- Support for this program was provided by Horizon Blue Cross Blue Shield of New Jersey.

- Hello, this is John Harmon, founder President, CEO of the African American Chamber of Commerce of New Jersey, and welcome to Pathway to Success.

I'm delighted to have our guest today, Mr. Gus Udo.

He is a, a major, major player in the global markets.

He's managed major transactions with large corporations as well as some of the, the world renowned financial services institutions.

He's also well-versed in black art and African culture, thus welcome to Pathway to Success.

It's a pleasure to be here, and thank you for inviting me.

So Gus, I'm delighted to have you here today.

Why don't you tell our, our viewers a little bit about yourself and what you do?

- I guess I'll start from the beginning, John, my family from Nigeria originally, and I ended up, there was a big civil war there in the sixties and we, in effect ended up in London, which is where I grew up and went to high school.

I was then very fortunate to get to the us.

I, I was given a, a scholarship to come to Harvard, which was wonderful.

And then went to the London School of Economics for graduate studies for a year and then got a job offer to come and work in New York for a Wall Street firm.

What was then Sheen Lehman, which some of you may now know as the infamous Lehman Brothers, but that was long after I was gone.

- So let's go back a little bit, you know, talk a little bit more about your family.

Big family, small family.

- Typical in some ways, Nigerian family of that era.

When we arrived in the uk he, he had two wives which caused, as you can imagine, some difficulties explaining and navigating as a, a young child growing through school.

So that was very interesting for me as a kid growing up, just to see how families are organized and navigate that.

- You awarded a scholarship for Harvard, that's something you applied for.

How, how did that come to fruition?

- I had a friend who I ran track with during the summers and he happened to be at Harvard and every summer he'd come back and tell me, you know what Gua, I think you'd really like it there, you should apply.

He just kept on that.

He wouldn't give up.

So to get him off my back, I didn't even tell my parents.

I applied and much to my shock, I was admitted.

I then had to go and tell my parents who were, well initially my father wasn't too pleased.

- Yeah.

So can you elaborate just a little bit on, on your father's objection?

- He thought, I just wanted to get far away from, you know, adult supervision and, and party.

It - Might be a little truth to that, right?

- Somewhat, yes.

So why business?

I think I get it from my father.

Before the Civil War, he was the overseas representative for the National Airlines in London.

He then went on to run his own travel business back in Nigeria.

So I think that's really where I got the entrepreneurial spirit from - The interest in math and science.

Can you speak to that?

- I did like science, particularly physics, and I like the certainty around it.

You know, you could have an equation, you calculate whatever, you get your number.

That's it.

- Can you speak to sources of inspiration?

- I've really been inspired by a whole variety of individuals, you know, performing icons on stage and music sporting greats like Muhammad Ali in the financial world.

So Richard was, you know, one of the big icons out there.

- Wanna really give the the viewers a sense of your, your depth and your - Broad experience.

My experience at She and Lehman was really extraordinary.

It was very grueling to be honest with you.

I, I didn't really like it, but I learned a lot from it.

And in those days there were very few people who looked, you know, like ourselves.

So that was really difficult.

There were no mentors or very few and you really had to be confident and try and navigate your way through and teach yourself.

- It was like being baptized by fire and they just threw you out there and you had to swimming at home.

- Man, I think that's a beautiful description of the experience, John.

It was, it was extraordinary.

It was, I wouldn't, you know, give it up for anything.

It really was in terms of my professional career, just invaluable.

- So let's unpack the Sheen experience a little bit in terms of, can you give some examples of the types of things it did?

- I started off in what they call the general industrial pool, which is, you know, sort of working with big companies and they'd pull you in essentially to crunch the numbers.

And in those days when we talked about spreadsheets, it was a physical, huge piece of paper that you stayed up all night long with a little calculator, calculating every number.

I then moved into the financial institutions group, which dealt with banks, insurance companies, and other similar entities, which was very numbers intensive.

And there are two memories that stand out.

One is I was placed onto the Chase account, which is JP Morgan Chase as it is now, basically calculating all the numbers for prospective mergers for them.

Just very, very high pressure.

And it was working, you had to present it to the chief financial officer who is a very pious, tough character and didn't, you know, bridge any errors in your spreadsheet and would suddenly turn to you in a big pre huge presentation and say, where did that number come from?

So that was a, a huge learning lesson on, you know, detail and thinking through, and also how to interact with senior management at a major financial institution.

The other experience I had was that I got to work on a takeover attempt by Sandy w who famous financier, and he was trying to take over Bank of America, - Talk a little bit about the Nigerian Emerging Markets Fund.

- When I left she Leman I got involved with what then was called less developed debt now called mercifully emerging market debt.

And I quickly realized that by turning these physical certificates into digital entries, through these new clearing systems that were emerging, that it would transform the trading of these sort of ignored assets.

