So Oscar, tell me about the $12 billion buyout of CI Financial. CI Financial. So it was an opportunity in plain view, as we call it, right? We've been hunting the markets, looking for mispriced assets that are kind of hiding in plain view, if you wish, on the public markets. CI was listed in Toronto. It was an old mutual fund company, right? So not very sexy in terms of industry. And it was trading as such. But underneath CI, there was Coriant. And Coriant was the largest and fastest growing ultra high net worth platform in the United States for wealth management. and really sort of a highly attractive and strategic asset. When we decided to take CI private, both businesses are attractive, but for different reasons. But Coriant was really sort of the crown jewel of the company. One of the fascinating things when we last chatted about, you talked about there's not much capital competition from capital sources that could write these 10, $12 billion checks in this case. Tell me about that. We've been trying to focus on a segment on the market where there is a little bit of complexity. and relatively large tickets. And if you do that, we see competition falling away quite fast, right? There's really only a handful of funds that can write a check of this size. And most of them are not really embracing complexity or hair as part of their investment thesis. They're more focused on, you know, stable capital deployment and getting money back. We as a firm have developed, you know, a bit of a modus operandi where we embrace complexity a little bit as an enabler of alpha for us. and when we do that with big tickets we find that that we usually don't face that much competition what does it mean in the context of Mubadala making an investment into a highly complex deal we started really embracing complexity in in our brazilian investment business um little over a decade ago and and we started we ended up in a corporate restructuring due to reasons that were not intentional and when we did that we learned really sort of how to deal with complexities. It was high level of complexity, debt for equity swaps, chapter 11 environment, bankruptcy, etc. After a while, we realized that we were pretty good at it. Brazil had been growing for, I don't know, the better part of two decades at this stage. And most private equity investors were more like growth investors. So we had, you know, nearly the only experience from this type of high complexity in the market. And we started exploiting it on purpose. So we raised special opportunity funds and started investing in it. And then as we sort of revamped our global private equity franchise a couple of years ago, we kind of honestly assumed that it wouldn't be possible in the U.S. market because it's too efficient. We won't find these types of opportunities. But I think as, you know, CI, for instance, has proven it's actually not true. We do find the same level of opportunity. So now we purposefully seek out some level of complexity. It doesn't have to be, you know, an outright bankruptcy or anything, but something that just makes it a little bit more complicated to execute that allows us then to ultimately find some value on the buy. Reminds me of the story. Two economists are walking down the side of the street and there's a $100 bill and they just walk past that and a passerby comes by and says, why didn't you pick up the $100? And they said, it can't exist. Yeah. Sometimes this, quote unquote, common sense could be overapplied and there's opportunities in fair sight that no one's taking because everybody's making the same assumptions. Yeah, I think that's right. After the deal, when you explain the entry valuation and how we got in, people are like, but why didn't anyone else do it? and yeah maybe that's why it shouldn't be allowed to exist as cio of mubadela capital how do you go about deploying this capital we have a number of products in-house that we manage uh obviously we have our private equity franchise which is you know basically u.s and europe we have our brazilian business we have a solutions business which is more you know evergreen uh capital structures and co-investment funds where we also manage some of this money through smas we have a number of insurance partnerships that we've struck and invested in. What really makes us a little bit different from most of the other funds out there is that we have the ability to write these really large tickets, like CI, again, as an example of that, where we can invest out of a private equity fund that on the cover of the fund is a $3 billion fund. We'll anchor the deal, but then we'll deploy the rest of the capital alongside the fund vehicle. So we're really sort of doing much larger tickets deal by deal and deploying into them. Is that like a $9 billion co-invest? Well, the equity check was a little bit smaller than that, but it was like a $5 billion co-invest effectively, which is pretty sizable. So I think we've been able to develop that as a bit of our niche. And I think our investors and LPs and partners, they have the ability to make what is a relatively modest commitment to a fund and get access to co-investment opportunities that far exceed the entire size of the fund. you're obviously not the only fund in the world that could write 12 billion dollar checks but how big is this unit are we talking about dozens are we talking about a handful i think it's a handful almost right the very very large funds could do it and and there's only a handful of them and we can write our checks on a case-by-case basis if we really like the deal and we have high dedicated you know high conviction on an opportunity and we have partners that want to participate we can go ahead and write the check and even for a high conviction deal even if we don't have partners We have a balance sheet to rely on so we can effectively bridge the deal and then after the fact go and offer it up to our partners and co-investors, which has been, again, something that has been very, very popular with the LP