Elliot Moss
Welcome to the Jazz Shapers Podcast from Mishcon de Reya. What you are about to hear was originally broadcast on Jazz FM however the music has been cut due to rights issues.
Welcome to Jazz Shapers with me, Elliot Moss, bringing the shapers of the business world together with the musicians shaping Jazz, Soul and Blues. My guest today technology entrepreneur, investor and philanthropist and very impressive too, it’s Ewan Kirk or I should say Dr Ewan Kirk. After thirteen years at Goldman Sachs where he led a European team of mathematicians, scientists and statisticians using technology to make data driven investment decisions, Ewan Co-Founded Cantab Capital Partners, a science driven investment manager. Over the past thirty years Ewan has been involved in multiple ventures to commercialise and apply STEM research – that’s science, technology, engineering and mathematics, if you didn’t know – across business, philanthropy and academia. And in 2007, Ewan and his wife, Dr Patricia Turner, Co-Founded the Turner Kirk Trust, providing funds to STEM, education and conservation causes in the UK and the developing world. And we’ll be hearing about some of the excellent projects they’ve supported, which include Solar Aid’s Light a Village Initiative, providing solar lights to a rural Malawi village, with a mission to light up all of rural Africa by 2030 and a Global Fellowship aimed at protecting biodiversity.
I mean, this is the thing, sometimes I meet these wonderful people and I go wow, where do I start? I’m going to start here, firstly, it’s lovely to see you, thank you for coming.
Ewan Kirk
Thank you for inviting me.
Elliot Moss
I read this about you, “I love the whole concept of discovery, the language of maths, the puzzles in maths.” Looking back at your academic life, Ewan, you did Applied Maths at Cambridge, which followed your first Degree which was Natural Philosophy and Astronomy?
Ewan Kirk
That’s correct.
Elliot Moss
And then you did a PhD in General Relativity. Now, I, you know most people I meet, they may have a Degree and there’s that path, they may have not had a Degree and go that path. Not many people I meet have three. You’re greedy. Greedy to study and I also read that you were thinking about academia but, again, you said, “I didn’t think I was good enough.” Tell me about all this stuff that’s, that you are naturally obviously predisposed to and tell me how that’s informed your decisions in your business life.
Ewan Kirk
Well, the thing about maths is, as you go through your career, it’s just about when do you fail? So, some people fail at maths at GCSE, right, it was just too hard or it just doesn’t work for the brain, some people it’s at a Degree, for me, I got to the end of my PhD and I realised, okay, I now know everything there is to know about this tiny subdivisional slither of, not just general relativity as tiny thing but this tiny bit of general relativity but I knew I was never going to be a researcher because I worked with really smart people, much, much smarter than me at doing maths but that doesn’t mean that you can’t continue to learn right and it’s just where do you get that satisfaction for learning from so, for me it was I sort of transitioned, I guess, from being a pure mathematician or it’s an applied mathematician I think, strictly, and decided to teach myself to programme and programming computers is something that I really liked doing, it’s another puzzle solving thing.
Elliot Moss
And you were very young when you founded your first business.
Ewan Kirk
Yes. Entrepreneurship is one of those things, it’s a bit like driving a car or sex. Everyone thinks they are better than average at it, right? So, I thought, right, you know I’ll start a business and a friend and I had written a piece of software and back in the day you could just sell it, like put adverts in magazines and we made the princely sum of £10,000 selling this software and I have to say, I thought, okay this is something that I think I can probably do. It was much, much harder back in the eighties to start a business. I mean, nowadays, with a PowerPoint presentation you can go around the literally thousands of VCs in London and raise yourself a couple of million quid to start a company because entrepreneurship’s a lot easier I think or at least starting a company is. But even though I kind of put that on hold for fifteen years or so, I really liked that concept of running something yourself, having sort of having the autocratic control, the ah ha, you just have to do what I say. When I was running Cantab, I really liked that control aspect and people once asked me, they’d say what’s the best and worst bits of running your own firm? And I said the best bit is, you don’t have a boss and the worst bit is, you don’t have a boss. Because that’s hard, right? It’s hard when you don’t have somebody else telling you what to do.
Elliot Moss
So you set your first business us, then you end up in the world of Goldman Sachs for quite a while, which again it’s the equivalent of being in Bain and BCG in the consulting world but there you are in a, you know, in a financial services behemoth, a bank of great repute. What was that like and what moved you to go, I’m done with this and I need some space to think?
