people saw it at first. This idea, automotive, energy, financial markets, lots of data, but they didn't see the synergies of the technology, the cloud, the ability for financial markets to consume data from everywhere, whether it was automotive, whether it was energy, whether it was maritime defense. The financial markets are huge consumers. So there was a lot of synergies that people didn't recognize, but as we started showing them, it was real.
Lance: Of course, that 13-billion-dollar company is the one that became 44. And it didn't all come from revenue growth, it came from a set of synergies that gave a one plus one equals three. And so that's what happened there. So sometimes you have to think about the shareholders, employees, and customers first. Second, you've got to make sure that you've got a vision for how you're going to generate not just cost synergies, but revenue synergies. And then sometimes you have to make a decision that probably isn't the one you want to make. Like being CEO of your own company and founder and then being president for another CEO. It's tough. It was a tough year, but Jerre and I had a plan. I knew exactly the date that it was finished. It was in the documents, so it was legally bounded. The whole board would've had to vote against me to overturn that. So I looked at it and I went, okay, that's fair. And that's all documented. There's nothing private here. When we did S&P Global, Doug called me and described his vision. Again, his vision. First time I heard it, I kind of went, well, I have my own vision for how I'm going to get to a hundred billion. And I looked at it and I said, okay, we're a 30 something billion dollar company, 35 or something like that. They're bidding 44.
Lance: We're going to be a third of the combination approximately. Is that worthwhile? If there are 200 billion combination, then we're 70 billion of that. Can that happen? Is it realistic? And my view was the revenue synergies, the cost synergies, the opportunity for employees, the strength and scale of an information company that could be a 200, 300, 500-billion-dollar company. There's no reason why you can't continue to grow and diversify in those segments. And so I agreed to do it, and I talked to the board, and again, you have to put yourself aside now I'm going to be out of a job. And it took two years to close, but in the meantime, I had the opportunity to start BeyondNetZero and it's my final chapter. And guess what? It's just as exciting every single morning
Hiten: You look just as excited. Yeah, I was just going to say that was you look just as excited as you managed that. One last question on that, and I'm going to move on to now, but again, I've got this analogy in my head, apologies. It's a bit football centered, but it's always like Alex Ferguson still sat in the stands at Man United, looking down on the pitch, watching his whole team. How much of your headspace, heart space still gets occupied by watching what's playing out at SPGI?
Lance: You know what, Doug is a great CEO. He's got three of my best on his team, reporting to him. Sally Moore, Adam Kansler, and Edouard Tavernier. So they report to him. They're there, they're part of his team, they're forming, part of his culture. And hey, maybe one of them will be the next CEO of the combination. So I think it's in good hands. I'm still a shareholder, so I care, and I think they're doing a good job. They hit a market. The market didn't necessarily believe in everything. Rates have went up, markets slowed. IPO markets closed, ratings slowed down. So guess what? The firm is going through a period that it's affected by the markets, but the underlying premise of that merger is solid. And now it's starting to show its true colors. Now it's back up to the level where we hit it off. And so yes, I think they got great prospects. I don't spend every day besides understanding how it impacts my family office and its valuation and what's going on. Of course, I always look, I have it on my phone and I send a note when they're doing really well and say, “wow, great results, love it”. But no, Doug and his team are, that’s their job now. And I’ve moved on to being a partner at General Atlantic and I have to say there’s just as many things to be excited about every day.
Hiten: Yeah. Let’s bring it to here and now, let’s bring it to here and now. So I’d love to get your views on the role that you see private and growth equity playing in delivering the net zero transition given the seat that you're taking now.
Lance: Right. Well put it this way, you've got a big piece of the transition is going to come from infrastructure, and I think that's well underway. The amount of new renewable power that's been generated, the amount that's been invested in the future sources, the amount that's been invested in the electrification of the automotive industry and transportation. These are big infrastructure plays that's not BeyondNetZero. You probably saw General Atlantic made the acquisition of ACTIS. ACTIS is infrastructure, global south big player, great firm. And so yes, we're going to have that as part of our overall GA climate strategy. But the GA climate strategy that's beyond net zero is very focused on enablement of emissions reduction, building management systems, battery technology, waste management, the use of carbon credits to provide offsets and the enablement of the trading, the analysis, the advisory. So we're information technology enablement to drive emissions lower.