community because we don't have to force people to run at the pace that we're running the deal. We can actually do the deal, back it with a balance sheet, and then take our time to syndicate it down to the partners. So you go to the larger Mubadala pool of capital, and you could essentially warehouse the deal, and then you could deploy it alongside your LPs on their timeline. Yeah, that's right. That's right. And you guys have really led with this strategic partnership model where you're a strategic partner of choice for GPs. What does that mean exactly? It means a number of different things. I think, one, we've been very partnership-oriented as a firm. We're trying to find partners, be a good partner over the long run. I think it means that we find like-minded GPs that leads to, you know, deal flow. It could be us offering up a deal to someone else to participate alongside us. It could be the other way around. So it could be a form of sourcing opportunities. A lot of the GP partnerships that we have, we've also found, you know, we might be looking for slightly bigger deals than they do. So when they come across something that is interesting, but too big for them, they may pass it along to us. So it's been a good source of just getting market intel and deal flow. but most importantly it's been a way for us to allow ourselves to scale without sort of becoming victims of becoming too big and what i mean by that is that in today's private equity market i think as the funds get really really big their desire to hunt for alpha sort of goes down right which is not a good thing for the industry in the long run right you want to maintain that ability for everyone to keep hunting for real alpha and i think by striking gp partnerships and finding firms that we wanna be part of, but not control, we can give these funds access to our network to more capital but allow them to continue to hunt for alpha without us becoming controlling decision makers which in a very large fund becomes the ultimate bottleneck right No one has time to look at a smaller deal even if it a great deal So they focus on larger tickets and missed opportunities. 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From a bottoms-up perspective, you partner with AGP. how does that partnership look like so typically we you know we we acquire or or take some form of gp stake in their business so that we are aligned in terms of of result we don't want to control their ic we don't want them to become part of us we want them to be a partner to us and then we would typically then also make some kind of capital commitment to them so invest in their products or deals or funds or help them launch new products or sometimes the hardest capital to come by in the market is for new launches or new funds we can play that role and allow them to get off the ground for instance with a new product that those are kind of the typical ingredients that we have and and then we work relatively closely with them seamlessly build a good relationship without sort of meddling with their business or controlling it how is your capital partnership more efficient more efficient way to grow without becoming what disparagingly it's called asset gatherers for the gps by spreading it out over gps that we find in the market that are all you know best at what they do in their niche we can allow our capital base to scale without sort of sucking them into us and becoming asset gatherers instead we can we can give a portion to this gp that is you know specialized on whatever it is direct lending we can have another one that does secondaries and that allows them to to have stable capital base good partner, but doesn't turn them into a, you know, asset gatherer sort of franchise. Pretty novel model. What mistakes did you make as CIO as you were building this out? Well, let's see. I'm sure there are more mistakes to come. The key is finding alignment when you do these opportunities to make sure that you really pick good partners and partners that are aligned to do what you want them to do. So for instance, if you're partnering up with someone that is, you know, good at a certain thing and that's why you're partnering, you don't accidentally want to partner with someone that actually wants to go and build a platform and expand into nine different strategies because then you sort of get back to where you started and what you try to avoid in the first place. So I think finding specialized managers that are really good at what they do and really enjoy, you know, the art of investing, if you wish, and are really seeking alpha, trying to deliver superior returns, that is the focus, right? And if you're not aligned on that from the beginning, I think you can see some friction. You're essentially an LP in this role. How do you suss that out in a meeting? Everybody probably tells you they want to be looking for alpha. They're great investors. How do you find that before you invest? It's a great question. And I think, you know, at the end of the day, I think we also take our time really getting to know these people. This is not a process or one meeting or a competitive, you know, round where someone is looking for, you know, an anchor investor or selling a it's not a gp stakes business if you wish we're not buying no it's not transactional it's really finding uh like-minded people that are trying to do something that we think is exciting the ones we have we've actually all found more or less by coincidence if you wish you just like networks you meet people you enjoy what they they we created sort of a mutual respect and partnership and they really want us to be part of their capital structure and go try to conquer the world together, if you wish. Is there a best practice for how you go about sourcing new managers? Have there been certain sourcing channels that work better than others? What has worked the worst is competitive situations. So we've never really been successful in that. Why? Because I think this is really a chemistry question, right? You