I first traveled to Almaty in 1998 as a very young investment banker keen to research a complex deal (they were never easy) related to a cross-border gas pipeline between Kazakhstan and China. This was before China’s Belt and Road Initiative took off, but was an early sign of what was coming. GDP in Kazakhstan […]
Read More Central Asia: opportunities revisitedFor decades, America has stood as the world’s premier destination for advanced education and research. This “brain gain” has fueled American scientific leadership, underpinned sustainable economic growth, and cemented our reputation as a hub for discovery and invention. Yet, in 2025, the U.S. advantage faces unprecedented threats—not only from global knowledge rivals like China, India […]
Read More America’s brain drainI’m excited to share my recent conversation on Spotify, where we dig into some of the most pressing questions in language assessment and edtech. As the host (Summer Long of Cathoven AI) put it, this episode “hits hard if you care about language assessment, AI grading, or scaling edtech globally.” We covered a range of topics, including […]
Read More Scaling to 60+ countries, with no safety netCompanies and investors are faced with continued ESG and sustainability challenges as reporting and compliance becomes more complex, new standards for public and private companies arise across jurisdictions, and the need for execution expertise becomes more critical and high stakes. Fortunately a thriving start-up sector of SaaS platforms and tools is providing enterprises with cutting […]
Read More Global Zero – ToolsEmerging and frontier markets have an urgent need for sustainable and impact investments to tackle economic, climate and societal challenges. As investors and advisors in these markets, we have long relied on numerous on-ground resources as well as “other people’s data” relating to sustainability issues around the world. Below are a just a few of […]
Read More Global Zero – Data and ResourcesGlobal investors are facing a widely varied post-Covid recovery with the IMF forecasting per capita income losses in emerging markets (ex-China) of -6.1% between 2000-2024, and potentially greater “scarring” over the medium term. There are a range of fiscal, humanitarian and social issues to consider and debate. I’ll pick one: the impact of an estimated […]
Read More Global Scarring: Investment RoundUpChina may have created the most impressive advance of educational attainment in history but it also suffers from a growing skills gap. In fact, China has one of the least educated workforces in the world as measured by the proportion of its labor force with a high school and college degree. The evidence piles up in […]
Read More China’s massive skills gapPublicly-listed education companies often sit uncomfortably between the demands of financial stakeholders on one side and commercial challenges of working with school systems, parents, government regulators and students on the other. Perhaps this is why education investment bankers are paid to be optimistic. Consider the recent flurry of announcements for the creation of education SPACs–or […]
Read More Taking SPACs to SchoolPeople hate job interviews, and for good reason: they can be a huge waste of time. According to a number of studies, there is no reason to think that an interview leads to better-decision making, a less biased process (starting with problems with the interviewer) or that the sequential “death by interview” method has any […]
Read More Open innovation is the new job interviewIn education, as in all economic life, there is no such a thing as a free lunch. Or is there? The international debate on higher education access and affordability creates a long wish list of what can or should be done, largely depending on a specific country’s development stage. In the wake of the Covid-19 […]
Read More Fintech, Student Debt and a Free Lunch
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