YouSaid · the spoken record

Martín Escobari

lines on the record: 75
first: 2025-04-17
most recent: 2025-04-17
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“Mexican workers are cheaper than Chinese. Than China today. Wow. And they're next door and they're your friends. They're not a geopolitical challenger to the U.S. So, I see another great decade for Latin America in the next years ahead.”
2025-04-17 · Masters in Business · Trends in Emerging Markets with Martín Escobari · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Domestic saving gone up, they have certain restrictions around foreign domestic savings for individuals investing abroad, so they're investing in their local markets. The best IPO market of the last two years in the world has been India. So now you have the confluence of three factors that create what we think will be a virtuous next 10 years for India, which is about time. Latin America, 700 million inhabitants rising middle class. at all time low multiples. You can buy the entire country of Brazil at ten times earnings. Mexico there is no better candidate or beneficiary of the trend to French shoring than the Mexican economy. The Chinese per hour worker is thirty percent cheaper than the Chinese worker and they're next door.”
2025-04-17 · Masters in Business · Trends in Emerging Markets with Martín Escobari · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That was a Modi change. Second change. The transformation of digital India. Which is internet access was expensive and not very available. The telecom sector restructure around Geo, which is a great telco company. And now 60% of Indians have low-cost wireless broadband. In parallel, the government created a national biometric identity database that enabled fraud-free digital transactions from your phone, and now 60% of all transactions are in India are digital. All of a sudden, you have one of the most digital economies in the world. The final missing link, their own capital markets.”
2025-04-17 · Masters in Business · Trends in Emerging Markets with Martín Escobari · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Listen, we have presence all over the world. We have three offices in China. We have offices in India. We have offices in Singapore, two in Latin America. We open offices, three offices in the Middle East. What's exciting right now? India. We've been in India for 22 years. India did not have its moment in the sun. Digital India wasn't ready. India infrastructure wasn't ready. It has been ready for the last five years. The business models, the digital business models that we saw transform industries in China, in Brazil, in Mexico had not yet done that in India. Over the last five years, India did a couple of reforms. First, demonetization, taking currency away and simplification of the tax code meant the informal economy went from fifty percent to twenty five percent.”
2025-04-17 · Masters in Business · Trends in Emerging Markets with Martín Escobari · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Among the top 10 in the world, yes, and we're more global than anyone else. Why are we more global than anyone else? I'll give you two statistics. Have the unicorns, the sort of billion dollar companies in the world are born outside the United States. More interestingly, have the unicorns in the United States are founded by immigrants from other parts of the world. So 75% of value creation is for people that were in this world, people not born in U.S. Talent is sprinkled around the 8 billion souls that inhabit the earth. We got to go where the talent is. And in our case, it means half of what we do is in the US and half is outside the US, and our activities outside the US have been accretive to returns.”
2025-04-17 · Masters in Business · Trends in Emerging Markets with Martín Escobari · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I'll give you one scary statistic 95% of Americans die in the hospitals. Only three percent of American doctors die in hospitals It's not about the quality of your death, it's the quality of your life and your health, as you said. Okay, so healthcare innovation, huge area, one of our biggest sectors. Energy transition to get to our decarbonization targets, we will need to spend north of $6 trillion a year. That's a huge opportunity, the whole ecosystem around this trend to net zero. And the fourth major mega trend is the rise of the new consumer, the sort of younger middle class rising in purchasing power in the rest of the world will mean six trillion dollars of extra consumption by twenty thirty in this emerging new middle class. These four megatrends define the growth equity opportunities set.”
2025-04-17 · Masters in Business · Trends in Emerging Markets with Martín Escobari · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Listen, the sectors are how we are organized internally. What's more interesting is what are the trends changing our world today? There are four mega trends that define the opportunity set for growth equity. First is the digital transition. Ninety percent of the world's transactions are going digital. Four trillion dollars of capital is invested every year in this digital transition, in the investments in AI and cloud computing. This is a trend that's 20 years in the making. It's been accelerated by AI. massive wave. The second one is healthcare innovation. Huge challenges in the West. Healthcare is too expensive and ineffective. The only way to address that is through technology to drive better health outcomes. In parallel, there's a new generation of healthcare innovation that is using the advances of IT to apply it to the cell and creating the next generation of life sciences therapeuties, which will dramatically”
2025-04-17 · Masters in Business · Trends in Emerging Markets with Martín Escobari · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Investment professionals. We have 90 operators in the operating group. We have tech enabled sourcing. We meet 7,000 entrepreneurs every year to pick the best 25. So this is a scale game. We have the scale. And then we also have specialization. There are 16 strategies. We call them the GA power alleys where we've developed 10 and 20 year track record. That's a huge source of imperative advantage. And then we have 19 local offices throughout the world. In every local market, we are more local than the local players and we have the advantage that we are plugged into this global network of knowledge and accumulated experience that the GA infrastructure provides through all our local partners.”