need to find a firm that really shares your values and has a vision that sort of makes sense for where we want to go and where they want to go. So, and anyone that runs a process, usually they're either looking to retire or just maximize price. And it's not the right driver. Someone, you know, the people that do a deal with us will have to believe that us being part of their equation makes them more valuable too, even if they're giving up a part of their GP as part of that process. It's a bit of a paradox because as an investor, you typically want to be investing when you're solving a solution. So if you're a secondary investor, you want to be solving a liquidity need. But in this case, actually solving a solution means that they're not necessarily looking for the partnership angle. You don't truly know whether they care about you as a partner or whether they're trying to solve this financial need. The market is, as you know, changing out there, right? It's getting harder and harder for mid-sized managers to raise money. LPs are consolidating. They want fewer and fewer relationships. And they want more sort of multi-product firms, if you wish. And I think what people see in us is a stable capital source. that also perhaps fluctuates a little bit less than the traditional lps we don't tend to have at least not to the same extent faces where we are focused on just dpi or or we we can be a more of a long-term stable partners to our sort of partnership firms truly evergreen capital truly evergreen or as close to it as possible the evergreen nature of it is not just the institution It also the stability of the personnel at the institution It one thing if you have an endowment that has a perpetual pull but if they churning people it doesn really help you It part of the DNA of both Mobile and Mobile Capital that we want to be good partners and we don do it for altruistic purposes We believe that it's actually a very profitable and good business model, right? If you are a good partner in the long run, you will attract the best partners and really make a difference. You're obviously quite a contrarian thinker with CII Financial, with not being focused on DPI, like seemingly every LP, what's your most contrarian take when it comes to which asset class do you think is underrated today? On DPI, for instance, just follow up on that. I think, you know, this is like the biggest fallacy of the industry in some ways, right? Someone at some point convinced long-term pension funds that they need to churn their capital every three years. This is not a sensible way of looking at it. A lot more people out there should be a lot more focused on compounding and long-term results and less focused on short-term DPI, which comes with a lot of friction, right? There's carry payments, there's tax payments, there's transaction fees, there's whatnot. Whereas long-term holds are, you know, generally speaking a little bit better, I think, for most types of investors. Not everyone, but you need to manage your liquidity. It's even crazy on a first principles basis. So I had Sam Zell's long-term partner, Mark Soder, who continues to run his family office. And one of the absurd things they talked about in private equity specifically is you hold an asset for five years and then you sell it to your main competitor. And even worse than that, where you're constantly churning and all these transaction costs and banker costs and all that, is that the first year is a lost year because you're building up, you're getting up to speed, you're changing management. And the last year you're dressing up the asset to go to sell. Both of those are inefficient. So you essentially have only three years of productive growth. And it's even crazier from the LP side because they get a letter in the mail. one says congratulations we sold this at a great price and another one's congratulations we bought this at a fair price and all they have is these fees and these management fees of these two different funds all because to your point somebody has dogmatically convinced that having marks and having liquidity having dpi specifically liquidity is obviously important but having dpi every five years is this golden rule that you can't question yeah and and i think we're actively trying to question you know we have obviously traditional products but but we're also taking a little bit more of a bespoke view here and asking our investors and our partners is this really what you want every three years or four years or when we have a winner shouldn't we hang on to it for instance you you've obviously seen the the cv industry grow up as a some kind of solution to to this problem with its own set of issues but but nevertheless at least trying to address the fact that you shouldn't get rid of all your winners to your worst competitors and continuation vehicles or CVs are these vehicles where a manager can continue owning an asset. Sometimes they cycle some of their LPs out and bring in new LPs. Obviously, it's been extremely popular and it's gone to $110 billion in AUM in short order. What are your views on this place? Where it's done for the right reasons. It's a very sensible product in the sense that if you truly have a winner and you realize that we want to hold this asset for 20 years, we can really deliver outsized returns year on year on year. Let's not get rid of it. I think that makes a lot a sense and you go out to your LPs and for those that want that long-term exposure, you let them in. And for those that want to exit, you allow them to move on. That's great. If it's used of a way of just extending fees for whatever assets that a manager can convince themselves that someone wants to allow them to hold, then for the wrong reason, right? But I think in the right situations, it's a great product as long as it's sort of handled ethically, I guess. what are some signals of alignment for CVs? The exciting part, at least in theory with them, is that, you know, if you see the GP willing to roll over their carry into the