LOCATION: London, UK
LANGUAGE SPOKEN: English
CURRENT ROLES:
Founder and managing partner, Livingbridge
Deputy chair, NHS England
Co-chair, 10,000 Interns Foundation
BOARDWAVE ROLE: Patron and Partner
Wol Kolade has worked at the same firm since 1993. “Literally the company I joined back then is the same company now. I have had no other job,” he says. The firm has been through one important change though – its name. When it became apparent that ISIS, as it was then named, needed a rebrand, Kolade took a typically no-nonsense approach. In fact, the decision to swap to Livingbridge took less than a few hours.
Kolade had just left a meeting with investors in downtown Chicago. It was 2014, and the terrorist group dubbed ISIS was at its most active. “It started to rain, we had these ISIS-branded umbrellas with us, and we wondered why people were looking at us. I realised pretty quickly that if we cannot put up an umbrella with our company name on it, we’re done,” he says. He and his colleagues played around with new names based on Wood Street, where their London offices were based. Eventually, they settled on Livingbridge, named after living root bridges, an exotic tree that grows in India. The tree is named for its purpose: specimens are trained over the course of many decades to bridge the local rivers with its roots, creating a pathway when raging winter storms make the waterways impassable. “The new name was done by the time we got on the plane home,” Kolade says.
Livingbridge has weathered its own storms and Kolade has witnessed many of the seminal moments of the tech industry, from the bursting of the tech bubble in the early 2000s to the development of AI tools in the present day. Kolade says that the firm fared better than many during the dot-com bust because tech was only a quarter of its investment portfolio. He also watched how the internet changed businesses forever, coupled with
the exponential drop in the cost of computing. And then there was the birth of the iPhone – which Kolade says changed the world in ways he never expected. “When I got my first iPhone, I thought it was fun,” he says. “We had no idea when it came out what it could do. But it has led to a fundamental change in geopolitics. Without it, we wouldn’t have social media and echo chambers, for example.”
Sound advice
One of Kolade’s key pieces of business advice is to be curious. “If everyone else is looking left, have a look on the right and see what’s going on,” he says. “The trick has always been to anticipate where tech is moving, or the impact it will have on the wider economy.” Being curious can alter a company’s culture. “It brings innovations, development and a bit of fun into what we do. To not be curious is a bit dull, frankly.” He says that he meets a surprisingly high number of entrepreneurs who are close-minded. “Helping to open up their minds is very important.”
As a youngster, Kolade wanted to be an astronaut. “I grew up obsessed with space and, in particular, an amazing picture called ‘Earthrise’. Fewer than 1,000 people have ever witnessed the earth rise,” he says. With typical lofty ambition, Kolade wanted to be a part of that small elite. This intergalactic goal alludes to his other key piece of business advice: aim high.
Unfortunately, poor eyesight ruled out a career as an astronaut for Kolade. Instead, he set his sights on the world of finance, completing a degree in engineering and an MBA. While he says he loathed engineering “with a passion”, it provided him with an important grounding. “I was doing programming in Fortran 77, which was the most ridiculous language ever, but it gives you an appreciation of being really tight with your coding and being really clear as to what you’re trying to do,” he says. “Compared to that, finance was a walk in the park.”
Kolade has always kept an eye on the future – and, today, he is no different. Many believe that AI is the most likely tech to change businesses of the future, but Kolade isn’t so sure. First off, he says, he prefers the term machine learning. He goes on to explain that we are very far away from artificial general intelligence. He also warns against making too many assumptions on where AI may take us. Tech, he says, ends up being most progressive when it takes you by surprise, as the iPhone did. But, he admits, it isn’t always possible to predict how society might change.
Back in the early 2000s, Kolade invested in a firm from Sheffield that created “extraordinarily good library management software”. But, within three years, libraries had lost their relevance meaning the software was next to worthless. Kolade adopted his no-nonsense pragmatism, and he sold the business to someone who was involved in updating the US Congress Library. “The US Congress Library is, of course, the world’s biggest library – not a bad endgame for some software made in the north of England.”
Kolade’s third, and perhaps most important, piece of advice for businesses is: be kind. “How much more fun is it to work at a company where people are kind and respectful? A leader’s job is to serve the rest of the company. I don’t know how you can do that without being kind,” he says. He recalls advice he was given by a manager when he joined Barclays – be careful how you treat people on the way up because you never know who you will meet on the way down. “I’ve never forgotten it. Again, it is about being respectful and not making enemies casually. You are alone at the top and you never know what the trajectory is.”
Creating equal opportunities
Kolade had a privileged upbringing: his father was a diplomat and he had postings in Cameroon, the US, and Trinidad and Tobago. It meant the family moved a lot and he “learned very quickly how to make friends”. But the nomadic life wasn’t great for education and his parents decided they wanted some continuity for their sons. So Kolade, aged eight, was sent to boarding school in the UK. During the holidays, he would visit his parents wherever his dad was posted, including communist Czechoslovakia, which he describes as “eye-opening”.
Being a citizen of the world is something Kolade wears as“a real badge of honour”. But the truth remains that, both at boarding school and then in the finance industry, Kolade often found he was the only Black person present. Representation of leaders from an ethnic minority in private equity remains, in his words, “shockingly low”. Kolade’s natural propensity to just get on with things meant he shrugged off a lot of casual racism – such as being mistaken for a member of staff at his local supermarket, or a delivery person in his own apartment building. It was something unexpected – an event thousands of miles away – that made him rethink.
10,000 Black Interns began life as an open letter he wrote in June 2020, following the murder of George Floyd. In the letter, he laid out the racism he had encountered in his working life, including a management firm where the CEO referred to him using a racially offensive and derogatory term, something he says he “sucked up” at the time. The letter created a stir and garnered the attention of Jonathan Sorrell, president of investment management firm Capstone. Discussions between the pair about what could be done to improve the stats in their industry led to the creation of the charity 10,000 Black Interns. The project started with a plan to call five people that they knew and persuade them to take on a Black intern for six weeks of paid work.
They hit their first milestone quickly, so they decided to up their target to 50, and then 100. After the Financial Times wrote about the project, things started to get crazy, Kolade says. “It moved from us calling our friends to people suddenly calling us. And then we asked how could we make this relevant to a wider part of the economy. We decided to go for a target that seemed crazy – 10,000 interns over five years.” The project is on course to hit that target early – and it is not resting on its laurels either. Now named the 10,000 Interns Foundation, it has also launched the 10,000 Able Interns programme, which offers the same support to disabled students. And, given all he has achieved, Kolade remains curious today. “I’m not just curious about today but about many days hence and I am quite comfortable holding both at the same time.”
Tips From The Top
What are your tips for a successful business?
1. Aim high.
2. Be kind.
3. Be curious.
What is the best advice you’ve been given?
Be careful how you treat people on your way up as you never know who you will meet on your way down.
Can you tell us something surprising about yourself?
I am a total sci-fi nerd.
If you hadn’t become an entrepreneur, what career would you have pursued?
A film critic or an astronaut.
Is there a piece of tech, other than your phone, that you could not live without?
My iPad, or perhaps a TV!
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