E17: Alex Lazarow (Investment Director, Cathay Innovation)

May 25, 2020

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Alex Lazarow is the Investment Director at Cathay Innovation. Prior to joining Cathay Innovation, Alex was a Principal at Omidyar Network, a global philanthropic investment firm. While at Omidyar, he focused on investments in the global FinTech and financial inclusion space across the U.S., Africa, Latin America, and Southeast Asia.

He is also an adjunct professor specializing in impact investment and entrepreneurship at the Middlebury Institute of International Studies at Monterey. He is a Kauffman Fellow, CFA Charterholder, and a Stephen M. Kellen Term Member at the Council on Foreign Relations. He earned an MBA from Harvard Business School and a B.Comm from the University of Manitoba.

Follow Alex (@Alex_Lazarow) and host, Akash Bhat (@bhatvakash) on Twitter.

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Glossary of terms:

1. Network Effects: Network Effects is a phenomenon whereby increased numbers of people or participants improve the value of a good or service.

2. Impacting Investing: Impact investing refers to investments made into companies, organizations and funds with the intention to generate a measurable, beneficial social or environmental impact alongside a financial return

3. Blitzscaling: It's the science and art of rapidly building out a company to serve a large and usually global market, with the goal of becoming the first mover at scale; an accelerated path to the stage in a startup's life-cycle where the most value is created.

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In this episode we will learn:

1. Alex Lazarow’s background (3:20)

2. Why did Alex decide to write ‘Out-Innovate’? (7:00)

3. What are ‘Frontier Ecosystems’? (9:34)

4. Similarities between emerging markets around the world and emerging markets within the US such as mid-West (11:53)

5. Learnings from speaking to Indian entrepreneurs about ‘sustainable’ growth (14:38)

6. Misconceptions about Blitzscaling (18:22)

7. Challenges in building global companies (22:04)

8. How should entrepreneurs think about the global opportunity and get it right? (25:15)

9. Bottlenecks in building sustainable businesses (28:10)

10. Is real innovation taking place outside the Silicon Valley? (31:16)

11. Misconceptions Alex had about emerging markets before writing his book (33:40)

12. How has Alex changed through his experience of writing the book? (35:15)

13. Rapid fire (38:10)