deal, or even invest in it and have a meaningful, you know, part of their wealth locked up in an asset that they have owned for five years, then presumably there aren't many surprises left, right? One of the issues when you buy assets is no matter how much due diligence you do, once you're in, there's always some element of surprise when you own a company. And I think if people don't admit that they're not being honest right there's always there's only so much you can find out during dd once you own a company for five years presumably you know it quite well at that stage and so the risk should be lower and if they really believe the growth is there and and can underwrite it i think that's that's a pretty interesting proposition yes that information asymmetry it's a stanley drunken miller invest investigate so you put you put in some money and then you learn. I productized it into a diligence question I used to ask companies, which is, what are you not telling me now that I'll find out at the first board meeting? And most people laugh and then, you know, most people still don't give you the right answer, but once in a while, you'll get some interesting feedback. That's interesting. It is like that, right? And CVs minimize it. So I think it's a good product. I think it's here to stay. It makes sense. I think, you know, we've been participants in it. Until about a couple of years ago, venture capital was probably too niche for you now uae is becoming this force in technology alongside obviously scaling is there a place in your portfolio for venture capital sure we have you know we have healthcare venture a bio venture fund we're investing that out of san francisco where i have our partner sitting that's been been very successful for us we have some tech venture which we're doing more on a deal-by-deal basis now which has been interesting i mean to your point ticket sizes have gone up quite dramatically in the industry. OpenAI just raised $120 billion, for example, one round. There used to be this meme that if something lands on your desk in Abu Dhabi, it's gone to New York and London, but that's dramatically changed over the last couple of years. I think that's right. What's driving that first look? It's a number of things. I think we've gotten a lot smarter as investors out of the region. There's a lot more activity. we've been a stable source of capital and partnership to a lot of firms over a long period of time when we started or when the region started investing then it was perhaps a little bit more new so i think a lot of things have changed but and to your point if you go to abu dubb then you walk in at four season it feels like you're on fifth avenue right it's all filled with usual sort of familiar faces from new york and a lot of that is downstream of milking conferences come there and as more of these conferences go into the region if you think about what's downstream of adverse selection, it's lack of relationships. So as those relationships and as that capital starts to flow, that starts to get that. The lifestyle in the region is phenomenal, right? So you've seen a large inflow of talent. People really want to live and work in Abu Dhabi or Dubai and they enjoy a great lifestyle, stable employment, interesting opportunities. I mean, the region really has a lot going for it in that sense. So you're a Swedish national that started in Brazil and then you became the CIO of Mubidala. How did that all happen? So in 2010, I moved to Abu Dhabi from London, where I was doing private equity. And then this Brazilian opportunity came along for Mobadla. And we didn't have any Portuguese speakers internally. We didn't have anyone with experience from Brazil. A few weeks later I was on a plane to Rio de Janeiro And that how it all started And then a few years later we had this restructuring on our hands and we ended up opening an office And at that stage we had something as strange as a model investment company had headquartered in Abu Dhabi It was the only office and then the second office we ever opened was Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, which is not the most obvious sort of second location for a sovereign wealth fund out of Abu Dhabi. Arguably today is one of the most difficult markets to predict because it's so driven by AI. if you knew the answer to AI, you'd probably know the answer to most markets. If you had to predict five, 10 years from now, what's the future for Mabatel cap? I mean, listen, I think we're just getting started from our point of view, right? We have gone from effectively only captive money and no AUM 10 years ago or a little bit less than 10 years ago to where we are today, which arguably was the hardest part. From this point onwards, we are super excited about the growth where we're headed and where we find opportunities. I think that role that we're playing, kind of the intersection between an asset manager and a sovereign and really a new version of asset management to some extent, really has some competitive advantages over the traditional fund model and obviously over the pure sovereign model too. So I think we'll continue to see new opportunities that we can capitalize on. And I think in particular, there's obviously, I think there's a ton to do with AI. And I think, you know, largely we'll leave it to other people to decide which AI company is going to be the winner. Where we're excited is how can we deploy AI in traditional industries in order to accelerate growth, in order to reduce cost, and really sort of focus on the AI use case. That's where we can add more value as a firm consistently across the portfolio. And I think it is an area where today, you know, there's a little bit of naivete in the investment community in that sense that, you know, everyone has an AI guy and then all of a sudden they're AI enabled. And I think in reality, it's a bit more complicated than that when you want to roll it out in an industrial company and get rid of a whole layer of the organization. You really need implementation