But, but were very high yielding.

And, and the issue was that most investors looked and thought, oh, Nigeria, you know, all the news we see is bad.

They never bothered to actually calculate that, you know, less than 30 days of oil revenue actually more than covered the debt service on the debt, which you could buy 20 cents on the dollar.

Wow.

And, you know, within a couple of years you got your principle back type of thing.

I created working with Chase to transform these physical certificates into electronically tradable facsimile, so to speak.

And then I, I stumbled on the idea, you know, I had the whole dilemma that many black entrepreneurs have, which is access to capital.

You know, why wouldn't I want to own and buy some of these myself if they're yielding 20, 30 plus percent?

Right.

And I've created this thing that Fidelity is using, Goldman Sachs is using, chase is using, but I don't have the capital to take part in it.

- Wow.

Here you are, you create the vehicle and now you'll have, it's like creating a plane, but don't have the fuel to get it up to a proper altitude.

What does that feel like and how did it motivate you to move on to your next venture?

- Well, one of the things I, I've learned, Johnny, it's a constant challenge, I think to black and brown and women entrepreneurs.

And it's something that I am really very passionate about attacking full on.

If you look statistically at sort of distribution of fund investments, for example, or private equity venture capital, you know, the allocation is around 1% of the total park to black founders.

If you are ignoring innovations that shift the market, for example, the, the, the program that I described, turning the physical certificates into electronic certificates allowed the big trading houses such as Solomon Brothers at during that time to mark that asset up 10 points overnight.

You know, that's by any measure, extraordinary.

And I, I know at least one fund manager who became a billionaire buying and trading this asset who bought into the idea of what I was creating.

I, I went on to do.

Subsequently, I had an opportunity to create a supply chain finance pro program working with Airbus number one commercial aircraft manufacturer, which was an extraordinary experience and to have been selected in a competitive situation with banks and other provi service providers.

But they chose me and they chose me because they told me point blank, your solution was the one that made the most sense and fitted our needs.

We ended up doing about $7.3 billion in volume - Wow.

- On a platform that I put together.

And so at the time it was very innovative.

It's something again that I would've loved to really to bigger global platform, but ran it even with an Airbus as my client, I ran into the issue of trying to access capital.

- You also have written some books.

We have prolific rider.

Talk to us a little bit about what inspired you to put pen and paper.

It - Was, my daughter actually asked me, dad, can you tell me more about the family?

And I started writing and found myself writing till early in the morning.

And that was sort of the genesis of the first book.

But I soon realized that it was really important to have a record of my experiences written in my voice and that that was something that, you know, is often missing in the broader canon.

And that there are many people who are like you and I, who want to hear stories about other people like themselves, particularly if their journeys have been journeys that have been somewhat different and unique.

A billion dollar blind spot.

Anyone wants to see what my experience has been within the industry.

It's there.

The more I talk to friends, everybody say, Gus, you have to write about this because having created this program for of us and to have a competitor come in, the dynamics of it really talk upon about how people make decisions.

And you have an analogous situation where you have a, a huge giant selects a company to work with, and somehow there's a tussle to push that minority firm out and replace it with what proved to be a dud that blew up in a spectacular - Way.

You, you teed up a huge opportunity for this major corporation, laid the framework, and then they kick you to the curb, if you will, and brought the other person in.

Was that how it went down?

- They were confronted with somebody who is very charismatic, did not look like me, had access to political power and lots of capital.

They chose to give this individual, I think $1.75 billion dollars as opposed to solution that I had that, you know, fairly confident from having demonstrated it already for 20, 30 million bucks could have done the job.

- Well, one never forgets injustices, but they also serve as motivation as you move on.

We'll take a break here on Pathway to Success.

We're having a great conversation with Gus Udo and we'll be back in a moment.

- The African American Chamber of Commerce of New Jersey is your pathway to success.

We encourage you to visit our website@www.accnj.com or call us at (609) 571-1620.

We are your strategic partner for success.

- Welcome back to Pathway to Success.

I'm your host, John Harman, founder, president and CEO of the African American Chamber of Crimes of New Jersey.

And so Gus Udo we're back.

We want to hear more about your amazing journey.

You have another initiative, 54 projects, LLC.

- Thank you John.

I've always been interested in art and, and did one of the very first postwar contemporary art exhibits in New York in 1990 with a college friend of mine, Ethan Cohen, who's a big gallerist here in New York and up in Beacon.

And over the years I've followed African artists and African American artists and I noticed that, you know, black brown artists of comparable quality were often were, are underpriced in relative terms and even more sharply for some women artists.

The the classic example is if a woman puts her name on a piece of art, it will sell for less than without her name.

