Small Business Finance: How AI & Embedded Capital Changes Funding

Thank you so much, Maria.

Great to have, be here.

Clarel, your career has moved across very different industries, companies, and even countries, so, uh, you began as economics researcher, also founded a technology company very early in your career, and later you moved into lending, payments, and also investment management.

So let's start, like, with that journey.

How did it all start, and what first attracted you to financial sphere?

Yes.

The odd thing that I don't put anywhere that people may not have read is that my career probably started when I was 15.

My father moved us out of South Africa when apartheid ended, and I grew up in Thailand, and he threw me at that age into trading steel for his business, which was l- the equivalent of physical stainless steel, uh, to East Asian companies that needed the scrap metal.

I'll tell you that because it's really...

I only reflect now, I was irritated at my father in some way for putting me through this, but I look back and realize the degree to which he gave me autonomy, the ability to understand and drive my own perspective on what was happening with any given deal, but also just know the difference in negotiating and trading and, more importantly, lift me out of what I felt was a very sheltered version of the world because South Africa was a very difficult time, and I was one of two non-white students in a white school when I first joined.

It changed my perspective of myself and what was possible.

So I actually feel like my journey started there, and as it's evolved, uh, the, a couple of threads have held very true.

When I started the MarTech company, which was like a YouTube for business on user-generated content, as well as what's happened through Amazon, uh, even partly in Capital Group, which is an, an older but very large asset management company, I think the invention pieces and being able to do things at scale have driven me tremendously, and that's true even today at Pipe.

The things that are possible today with what we have available to us change the dimension of what's valuable and possible in the world.

And so, uh, my...

That, that is a thread that's held all the way through.

I think the other one that's held very strongly for me, which is one that I have to battle every now and then, is technical depth.

So do you have a whole system view of what is going on deeply? And that's meant that, you know, whether it was at Amazon and leading lending, starting in product, I had to really understand deeply the science to know how I could move the levers of the business.

Similarly, that kind of learning and curiosity and depth has to be true in many things I'm doing today.

But if you don't do that with the perspective of what it means for the whole system you're creating, you have a sure chance of missing part of the opportunity.

And so I'll pause there to say, uh, that journey started in a, in a slightly unexpected, unchosen way, [laughs] I'd say.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah.

That's wonderful.