2025-04-17 · Masters in Business · Trends in Emerging Markets with Martín Escobari · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yes, yes. So we started investing in technology in the United States and soon discovered that technology is not just changing the technologies like Japan, but it's changing the healthcare sector and the financial services. Then we discovered that this is a global opportunity. We opened up Europe 30 years ago. We opened up the emerging markets 22 years ago. And now we've built what we think is the most experienced scaled growth equity investor in the world. Now, growth equity has become incredibly competitive. It's now a $2 trillion asset class. Why is it so large? Because there are more companies that are growing 30, 40 percent. Why? Because they're embracing technology to change their business, and that allows for faster growth at cost efficient metrics. How do we compete in this highly competitive world? We have more experience. 45 years of track record, great brand, 500 investments over the last forty-five years. We have scale. We have 250.”
2025-04-17 · Masters in Business · Trends in Emerging Markets with Martín Escobari · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Over his lifetime, most of it anonymously and at the later stages of his life he says, I actually need to tell my story because it maybe it motivates other people to follow this incredibly rewarding path, which is to spend my life giving away my wealth. And that he did, and he set us off on this incredible forty-five-year journey of backing innovators wherever they may be in the world. And that's what we are today, and that's what we've been doing for 45 years.”
2025-04-17 · Masters in Business · Trends in Emerging Markets with Martín Escobari · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And he questioned what is the purpose of my wealth. And he thought about it for a long time. And I've heard him tell this story. He's now diseased two years ago. And he says, the purpose of my wealth is to improve the human condition today. Not tomorrow, not 100 years from now Foundation today. And he created General Authentic as his family office or the vehicle to manage his family wealth. He wanted us to invest in innovation and entrepreneurship globally, and he wanted all the proceeds of our investment activity to go finance the great causes anonymously. He was the originator of the giving pledge, except it wasn't 50%. It was 100%. He famously said, I want my last check to bounce. And he almost succeeded it when he died. He donated $9 billion.”
2025-04-17 · Masters in Business · Trends in Emerging Markets with Martín Escobari · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Chuck is one of the most impressive people I've ever got a chance to meet. He stumbled into the duty-free idea as a soldier. Because he was mesmerized by the vibrant trade that happened in the American bases in the Pacific. So you could buy cigars, liquor, appliances, half off. Because it wasn't America and it wasn't the Philippines, it was no man's land in this area, and the taxes were very high in those regions. So there was a loophole. He created the World Duty Free Business, which thrived to a major business. He landed upon a level of wealth. He was not ready for.”
2025-04-17 · Masters in Business · Trends in Emerging Markets with Martín Escobari · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And it's always darkest right before the sun is going to come out. And you have to believe the sun is going to come out and plan for the sun. And as it relates to a world that's highly unpredictable, remember the sun is going to come out and stay through to first principles and what makes great businesses and who are great entrepreneurs and who's solving real world problems and lean in when everyone else is scared.”
2025-04-17 · Masters in Business · Trends in Emerging Markets with Martín Escobari · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I grew up in Bolivia in the 80s It was chaos Chaos that it's hard to internalize. So in my teenage years, ten years, there were nine presidents. In my teenage years, there were thirty five thousand percent inflation. But that meantis halfway through my teenage years we changed currencies from the pesoboliviano to just obliviano by chopping off six zeros. million US dollars becomes one American. That happened when I was fifteen. So I grew up with chaos and I got comfortable with chaos. And the main lesson of chaos is it's never as bad as it seems.”
2025-04-17 · Masters in Business · Trends in Emerging Markets with Martín Escobari · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I've been an investor for twenty odd years. The main lesson is the profound realization that the heroes of the journey are not the investors, are the people that are in the front lines, in the trench lines. It is so hard to create out of nothing something that thrives. It is inhuman level of sacrifice that these people go through, and I have so much respect for the heroes of the journey, and I remind my colleagues, we're just the supply lines.”