But to my mind, it struck me as a, a way to be able to create an alternative source of investment that actually one of those rare opportunities that you get to do something that you like and enjoy that actually does good as well and also makes money.

So I decided to create a, a series of funds to invest in African art, African-American art, British and European Asian art and Latin American art.

So reflecting the world we live in, it's a global world.

And to see if we can find a way structurally of arbitraging it, as it were, this built in inefficiency that's again, come outta pattern of matching.

So huge disparities and huge opportunity, again, obviously opportunities for loss as well.

But I, I think working with art experts in each of the different funds to carefully select and curate the funds and to put them together in a way that we minimize risk as best as we can by combining blue chip artworks, American art, for example, a baer together with ake Andy Wiley to really create their resilient portfolios and to replicate that across all the different strategy across the funds, for example, so an artist I met 30 odd years ago, I Weiwei one of the most prominent contemporary artists in the world today.

And you know, he's somebody whose work has gone up in value.

It's an incredibly challenging thing to, to try to do.

And while there have been some art funds in the past, they've tended to be a singular and they haven't followed the classical portfolio management approach, but at the same time respecting the work of the artists as well and looking to build up their brands and bring them to where they should be through our portfolios.

- How does this work in terms of when does one get their, their return on their investment?

- John, that's a great question.

So it's really a buy and hold and it's for high net worth investors primarily, and institutions who are willing to wait the six years for the assets to appreciate.

Of course there's also a risk they may depreciate, but which is why we have this blended approach.

You invest your money today, you wait six years.

If the market conditions aren't right for us to sell at that time, then we can extend the fund in total for up to another three years.

So it's really a long-term play and it's all about capital appreciation.

When we buy a piece of art from the day we buy it, we're already building strategies around how we're going to dispose of that art.

- So what did your interest in post-war and contemporary African art originate?

- It started a college from a course that I took from a very dynamic professor Moonie Jean Adams.

She taught a course on African art, which is one of the few culturally relevant courses at college at that time.

I took the course, I absolutely loved it and it stayed with me and she, you know, built that passion in me.

A love of not just African art, but art in general.

- So what would you say is driving the interest in black art?

- Well, I think number one, it's of a very high quality.

It's coming more into the fore now with the, the museums, in particularly now reassessing their collections, which are predominantly more than 80% white male and having a desire to have it, their collections reflect the communities within which they sit.

And that's really caused a renaissance in, in terms of values.

And I, I hope that momentum can continue, which is part of why I started the funds.

- So Gus I'm telling you, this whole conversation has just been enlightening, just fascinating.

Gus, can you elaborate on some of your alternative strategies?

- Yes.

You know, in addition to art, we see other opportunities as well, alternative lending, which, you know, in part could also be related to the art because that's another area, a market segment that's growing very rapidly.

And we think that there are interesting opportunities there too.

We've got intellectual property.

We think that there's some tremendous IP being produced by brown black women, you know, lots of groups that don't get an opportunity to have that IP developed.

So we're looking to create a fund for that.

And I think an example of that has been the huge rise, for example, in Afrobeats within the music sector.

Other things are carbon and renewables, digital infrastructure, and then multi-strategy, which is a combination of all of these in the digital infrastructure space.

I've been sort of actively working on a very, very exciting project, project that has been featured in the Wall Street Journal, a project called Far North Fiber, which is to build cable connection, fiber cable connection between the US and Alaska, all the way to Japan and down to Europe and beyond.

And it has opportunities to drop perhaps as far down into Africa as well, opportunities for data centers, issues around clean energy and cheap energy, which are bountiful up in, in the northern, northern reaches.

So extremely exciting.

- You've shared so much information.

I, I must close by asking you 54 projects, LLC, what, what's on the horizon for the next three to five years?

- It's sort of a new dawn, but trying to use 35 plus years of experience within the industry to really build a platform that pulls together all the opportunities that I've seen over that period that are relevant today and to try and build and expand on it.

- Well we thank you so much guys for being here on Pathway to Success.

- Thank you so much, John.

It was a real pleasure and an honor to be on your show - Until the next time on your Pathway to success.

This is John Harmon, founder, president and CEO of the African American Chamber of Commerce of New Jersey.

The message today is we're altered, overlooked up the Citibank study, which covered two decades, which showed because of systemic discriminatory practices in the United States, the US economy forego about $15 trillion in GDP.

Again, lost opportunity.

And sometimes people do things against their own interests because of discriminatory practices.

In other words, not to engage and do business with people of color.

We will continue to persevere, we will continue to be resilient and we will continue to contribute to the success of the United States as well as the global economy.

Even when we're not well received, we have value.

Success is in our DNA and we'd encourage you to give us an opportunity to contribute to your success.

- Support for this program was provided by Horizon Blue Cross Blue Shield of New Jersey.