Talent, Hunger, Wonder, with Bob Bush – Episode 486 of The Action Catalyst Podcast

Bob Bush, senior investment executive and the President, CEO and Co-Founder of Mutombo Coffee, explains the key business point on which he disagrees with Bezos, breaks down risk tolerance internationally and domestically, shares the historical lesson we can learn from Nikola Tesla, and talks about keeping the hunger and the naivety that is your spark.

About Bob:

Robert (Bob) Bush Jr. is a senior investment executive with experience across industries, geographies (USA, Europe, China, Middle East, and Africa), as well as asset classes (venture capital, private equity, Islamic Finance). He has engaged in various financial and operating special projects for sovereign-related entities, family businesses, family offices, investment companies, corporations, and startups. Bob has provided live television commentary and keynotes at global conferences on innovation, social impact, sustainability, global investing, and international trade. His unique experiences, love for learning and teaching, as well as an established network of relationships, fuel his interests in innovative business models, public private partnerships, and entrepreneurship. Bob’s international experiences with multinational corporations and government advisory as well as his love for learning and teaching have given him a unique perspective on solving global challenges.

Currently, Bob serves as the President, CEO, and Co-Founder, along with the late NBA Hall of Famer, Dikembe Mutombo, of Mutombo Coffee, as well as an Advisor to the European Commission, Royal Families, and Dubai Prime Minister, and a Contributing Writer to ForbesMiddleEast.com.

Mutombo Coffee is an African-American and woman-owned brand that invests in female-led coffee farms, embodying their mission as a “coffee with a cause.”

Bob’s overall business transactions have totaled more than $30 Billion, and he has co-managed assets nearing $10 Billion (USD).

Learn more at MutomboCoffee.com.

The Action Catalyst is presented by the Southwestern Family of Companies. With each episode, the podcast features some of the nation’s top thought leaders and experts, sharing meaningful tips and advice. Learn more at TheActionCatalyst.com, subscribe below or wherever you listen to podcasts, and be sure to leave a rating and review!

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(Transcribed using A.I. / May include errors):

Bob Bush
I’m enjoying this. So until you kick me off, I’m good to go.

Adam Outland
Awesome. I know you are a contributor to Forbes Middle East. And Jeff Bezos said, and I’m heavily paraphrasing that he mentioned, how the US is such a good fertile ground for business, partly because of the risk tolerance of the money in the US that that there are many organizations that are have a high risk attitude towards venture and taking bets that isn’t as common in other countries. But I think you have an interesting perspective, because I’d be curious your thoughts about the risk tolerance in the Middle East for investments from an uninformed perspective over here, it seems that it’s quite high, but you might have a different perspective on that so. And I think even your greater comment on the economics of risk, risk in general would be interesting.

Bob Bush
Yeah, I’m familiar with Mr. Bezos comments. There are a couple of things there. I think venture capital and PE do not have a high risk tolerance and so and it seems that I’m going against one of the world’s richest man when I say this. So let me really sort of unpack that. Yeah, what you find when you talk to sophisticated investors, it’s all about the risk mitigation. These guys don’t make money by taking non risk adjusted risk. It is all about a risk adjusted risk. And so because of the size of the capital pool, you have different kinds of risk players who are comfortable with certain kinds of risks for startups or certain kinds of risks for growth companies or certain kinds of risks, right? And so what are the things that and I’m sure that that Bezos would agree that when you look at a capital stack, you will find that there is ample capital for whatever risk level that you want, sufficient enough to have a very robust, robust market around. So it’s not so much that the US has a super high risk tolerance, but that there is enough, there are enough players, wherever you want to be on the risk spectrum who are comfortable with understanding that particular risk at that development, and the mitigants for that risk, and that’s who they bet on. They don’t bet on the guy who’s taking the most risk, or, you know, the company, or the team, or the woman who’s taking the most risk. They’re betting on the company, the woman, the team that knows how to mitigate the most risk for that type of risk. That’s the bet.

Adam Outland
And I think you’re probably dead on that, that Bezos would agree on that. I think his, he probably operates with a different definition of risk that the average person and probably lines up with what you just described.

Bob Bush
Right? So let’s, let’s dig that a little bit deeper. What we have, you know, this kind of links to the Middle East, and it links to Europe, where I’ve been fortunate to have done some work with the European Commission and other capital providers across the world. And so one of the things that the United States has is reasonably patient capital. Very little capital is patient, and certainly not PE and hedge fund capital, but it’s reasonably patient, meaning, meaning that it can be sticky, that if, depending on where you are in that capital structure, if you need three years of capital, or if you need five years of capital, or you need seven years of capital, or you need 10 years of capital, right? There are capital providers that are willing to take that turn, provided that Dominicans are there and that, you know, I had the pleasure, I was asked to advise a particular group, several groups of the European Commission around this very point. I know if you just saw recently where the commission has now allocated $200 billion for AI development, and it was 100 almost 100x and what they had internally thought they were going to put into AI just a year ago. And so I’ve lived in Germany. I’ve spent a lot of time in in Switzerland and Austria and talking to Europeans where these sources of capital are. Spend a lot of time in London as well. One of the distinctions between sort of European risk taking and the US is and I. Take it from the entrepreneurial side. So the European Commission asked me to go around Eastern Europe, to the Balkans and all these Eastern European countries, including Ukraine, and meet with entrepreneurs and accelerators and incubators. So this was, just may have been about 10 years ago, on this very question of, you know, you know, appetite for risk, etc. So from the European Commission perspective, they had the Chinese and the Asians, tons of capital, very assertive, very aggressive to their East. And then they had the Americans, very end of that innovative, very assertive, very aggressive. And the Europeans were getting bookend and squeezed. And so having been an American that had lived in the Middle East, who was now living in Europe, I was living in Europe because my former wife is European, German, and so we were started a family there. And you know, you’re at a dinner party here and there, and people start asking you questions. And before you know, if you’re saying, Can you come to Brussels? So I ended up doing some work in process. So the point is, is that the entrepreneurs, the best, most innovative talent that’s coming out of these countries is, I would say, superior to the talent coming out of US universities. But the incentives. So think about it this way. I had the pleasure of getting a philosophy degree at a liberal arts school. You don’t have that kind of luxury in many of these eastern Europe. It is physics, it’s math, it’s engineering. You make stuff.