Ewan Kirk
Okay. I mean one of the things about Goldman is almost everyone there is incredibly good at their job. To go back to the entrepreneurial thing, it has a real, or it had a real entrepreneurial flavour to it because it was a partnership when I joined and so you joined a business, in my case it was the energy business, the oil trading business, which is run by one or two partners and it’s like a small 50 person firm and Goldman was just, or was just an agglomeration or small 50 person firms, everyone being really entrepreneurial. I remember once I was sitting coming up with derivatives and you know the options and swaps and structures for energy traders and energy companies and sovereigns and gold deals and so on, and I came up with this thing which to be perfectly honest, was a bit of toxic waste, I mean it was just a terrible, terrible deal for the client and probably for us and so I showed it to the partner who ran the business. Now, part of the thing was, we all sat on the trading desk, the partners sat next to me on the desk, you know and I was sort of the junior quant and I said, “What do you think about this?” And he looked at it and we went through and he said, “Now, just remember that it’s my money you’re playing with here. Would you do this if this was your money?” and I went, “No.” He said, “Just remember that.” And actually it was a really good lesson because sometimes in public companies, which are not partnerships, you get slightly removed from the shareholders.
Elliot Moss
The fact that it’s not, yeah, no longer your money but of course the business went public in around ’99 or 2000, didn’t it?
Ewan Kirk
It did, yeah.
Elliot Moss
And did that, and then you left in 2005?
Ewan Kirk
Yeah. So, I made it to Partner in 2000. I was a Managing Director in 1998. So I was what was called a post-IPO Partner, which was a difference of a lot of money. However, that’s good.
Elliot Moss
But that culture of entrepreneurialism, firstly obviously you saw it there and people may not think about organisations in that way or even think about what you set your own thing up and you are an entrepreneur but of course it’s not like that. As a post-IPO Partner and all that, did it retain some of its entrepreneurialism? Did it continue that thing or was it obliterated?
Ewan Kirk
No it did, it did for a while. Now I haven’t been in Goldman now for the best part of twenty years so, I can’t really talk about the culture now but…
Elliot Moss
But those few years afterwards?
Ewan Kirk
It was absolutely that. The reason why I left was, partly it was a little bit about when you are at Goldman or when, you know, when it was a partnership, being a partner was the goal, that was the thing you really wanted and you just worked really hard at it and you, Lloyd Blankfein used to say, ‘you do the job of partner for two years before you actually make it’, you know, you get patted on the back and you think you’ve made it and then suddenly you realise you are at the bottom of a 300 person greasy pole, all of the people on that greasy pole are trying to make it to the management committee or whatever, and I just got a bit tired of that. I mean, I enjoyed it and I loved the job and if you could sort of cut me through the middle like a piece of seaside rock, I probably say Goldman Sachs, I think it’s a great, I think it’s a great organisation and does amazing things.
Elliot Moss
But that reality of that greasy pole, the politics of it, probably not for you at that moment, which is then, and we’re going to pause there because the next instalment, get things, to me they get kind of interesting. Much more coming up – not that that bit wasn’t interesting as well because it’s revealing about, as you said, that dichotomy between you think it’s an entrepreneurial place and it is and all those other things we’ve just discussed. Much more coming up from my fabulous guest, that’s Ewan Kirk, he’ll be here for the duration but right now, we’re going to hear a taster from the Mishcon Academy Digital Sessions, they can be found on all of the major podcast platforms. Mishcon de Reya’s Tom Grogan and Anne Rose talk about developments in the world of blockchain and the key opportunities and threats affecting businesses looking to implement blockchain platforms.
You can delight in all our former Business Shapers on the Jazz Shapers podcast and indeed you can hear this very programme again if you pop Jazz Shapers into your podcast platform or choice, or if you have got a smartspeaker, you know the drill, just ask it to play Jazz Shapers and you should be rewarded with a taster of our recent shows. But back to today’s guest, technology entrepreneur, investor and philanthropist, it’s Ewan Kirk. So, you finish at Goldman Sachs, I’m not going to cut you open because I don’t have the equipment with me but let’s assume you are still in there, embedded in your physical DNA. I read that you or listening I think to maybe a podcast, another podcast, you took some time out?
Ewan Kirk
Yep.
Elliot Moss
And you reflected and you came up with a mantra. You went, I’m going to do my own thing but if I do my own thing, there’s going to be four kind of rules which underpin it. If you don’t remember the rules, I can tell you them but you tell… I think you probably do.
Ewan Kirk
I can…
Elliot Moss
But these are really important, I think, in terms of looking at… people thinking about a business and what they want to do next with their lives. Just run through them for me.
