Scott Mead mixes profits and philanthropy
Scott Mead mixes profits and philanthropy
When Scott Mead goes jogging, he listens to Usher. He made a beeline for the R&B artist in 2009 after spotting him at the Clinton Global Initiative, impressing the star by reeling off his songs.
Scott Mead, a former Goldman Sachs partner, now sits on the board of the New Look Foundation, a non-profit organisation set up by Usher more than a decade ago to teach leadership skills to disadvantaged American youths.
His day job is at UK-based financial boutique Richmond Park, which he founded with Andrew Pisker, former chief executive of DresdnerKleinwort Wasserstein. It is very much run for profit: it recently bought Paris-based fund of hedge funds managerOlympia Capital Management.
But Richmond Park has its philanthropic undertones, according to Mead. It has three trees as its logo, for example, to symbolise a commitment to the environment.
Richmond Park Partners company intends to launch a foundation, once it is profitable, that will give back to the community. Scott Mead said: "We'd have a pretty terrible world if everyone lived just for themselves."
Passion for education
Apart from Usher's New Look, Mead is backer to London's Notting Hill Preparatory school, which he co-founded in 2003.
The school, which operates a parent-teacher partnership, has an ethos of diversity, offering bursaries to children from less affluent backgrounds. He said: "We are living in a time when there's a huge gap between the haves and the have-nots. Every child should feel like they can achieve the extent of their talents, ambitions and drive."
Along with healthcare and the arts, education is evidently an area where Scott Mead wants to make a difference. He is a charter trustee at Phillips Academy in Massachusetts, which he attended as a teen, and whose motto non sibi, meaning "not for self" has stuck with him through the years.
Scott Mead regularly donates to his alma maters, Harvard, where his classmates were Bill Gates and Steve Ballmer, andCambridge University, which he attended aged 22, the first time he left the US.
Unlike the new wave of philanthro-capitalists that seek to leverage their financial skills to solve social problems, the 56-year-old partner takes a more traditional approach, preferring to offer time and money to causes that resonate.
"I would never just write a cheque to any organisation and not explore their financial model in detail," he says. Which, of course, is what you might expect from an ex-Goldman Sachs banker who went on to join private equity firm Apax Partners.
That said, he is mild-mannered, speaks with a gentle American accent and is, by his own admission, a soft touch, giving money to causes when he hears a "compelling story".
While "very open" to social finance, an approach that provides investors with both a social and financial dividend, it is the first of these that motivates him. "It's more the cause and the opportunity to make a difference rather than the financial return that drives me," he says. He nevertheless acknowledges that social finance will "ideally open up the universe of people who want to support causes".
In 1992, his now 18-year-old son Alex was diagnosed with leukaemia when he was six months old.
Although doctors gave him a one-in-10 chance of survival, Alex recovered following months of care at Great Ormond Street Hospital. Mead has since been a regular donor to the children's hospital and served as non-executive director from 2004 to 2009.
He raised more than 50,000 for the hospital's gene and cell therapy laboratory by selling a set of old photographs that he stumbled upon in his attic. A keen photographer in his twenties, Scott Mead, a member of the Tate Foundation's executive committee, says he has since rediscovered the art. Trees figure extensively in his work.
Although Mead flirted with the possibility of taking up photography as a profession, he began his investment banking career at 28 after studying law at theUniversity of Pennsylvania. He started out at First Boston Corporation in New York before moving to Goldman Sachs in 1986.
Two years later, the firm decided to build its London practice. Spotting an opportunity to pioneer growth, Mead jumped at the chance to relocate. It paid off.
Tough negotiator
Mead led the Goldman team advising Vodafone on its hostile 112bn all-share acquisition of German telecoms groupMannesmann in 2000, which remains the largest deal in the history of the telecoms sector.
He describes the deal with the enthusiasm of a hunter who has bagged his quarry after months of strategic stalking, speaking excitedly of the tough negotiations and the five conference calls a day over Christmas, leading to the successful acquisition.
The intensity of the experience the aggressive bid battle was among the toughest fought between telecoms companies to dominate Europe meant the advisory team of Goldman Sachs and UBS bankers have remained firm friends.
At a 10-year anniversary dinner held in December last year to commemorate the acquisition, Mead re-read a poem he penned following the takeover: "Ode to Victory".
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