Global Trend

This week was the week of career forum aka career fair. It wasn’t in the format I was used to - with hundreds of companies having their own booths for 2-3 days straight and having sessions during the evening. What we had at IESE instead was 3 days of no classes, company presentations during the day, some networking breakfast and lunches sprinkled throughout, afternoon booth time, and then networking dinners. The concept of these dinners/invite only events is still a mystery to me, who gets invited, why, why not. Is it more fair to have a person review resumes to get a more comprehensive view of the individual or does an algorithm do a better job not having bias? But then, are we all reduced to words and numbers from what we’ve accomplished so far? Does past performance tell us anything about the future?

At IESE, we all get organized into teams of 9 with different backgrounds and have a professor assigned as our mentor. I had the chance to meet 1:1 with our professor Iñigo, he had his mandarin name 你哥 pinned on his whiteboard. This made me chuckle a little as this translates to your brother in Mandarin and would be a awkward thing to introduce yourself to others for the first time as “Hi, I’m your brother.” Iñigo reads a lot and recommended me some books he also recommended to his colleague, our Capital Market professor. These were books about religion, autobiographies, The Usefulness of Uselessness, and some spanish book I wish I could read some day. He asked me where in Taiwan I was from and it was really the first time where someone pulled up a Google Map and have me point to the areas and the landscapes of what Taiwan consists of. We also talked about the indigenous people that lived in Taiwan before the Han people came. It’s always a good time with the team (we call ourselves MAD High Five because we are team 5 in the Madrid section) even though some are going through stressful and overwhelmed times. With this group - there’s always room for one more drink.

For Thursday, we had the opportunity to visit two companies as part of MBA day. This reminded me of the old Tauber days where we got to visit facilities and get a really nice lunch! On our route we got to see Asabys - a health tech VC and Hutchinsons Port Best - a port. VC is another area that I’m interested in exploring, and maybe this was exactly why I decided to come for an MBA, the freedom to explore and learn about things that always seemed outside of my immediate reach. VCs can usually expect 1-2x return while some may reach up to 10x. For Asabys, they only invest in 1% of the companies they receive. It was really cool to see how the automated machinery moves containers and we also see these spider looking cars that run around.

Our tour ended at the Barcelona Museum of Contemporary Art. The guide we had started first with all art is political and we even had a debate about what exactly is art as we all stood there looking at a transparent acrylic box with condensation inside. Yes, that’s the art and no two moments are the same because people come in and out and that affects the dynamics of water vapor within the box. After a full day, I was too exhausted to wait for the food to be served so we went to get some Mexican food instead. 10/10 for the company but just 7/10 for the birria.

Now to the title of this week’s update - key trends to be aware of in the global context panel from four people with very different perspectives. It was a wake up call for how much of the world I’m not paying attention to. The panelists talked about the implications of NATO expanding its membership to Georgia and Ukraine; nuclear power coming back as a response to the energy crisis due to the Russia/Ukraine war in Europe; businesses now needing to choose between China/Russia/Asia camp or the West/US/Europe camp; opportunities for arbitrage for many years to come and ones who understand more cultures will make fewer mistakes. And from one of the panelists - the east and the west is really seeing the same reality from very different perspectives, the same information can be interpreted so differently. There was a looming theme that China taking over Taiwan is a matter of time and that we’re just approaching a world that either will deteriorate due to global warming or due to us fighting with each other for more resources and power.

Fortunately there was the Diwali celebration that I got to take my mind off for a little bit. It was so nice to see so many people dressed up for the occasion, along with the music, the food, the performance I couldn’t see because I was wayyyy too short :)

The weekend was not a real weekend because I signed up for classes to learn about valuation, modeling, and leveraged buy out. It was so interesting learning about using multiples from similar companies (in terms of size, geo, product lines, etc.) to evaluate how much a company is worth. With LBO, it was shocking how through borrowing money with or without the company growing, one could grow their equity in a company significantly during. Saturday night was a new restaurant exploration that I’ll create a separate post about.

Until next week where we get Monday and Tuesday off as part of Spanish holiday :)