Lance: So if you look at the investments we've made, every investment without an argument, you and I would agree, is positive towards lower emissions. But when you start to try to measure the emissions of an enabler, you actually start to question the amount of carbon reduced. Because the carbon reduced is probably on somebody else's balance sheet. So if I own a building management system company that helps manage energy consumption in a building, the building is reporting the carbon reduction, but they can't do it without the enablement. And so I'm a big believer that BeyondNetZero's future is all about investing in companies that are going to drive enablement of emissions reduction and the seven investments we've made so far, guess what? They all do that. It's rural solar, it's supply chain technology, it's supply chain ratings. It's to encourage the selection of good players. It's offshore wind services. It's a whole group. It's recycling and waste management. It's a whole bunch of great companies that guess what? They're doing things to enable others to be more climate friendly. And so I love that. And I love that because it plays on the strengths of me as an entrepreneur, John Browne as an industrialist, and GA as a growth investor. And when we put all that together, we've got a competitive edge.
Hiten: That’s a good alchemy. That's a good alchemy. There's a lot of exciting things in what you've just described. There is an emerging view or noise out there that there is helping the climate transition, but there's a break from that with making money. What's your view on that?
Lance: Unfortunately humans, we need to feel destruction before anything changes. When the whole covid arrived on the scenes, how much money was spent and how fast did the world work to actually remove Covid from our environments? I've never seen anything deployed at that scale, that fast, that much money in the world, every country trying to defend themselves. What if we did the same thing? Well, and we see it for war - when there's money needed to protect borders, geopolitics, big money, big expense, it's done very quickly. So why haven't we done the same with respect to climate change? Okay, forest fires, floods, natural disasters. We see it around us. We know it's there. I can tell you, I come from Vancouver, Canada. I never saw summer over 30 degrees centigrade or 90 degrees Fahrenheit. How about 45 degrees? If you go online and Google “Vancouver summer hottest temperature”, how about 49 degrees in British Columbia?
Lance: Wires are melting. There's no air conditioning. That's not normal. You had old people sleeping in basements of houses. It's not normal. When the big floods that we've seen, the forest fires in Australia and California, these are not normal, Hiten. So when do we actually have enough destruction where the world goes, holy smokes. We've missed the point because right now none of us quite believe it yet. We're still spending and creating emissions, whether it's our transportation activities, whether it's, put it this way, I have a climate fund. I bought my first full EV car this year. The real believers bought them 10 years ago.
Lance: Right? So when do we decide enough is enough? And so when I look at it, we just don't feel the pain yet. So my view is when the pain is high enough, the story becomes stronger. Now, let's put it to a positive. The world is spending more the amount of renewable power coming online this year, including the leader China. It's substantive. The absolute number of electric vehicles on the road- outstanding, infrastructure being put in, but it's not enough yet. But let's not have a cup half empty. Let's fill that cup and find a way. Let's find a way forward to actually solve this problem. And we've got lots of work to do. So that's why I'm excited about what I'm doing. I'm excited about what ACTIS is doing. I'm excited that GA is partnering or engaging in this way as a firm. And so I think we'll make a difference, we at BeyondNetZero as enablers, ACTIS as creators of real emissions reduction. And there'll be more and more, competitors will continue. There's a lot of venture. There's not enough growth. And of course there's lots of infrastructure capital.
Hiten: Yeah. Given your seat now, given everything we talked about at the top of the call on your own journey, given now you've gone from being an entrepreneur to supporting the entrepreneurs in this space, how strong are the parallels between that whole market structure change you observed for 10, 15 years in financial markets, 2000, 2015, transparency, regulatory rules, crisis triggers something. How strong is the parallels between the structural change we need to see in sort of our core infrastructure around energy and transportation? Is there any link or is there any parallel or when you sat there sitting and looking across these stories playing out?
Lance: Right. Well, from your seat, you see it as Oliver Wyman, you've got both carrots and sticks being played all over the world from a regulatory perspective to drive adoption of EVs, reduction of combustion based vehicles in inner cities, the designation, measurement and incentives for greener buildings and greener houses, the incentives to put solar on your rooftop, the sticks to pay penalties for high emitters. So you got Europe plays a much more stronger hand on regulation. US has used the IRA [Inflation Reduction Act], huge amount of money deployed to actually incentivize and create a real attractive, vibrant marketplace to impact change. And that's happening all around the world. So my view is isn't that kind of like you have the financial crisis, regulators came in, new providers started to play, the financial markets followed the rules, and we got to a much stronger financial market today than it was previous to that.