Ewan Kirk
So, I took a year off after Goldman and bought more guitars, bought a motorcycle and then sold it because it’s a cliché to buy a motorcycle when you retire from Goldman, went to the gym every day, we took our kids out of school and we travelled around the world for four months which was absolutely lovely and I didn’t think at all about anything, right, I’d had a year off and then beginning of 2006, I sort of sat down and I thought right, what do I want to do and I had four rules. The first rule was, I would never commute again because I had commuted, I live in Cambridge and I commuted down to London or I suppose, I also commuted around the world but I had commuted a lot and it’s miserable and grim. The second one was, I would only do things I like. So, I kind of like maths, I mean that’s sort of obvious from my CV I guess, I like computer programming, I sort of like the markets, I mean the markets are a complicated and not well solved problems and I also quite like selling, like you know being in the pitch thing, I mean it’s a little bit of a performative art when you are trying to sell things so, I quite like doing that. That was my second rule, only do things that I really liked. The third rule was it had to be something that was hard. The phrase that’s used a lot is ‘On the edge of failure.’ So, if you can do something that’s on the edge of failure, if you don’t fail, that feels like really good, right? It’s a nice thing to do. And the last thing was I wouldn’t hire anybody I didn’t like and even though people in, particularly you know in tech or in finance talk about it being a talent war, you know you just you know it’s really hard to find people. It generally is but if somebody comes in and they are brilliant but annoying, you can probably just wait and then somebody who’s brilliant and not annoying will come down the line at some point. And so I kind of stuck to that and I was really pleased to do that. It meant the culture in the firm was really good.
Elliot Moss
And the firm, the firm that we’re talking about here is Cantab Capital Partners.
Ewan Kirk
Yeah.
Elliot Moss
Which you were involved in directly in a kind of, obviously from setting it up all the way through…
Ewan Kirk
All the way through.
Elliot Moss
…to right, you know a couple of years ago. A hedge fund that uses computer models to drive investment decisions, essentially quant.
Ewan Kirk
Yes.
Elliot Moss
Quant. Decisions. If people have watched Billions, it’s sort of that but the real version of it, which is… I know, I know, of course you are going to say.
Ewan Kirk
I don’t watch Billions because it’s just a little bit too close to the bone round here.
Elliot Moss
It’s not that it’s not accurate, it’s too accurate.
Ewan Kirk
It’s too accurate.
Elliot Moss
But I mean that’s a, you know, at first hand I’ve seen those kind of businesses evolve and that’s notoriously difficult to beat the market, to prove that the numbers are beating the market. In just a very, in your own simple language, summarise thirteen years of how you made it successful. Why did it work, apart from your four rules of course?
Ewan Kirk
Apart from my four rules. Well, the four rules would have worked if it was a coffee shop, frankly.
Elliot Moss
Absolutely.
Ewan Kirk
I always sort of step away from the word ‘quant’ a little bit, just because it’s, you know, it’s a contraction of quantitative and if you use a spreadsheet to work out the price and earnings ratio of a company, that’s quant, right? There’s a separate thing here which is systematic so, the rules of trading are embedded in code, for want of a better description. So, to really boil it down, what do systematic funds, systematic traders do? You sort of take lots of data in the market and in a sophisticated way you work out what has worked in the past and then you do that in the future, and that’s it, right?
Elliot Moss
And that’s it. And there you go. If only it was that, that, just that, we would all, we would all have set it up but there you go, Ewan Kirk did do it, he set up and successfully exited the Cantab Capital Partners and we’ll be talking much more about the next part of his journey after this. It’s Etta James with Tell Mama.
Etta James, Tell Mama. There’s lots of energy around the music today on Jazz Shapers, which is fabulous. Ewan Kirk’s my Business Shaper and we’ve been talking about being systematic and I loved your… the simplest, pithiest version I’ve ever heard of thirteen years of a business doing rather well and selling for many hundreds of millions of pounds by the way, which I think is public anyway so I’m not going to embarrass you. Extraordinary. The industry, I believe, back in 2020 gave you the accolade of Lifetime Contribution, the winner of Lifetime Contribution to the Hedge Fund Industry. A source very close to you (you), told this person (me), that you had actually at one point bought a book, Hedge Funds for Dummies.
Ewan Kirk
That is actually correct, yes. When I left…
Elliot Moss
I say this only to help reassure people that just because you don’t know that… the ins and outs of an industry, doesn’t mean you can’t come in and do something disruptive and special.
Ewan Kirk
That is true. I mean obviously, I understood markets and most importantly, in these kind of funds, it’s about technology and I really understand technology. We wrote literally millions of lines of code to make this all happen but I really had no idea of what the structure, format or what you needed for a fund, right? People say oh I’m going to start a hedge fund or I’m going to start a venture fund. Well there’s all this stuff you’ve got to do like have administrators and prime brokers and some Cayman Island partnership and blah, blah, blah, know your client, all that stuff. I had no idea how to do that.
