“The Lisbon MBA Career In” – Stephan Morais

Posted by The Lisbon MBA on 5 Apr, 2022 4:25 pm

 

Last week we had one more session of Career In this time dedicated to Private Equity and Venture Capital.

 

Stephan Morais honored us with his presence and took us through his professional life story from a graduate engineer who soon realised he would not pursue engineering professionally, to the success story of Indico after realizing during his Harvard MBA that, one day, he would like to be a professional investor. Stephan has over 20 years of experience in investment, entrepreneurship and management. He is Co-Founder and Managing General Partner at Indico Capital Partners, a leading Portuguese-based Venture Capital firm that invests in global and sustainable technology companies. He was appointed Young Global Leader by the World Economic Forum in 2010.

 

 

Stephan shared that he always tried to build his career with an objective in mind: to be a professional investor. But as said by Stephan, “life takes time”. So, during the first phase of his professional life he always saw the jobs he had, from Government Consultant to Chief of Staff of EDP’s CEO, as a great learning opportunity that he could build on to achieve his goal. He was finally invited to join Caixa Capital to lead the Venture Capital portion of investments. He built an excellent portfolio at Caixa, and he was able to learn from the inside about everything that was done in Venture Capital, Business Angels and accelerators in Portugal.

 

After some years he was finally ready to launch and grow his own company. He now leads a small and cohesive team of people, the members being carefully chosen as trust and alignment of objectives are crucial to the success of the company.

 

For Stephan, the private/family life is extremely important and he believes that the professional life should be seen as the person’s goal to do the things they like and then see the ups and downs as a game that needs to be played with the pieces available on the board, in the best possible way.

 

He recommended students not to take themselves too seriously, either when things go well or not well, as luck has a role to play in life.

 

It was truly an inspiring session. Thank you Stephan Morais for sharing some strategies and insights on what it takes to be a professional investor.

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