Lance: When you look at climate change, governments are very much behind a net zero. It's very difficult to drive that agenda for corporates that want to make money, for governments that don't want to go any further in debt. And so everybody looks at it and nobody wants to pay more taxes. So everybody's looking at these things and they're going at a pace that's just not fast enough to hit net zero by 2050. And so it's not that it's game over, it's just that we have to continue to accelerate. And I think like in the financial crisis, the regulators have to stay involved. And what's interesting is the governments, unlike the financial crisis where the regulators just gave instruction. Here, the governments are given instruction and then actually putting capital to work themselves. It's not just the growth capital or infrastructure capital or venture capital. There's capital coming all over the place through incentives and other vehicles. So yeah, I think there's some optimism in the overall ecosystem that's happening around climate change. It just needs to go faster.
Hiten: When I zoom out and I think about it, it's like there's these mega system changes always seem to have regulation, technology, there's some incumbents and then there's some new winners that are born out of it. You could argue that Markit was that in that financial system change. And I guess just the parallel here, again, there's a mega system change that needs to happen. Regulation, technology, there's some incumbent, and I guess with you as many, there's going to be people looking at who are the people that are going to enable that change and be the future leaders and influencers. So I think there was just a pattern that seemed to emerge there. Shifting gears slightly, if I can. I'd love to hear what you do outside of work. If there's any hobbies or interests that you pursue outside of work that helps you be an effective leader, an effective investor, has kept you as energized and hungry decades down the line as you did at the outset. Is there anything you'd want to share on that front?
Lance: Well, yeah, I guess the newest feature to my life in the last four years is I now have six, soon to be seven, and I'm sure eight or nine grandchildren, all four and under. And so as you enter different phases and chapters of your life, you find these new parts of it that come in and influence. I guess what I am finding there is a real opportunity. Because you're not the father when you're the grandfather, you’re just an influential figure. And so you get to look back at yourself as a father. You get to watch your children as parents, and then you get to be even better yourself. And that's very interesting. It actually has so many applications to the corporate world as you change and adapt. And so that's the most recent thing in my life, which is a lot of fun.
Lance: I guess the other piece of my life that I always find interesting is I come in and out of interests in various sporting activities. So I've picked up paddle and I go, wow, what a sport. Where was this sport? This is the sport for the, okay, good tennis player that isn't an expert or isn't a professional or isn't top of the club. Because in tennis you kind of have to get to that top level to be able to constantly compete. In paddle you and I are playing against two others and there's so many shots to be made, so much going on. It's a small contained court, so you don't have to go running for the ball. You don't miss all the serves of a real pro. And the fact is, I find that that team spirit around the paddle court, I love it. And you can play with younger people, older people.
Lance: It's something you can play with your partner and you can have a lot of fun. I also got back a lot to skiing, which is really my kind of grassroots sport from very young, where I've done a lot of backcountry, had a lot of fun, and I'm just doing more of it and I love it again. The equipment's better, the skis are lighter, the boots are more comfortable. Nobody remembers, but hey, I'm 60, so I remember leather gloves, lace up leather boots, wood skis, super narrow. We did all the stuff then - powders, jumps, moguls. I don't know how the heck we did it, because today I've got these great light skis, boots, the poles, you can hardly feel 'em in your hands. I got heated gloves, these great waterproof clothing, and it's just so much nicer. So I'm doing that.
I guess the final piece is tying it back to the philanthropy. Yesterday my oldest daughter announced a partnership with the BFI [British Film Institute]. We created a bunch of potential new BFI scholars around the Uggla scholarship program. It's to build out their digital library. It was announced yesterday. I think that's really exciting. It's a big, big gift from the family. We've got a hundred students, as I said. So that's a big gift. Multi-year, every year funding a hundred students. So you can do the math and it's perpetual. It never stops. It'll go for 10, 20, 30 as long as the institution's there. And so I love that. I love being connected. I spend time, they're all on WhatsApp with me. They connect to me. I help them with resumes and job interviews and placements, whatever really I can do. And these are children that didn't have the same opportunities. And I want 'em to feel like they have privilege in going to school. Because when you go to school with privilege, guess what? You don't need a job after school. You don't need to be working on the weekends instead of studying. And so you have a much better chance to finish with top results, get top jobs. And I'll be hitting on you to interview one or two of them.
Hiten: No, what a great portfolio. I mean, skiing, paddle, grandfathering, day job with the investee, it sounds like look, the ultimate balance, right? No wonder you're so glowing and energetic in this next decade.
Hiten: Thank you for being so generous with your time. So generous with your wisdom and experience and bringing the energy and coming on the show. So it's been a real privilege, Lance, to catch up again and hear you share your story. So thank you so much for coming on.
Lance: It's been a pleasure. Thanks.