people, right? That can go and do this together with the tech people. That's a focus area for us. I think that's going to be quite big going forward. We can continue to be a very good partner to the insurance universe and grow that practice. I think on ultra high net worth private wealth with Coriant. And, you know, we did two add-ons in Europe that are about to close in Stano Capital and Stone Egg Fleming, both very, very large, which will add, you know, a couple of hundred billion dollars to that platform. We really have a shot at creating the world leader here and continue to grow that business. So that's quite exciting. So I think in terms of, you know, growth areas, I would say we're obviously going to keep expanding our product footprint, primarily probably through GP partnerships. to have access to products that can be suitable for, you know, whether it's our insurance capital or private wealth capital or our own capital. But I think particularly growing the insurance platform, focusing on this sort of AI use case and growing the private wealth footprint on Mobado Capital, three areas where you're going to see us really outgrow competition over the next two years. I think one of the most underrated aspects of Mobado Capital is, paradoxically, that you do have outside investors. I was speaking to the CIO of spider in management, Karen Walsh, and she's formerly from Stanford Endowment. One of the things she talked about, because they do University of Richmond's endowment, but they also have other endowments. One of the things she has to constantly be in ICs with her counterparties and get really hard questions about why they're doing things this way and that way. And it's constantly sharpening their arrow, constantly improving their thinking. So you get almost best of both worlds where you have hundreds of billions of dollars of your own capital. So you have this capital as a moat, but also you're constantly being challenged. So you're never resting on your laurels. You're never thinking, I'm the smartest person in the world because I have hundreds of billions of dollars. Nobody's confronting me, but you're able to get LP feedback. In a weird way, we're kind of the underdog in the third party capital management business in that sense, right? That people look at us and go like, are you really as good as the others out there? We've proven to all our LPs that we are. But I think to your point, that's what keeps us on our edge, right? We get pushed now. Our parent is very demanding too. But having that third party, having to be responsible for every decision every single time where people can vote with their feet if you're not doing well, that is critical for being best at what we do. And there's also this aspect of deployment. I just came from interviewing CIO of Marc Andreessen's family office, Michelle, we were talking about this. And typical endowments, you deploy your capital, and then you're just thinking about follow-ons and things like that. So it's hard to retain your top talent because they want to be learning, they want to be doing deals, they want to be making mistakes, they want to look at other asset classes, but there's no net new capital. So being able to onboard capital is a huge recruiting advantage. It's a pretty unique mix because we have a stable capital base from our parent, and then we're able to attract third-party capital as a multiple against that, which continuously allow us to grow. And then we have a unique mix of proprietary capital and external capital that allows us to perhaps do a little bit more innovative partnerships with insurance companies or indeed buying a large private wealth platform and making that part of the firm. So we're pretty excited with our setup. We jokingly refer to it as our unfair competitive advantage sometimes. If you go back to 2003, just graduated Master of Law from Uppsala University in Sweden, what is one piece of timeless advice you could give a younger Oscar that would have either accelerated your career or helped you avoid cost mistakes? I think one of the biggest piece of advice I would give myself. One, don't be too impatient. It's fine. When you're young, everyone thinks if you get passed on for a promotion or if you lose one year, then it's like the end of the world. At the end of the day, it doesn't matter. It's much better to focus on rounding your experience and becoming as broad as an investor as possible in terms of what you have experiences from than it is to hurry to the next level. I think most of the people that I've seen failed have failed because they were effectively overpromoted. You become too senior you're too fast and and that just makes you like very prone to blow up right so it's it's counterintuitive when you're in it because everyone wants to run as fast as possible and when you're young you're incredibly uh you know you have a strong view that you know the answer to everything in reality taking your time a little bit pausing and making sure that you know what you're doing before you have to do it on your own is is probably the best piece of advice that i could have given to myself or that someone else could have given me you have a similar thing on podcasting everyone always asks me who do you want to interview of course i always say elon because that's my dream guest but i'm not really pushing for him frankly because i want to get better because you also want to be in a position where you're your best self when you have that opportunity so right that's something also 20 years ago i would just been like you know how do i get that mark how do i get that that great guest but i think also like i'm not yet ready for that person i need to improve these three things in order to be make that a good interview so something that gets maturity oscar when your team reached out asking if they could jump on a podcast first ever podcast for Mubladala. I was honored. So thanks so much for sitting down and having conversation. Thank you. It's been great. Thanks for having me.