Elliot Moss
But what that says is to me, Ewan, and I guess now in your capacity as a… you’re on the Board at BA Systems, a non-exec Director looking at their technology investments, you’re an Executive Chair of Cardeo, I think, you’re involved in Deeptech Labs and you’re the Chair over there which is this Cambridge based accelerator. Your whole mantra in life is now, I imagine, spotting the yous, or not you directly, but people that have got a good idea, that have real passion and knowledge but they don’t necessarily know the ins and outs of the industry because you’ve proved the rule that you don’t need to know that bit, you can learn that bit. Is that fair?
Ewan Kirk
That’s true, I mean it’s always, it’s really hard to teach somebody to be smart, right? You kind of got to be smart.
Elliot Moss
What do you mean by smart, just to…?
Ewan Kirk
Clever. Intelligent. Quick at solving problems. That stuff is hard, right? But it’s generally in an industry, those industry things are easy or not easy to learn but they can be taught. So, if I use Deeptech Labs as an example, what we do is, we get deep technology companies at that sort of quite early stage, you know they’ve maybe got some customers, they’ve definitely got the technology but by definition deep technology companies are run by scientists who, quite rightly, haven’t spent their time learning to be an entrepreneur or learning to be a lawyer or learning to be something, they’ve just been scientists and our job is to turn them into entrepreneurs and that’s a lot easier job than taking a random entrepreneur and trying to turn them into a biochemist, right, you can’t do that. So, you can teach people and I when I was starting the firm back in the mid-2000s, a lot of people gave me advice and help, right, you know I’d phone up people and go ‘I’ve got no idea what to do, how do I do this’ and people would say, ‘oh you need to go and talk to this person’ or ‘have you thought about doing that’ or ‘don’t do this, do that’ and so I do have this sort of semi-informal programme where I pay it forward. So, you know, I get loads of people sending me pitch decks for fintech businesses or they want to start funds or, you know, and maybe, for want of a better word, kids right, who just got a good idea and I’m quite happy to spend an hour with somebody saying ‘think about doing that, don’t do this, that is wrong but this is good, you need to think about pitching it this way or that way’ and that pay it forward thing, I think is quite good, right, you know I did well out of people being nice to me so, I might as well be nice people in the future.
Elliot Moss
You’re going to get a lot of calls after this.
Ewan Kirk
Oh no.
Elliot Moss
It’s okay. And emails. And big ideas. We’ve fantastic total addressable markets, don’t worry.
Ewan Kirk
That’s fine, okay, it’s good, yeah, I like those.
Elliot Moss
We’ll have our final chat with my guest today, Ewan Kirk, and we’ve got some Van Morrison for you as well. That’s all in just a moment, don’t go anywhere.
Ewan Kirk is my Business Shaper just for a few more minutes. You talked about paying it forward and you mention how you reach out and how people, you know, will then come and say this is what I’m thinking, you’ll be very honest with their… about their ideas. The Turner Kirk Trust and all the good things that you do, extraordinary things that you do. Is that just, and take this in the way it’s meant to be, if you didn’t have a lot of money, how would you help people? I mean, what I mean by that is, it’s a phenomenal privilege which you take seriously that you have, you have been very successful and now you want to give back and I can feel it when you talk about the time you give, that’s not about money, that’s just about you doing the right thing. I guess the question I really have is, what does it feel like to be able to do these wonderful things and how do you approach it? Is it systematic in the same way that you have been systematic in your approach to business?