2025-04-17 · Masters in Business · Trends in Emerging Markets with Martín Escobari · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And that's good for the environment. So I was part of a transformational moment together with my co founders. And it was exciting, it was scary, and ultimately when we sold it, producing good returns for the investors, it was very fulfilling.”
2025-04-17 · Masters in Business · Trends in Emerging Markets with Martín Escobari · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“More difficult, but the advantage of Brazil is we had not developed the brick and mortar retail infrastructure. There were no superstores. The Brazilian consumer was starved for variety because all the supermarkets carried very limited assortment. So the opportunity of e-commerce, we believed, was 10 times bigger than in the US or Western Europe because we were leapfrogging a whole stage of evolution of the retail format. And it came to be e-commerce in Brazil now 25 years later is close to 20% of all trade. It is a vibrant dynamic industry and there are no category killers. We skip that whole Toys Ras and babies R us and bad bad and beyond phase.”
2025-04-17 · Masters in Business · Trends in Emerging Markets with Martín Escobari · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So listen, the macro was horrible, but the technology was overwhelming and the sources of capital recognized that this was a global opportunity. So we raised $250 million as a private company. So before the correction of March of 2000, Money was raining. There was no infrastructure. You had to build everything from zero. Everything was a hundred times.”
2025-04-17 · Masters in Business · Trends in Emerging Markets with Martín Escobari · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And the internet felt at this amazing life-changing opportunity. And I said, I can't miss this adventure. And me, together with two other colleagues from the private equity group I was working on right out of business school, from the 3G guys, said we're in the wrong side of this revolution. We shouldn't be financing the startups. We should be creating the startups. And we set out to build the Alibaba or the Amazon.com of Brazil. And it was seven incredible years because it started great. We raised more money than we could have ever dreamed. We almost went public. The market shut down. We almost went bankrupt. We had to sell the pieces. We had to get to profitability. And then we came back. So it was a full compressed 30 years of life into seven, but I felt I did not miss the revolution of my generation.”
2025-04-17 · Masters in Business · Trends in Emerging Markets with Martín Escobari · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The one that hit me in my 20s was the internet. And I had this realization that this is my one shot at, I don't know if you listen to the Hamilton musical. There's my shot, the scrappy immigrant that's waiting for the revolution where it's a level playing field and you're all trying to catch this giant wave.”
2025-04-17 · Masters in Business · Trends in Emerging Markets with Martín Escobari · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So I believe each generation will have one giant wave, one giant disruption that will catch us in our twenties or thirties. For me it was the internet, later it was the mobile internet, the cloud, now it's AI and biotech revolution.”
2025-04-17 · Masters in Business · Trends in Emerging Markets with Martín Escobari · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So listen, I've up until recently been very disciplined about setting up five-year plans for myself. And I keep them. And if you looked at my five-year plan when I was in college, I was destined to go work at the World Bank, help solve big problems in emerging markets, one day get called back to my country to be finance minister. And then if I did a good job, maybe have a shot at running Bolivia. That was the plan coming out of college. I stumbled into business. I fell in love. And that's how business school came about. And then that's... I've been doing for 30 years”
2025-04-17 · Masters in Business · Trends in Emerging Markets with Martín Escobari · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And the accident that led me to Harvard is interesting. I had a neighbor who was a school teacher at the American school who became my mom's lifetime best friend. and talked her into putting me in the American school. By chance there was a very good American school because some oil companies were funding great education for the kids. And I got a great education and then I got a scholarship to Harvard. And that is where I sort of entered Hogwarts Academy of Wizardry and the doors of the universe open to me. And I was the first Bolivian in 350 years to go to Harvard College. Yeah.”
2025-04-17 · Masters in Business · Trends in Emerging Markets with Martín Escobari · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“What is Honest to God. We're not even talking about the business school just in college. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Didn't register.”
2025-04-17 · Masters in Business · Trends in Emerging Markets with Martín Escobari · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The odds of me being here with you today are about one in a million. I mean, I was born in a town of 10,000 people. My parents were communists and had disdained for capitalism. They spent their life saving children's lives in public hospitals, and to them business people were soulless meaningless lives, and they expected something very different from me. So that's sort of the first set of unusual circumstances.”
2025-04-17 · Masters in Business · Trends in Emerging Markets with Martín Escobari · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source