Adam Outland
You make stuff, right.

Bob Bush
And so the pragmatic and practical pool of talent at that university, at that mindset level, they make great stuff. And guess where those the best and the brightest go up until recently, they become PhD students. And when you talk to them as PhD students, and then you talk to them, I spoke at dozens of universities, and talk to professors and departments, those departments and professors eschew their best and brightest doing something as pedantic is making money. Yeah, interesting. So there’s this stigma that if you’re that smart, why would you want to do what those 120 IQs guys do in London? So you got culturally, this issue of not supporting innovation in that sense. So you’ve got a lot of by best people not being trained and how to truly be innovative. They can be inventive. They can make, you know, you know, test is a wonderful example that’s exceptionally invented, but he got out maneuvered by Edison others around how to make the business model being truly innovative around those inventions. That’s a historical, culturally relevant point. Even today, his level of inventiveness is top notch, but his ability to meld the capital get the business model around it, he got out maneuvered. He got outgunned by Edison and CO, right? And so when you’re really thinking about the fertile ground for risk, or fertile ground for talent, or matching capital to talent, etc, there’s some really interesting things that I’ve personally had to observe going from the just on the talent side, exceptionally talented kids. And so what ended up happening is how they started bridging and learning from the Americans. Then you had a lot of and Ukraine was a perfect example of this. They started doing it, outsourcing to some of these countries, because these kids could code and they had good math skills and they had good engineering skills, etc. So that’s transition. And now they realize, well, wait a minute, why am I doing the code for that Silicon Valley company? I want to be that Silicon Valley entrepreneur. So organically, there’s sort of this shift around all of that. So Do not underestimate a bright person who shows up every day without the best resources and their ability to create something that is world changing.

Adam Outland
That’s right. Well said. A question I ask everyone, but one that I just love, in general, is, you’ve had a wealth of experience. Let’s say you were able to just sit, sit on that bus from Illinois to St Louis and talk to that young man who’s riding to school every day. What advice would you provide him, knowing all the things that you know now?

Bob Bush
Well, as you’ve already picked up on, and I’m not trying to be unorthodox, we think the young man has something to tell me less than me telling him. And I’m going to tell you why. Because as you start having the weight of the world on your shoulders, you got kids, you got wives, you’ve got employees, you’ve got bigger problems, right? You think keeping the same level of curiosity and inquisitiveness and maybe naivete that you can do anything you want that should. Me, I want to make sure that this world does not beat that out of me and beat that out of other entrepreneurs, because it can happen. Man. You know, I remember reading very early on about an immigrant that came out of Europe during the 30s in New York in the middle of the Depression, and 50 years later, he was this super rich industrialist. And they asked him, How did you do it? He said that I never read the papers, right? So what I would say to anyone that asked this question is, those aspirations that we all have, those that that sense of wonder, etc, don’t lose that keep that young man and that young woman in your spirit, because before you know it, the world will do its best to take it out of you. So I think that young man has a lot more to teach me than I probably do him. That’s a real value to me. Of course, I got more skills and I got more people, etc, but the heart of that matter, that talent, that God given hunger, that God given inquisitiveness, don’t want to lose that, because that’s your spark.

Adam Outland
Yeah, the a plus player is the person that’s humble, hungry and smart, and you could replace hungry with curious, right? But the more these interviews that I’ve done, I couldn’t agree more, right? The humility and the hunger is a good combination with intelligence. And the more I’ve learned about business, the more I realize I don’t know. So it’s pretty easy to remain humble in this business when you’re learning all the time.

Bob Bush
None of us are smarter than the market, brother.

Adam Outland
That’s right. That’s right. For our listeners, please share Mutombo coffee, which I know we didn’t spend probably nearly as much time on this as we could have, because you have such an interesting and colorful life. But where can people learn about the Mutombo coffee, the respective social initiatives, and how can they participate?

Bob Bush
Mutombocoffee.com of course, we have a website, M, U, T, O, M, B O, coffee.com we also have launched an Amazon store, and so that will will start doing more with that. Primarily, we’ve been B to B for the last few years, so we’re now just starting to which is why I’m sticking my head up and doing more podcasts like yours, because we want people to know that that we exist, etc. The one of the other things we will do for your listeners is we’ll create a VIP code for them, and anyone that puts in their code when they go to the website, they will get a VIP preferential pricing for our product as a way for us to say, thank you for introducing us to your listeners.

Adam Outland
Yeah, love that. Well, thank you. Wow. This great, really great interview. I mean, really good for our listeners. Hopefully you’ve enjoyed it too. Great conversation.

Bob Bush
I did. Make me look good, fellas, make me look good.