Ewan Kirk
It’s very hard to be systematic, to be truly have a rules based thing but you can, you can have certain rules that you think about a lot. So, one thing I think about in the philanthropic space is, there are some problems which are just Government sized. Yeah, I’ve got some money but I don’t have as much money as the US Government or the UK Government and some things are a huge amount of money, which philanthropy is just not appropriate to do. There’s that great phrase, I think it’s the German comedian, Henning Wehn, who says, “In Germany, we don’t do philanthropy, we pay taxes” and that I kind of think is important because there are some things like ensuring that our children get educated correctly, which is not a charitable thing, it’s a Government thing, it’s a societal-sized thing and, you know, we’re not the Bill Gates Foundation, we don’t have that much money right so, there are some things like solving malaria, which are completely outside our reach so, what you have to do is pick things which can be catalysed by smaller donations, things that are difficult to fund, I mean one of the things that we… one of the sort of mantras we have is permission to fail so, a lot of charities, they are so desperate to show their donors that they had impact, you know, you gave us a hundred pounds or a thousand pounds or a million pounds and we did this with it, right, so they have to go and do one thing with it and make sure that its impact rather than experimenting. There’s more than way to solve a problem and sometimes people end up in this kind of local minimum or local maximum of doing this whereas if they could just jump out of that and try other things, so the Light a Village thing that we did, originally, they didn’t know how to distribute these lights, they could get the lights to Kinshasa, you know obviously, made in China, delivered to Kinshasa, not very expensive. How do you distribute them? And we said, well just go and run five different experiments and we don’t care if all of them fail, just go and find out. And that gets you into a situation where you are doing something which if you found the right way to solve the problem, it’s much more sustainable and self-sustaining rather than the problem with most philanthropy is, you give a dollar and then the dollar gets spent and then it’s gone and there aren’t enough philanthropic dollars around to be able to solve big problems. What you want to do is give that dollar to either create a self-sustaining thing where, to use another example, we once funded a microloan bank in Malawi, so that involved putting up a certain amount of money but then that money just keeps getting recycled into loans, right, and then so it’s… you’ve sort of solved that problem in a way but we’re well aware of the fact that there are some problems which are just way too large.
Elliot Moss
Just talking to you and, we’re going to have to close off soon, so I’m trying to think about the big question for me is, this, you sound incredibly level-headed when you speak about these quite big things that you’re doing, whether it’s thinking about how you give money, thinking about giving time, the serious job of being a non-exec over here, the being a Founder over there. Where’s that levelheadedness and that natural predisposition to solve problems come from, for you, Ewan? That’s the thing that I’m really kind of going, I wonder why he’s like that?
Ewan Kirk
I’m not normally really level-headed, I mean sometimes I’m a bit crazy but…
Elliot Moss
But generally, but you seem to see things quite calmly. I guess the question is, the noise of the world, the complicated is all around us and there’s a lot of chat about all sorts of things. How do you keep the space to enable you to make good decisions?
Ewan Kirk
That’s a really good question that I’ve never been asked before and I don’t really know the answer. I mean, it’s just my natural approach to something is probably evidence based, I mean at least in a professional sense. You definitely want to know about the problem space and you want to try and understand it and it is the case that we all have biases, right, and my bias is towards that rationality. The rationality has kind of worked out pretty well for the human race over the past three and a half thousand years, it’s worked out well, science has worked out well for us. So, I like to at least approach a problem initially that way. I mean, obviously I have my emotional biases too and sometimes those come into play and do stupid things, right, everyone does but I think at least initially it is good to think about a problem, don’t just go off half cocked and sort of fire around, you know, any old random stuff, I mean that was something that we did in the Trust, well part of the reason for doing the Trust was to stop me doing stupid things that I kind of thought I’d, you know somebody would come and say oh we’ve got this philanthropic thing that we’d like you to do and I’d go oh cool, look here’s some money and that wasn’t really a very clever way of approaching it because you waste a lot of money and waste a lot of effort, which is you know the important thing so, yeah, I like rationality.
Elliot Moss
That makes perfect sense. An emotional question for you. Thank you. Firstly, thank you for joining me today, it’s been brilliant. The emotional question is, what’s your song choice and why have you chosen that?
Ewan Kirk
So my song choice is Larry Carlton’s Room 335. The reason I chose it is, I mean apart from the fact I really like the song and it’s great and all of those things, I’m a guitarist, I’ve been playing the guitar for 50 years and I’m quite good but not super good, a little bit like my academic career, you know, I’m quite good but the reason I like this song is I tried to play it for about a month, the chord sequence is incredibly hard, it just doesn’t fit the fingers very well and then the lead lines are beautiful and you know I’d play a couple of bars and learn that and then learn another one and however much I tried, I couldn’t do that one, and I can play a lot of stuff but 335 is just both… it feels very simple, as you listeners will listen to it, it feels like a simple song but in fact there’s so many layers going on and everything’s really hard and complicated and so I thought, well, you know I must have listened to it over and over and over again for a month and if I have to listen to it that much then your listeners can listen to it too.
Elliot Moss
Larry Carlton there, with Room 335, the song choice of my Business Shaper today, Ewan Kirk. Systematic, that was the first thing he said that has really informed his success. Permission to fail, really important as a senior person, as an entrepreneur, to give people permission to fail. And finally, his approach to all problems, be evidence based, it’s good to think about the problem. Great stuff. That’s it from me and Jazz Shapers, have a lovely weekend.
We hope you enjoyed that edition of Jazz Shapers. You’ll find hundreds of more guests available for you to listen to in our archive, to find out more just search Jazz Shapers in iTunes or your favourite podcast platform or head over to Mishcon.com/JazzShapers.