I ride road bikes, routinely taste great wines and work on anti-food-waste initiatives. In my spare time, I am a Faculty member of the Said Business School at the University of Oxford and a Fellow at The Queen’s College Oxford. I sit on the investment committee of my college endowment, and on the wine committee of the College, which is a more serious affair than you think.

I have been researching the private equity industry for the last fifteen years. It was a baby back then compared to today but people have always been intrigued by it. Data point after data point, article after article, I found that virtually everything that was sold as a fact was not quite so. I published about ten articles in leading academic journals on this topic and these articles are freely available on ssrn.com, have been downloaded some 50,000 times and cited about 2000 times (source: Google scholar). This research has been presented in about 100 universities throughout the world, at all major academic and practitioner conferences in this field, and featured in the media internationally (including The Economist, Financial Times, The New York Times). I worked with a number of large institutional investors on their private equity investment decisions and benchmarking systems and with government bodies on private equity matters (e.g. Dutch Ministry of Finance, Norway Ministry of Finance).

I have been teaching private equity for ten years to MBA/EMBA students, and developed a variety of executive education courses, including customized programs for leading consulting companies and asset managers. Representative student feedback talks about “great energy and ability to captivate class on a difficult topic”; “engaged professor who brings a lot of personality into the classroom”; “constantly pushing us to think critically”; and “has a knack for simplifying complex concepts.” Students also routinely complained that I should do something about my chaotic notes and board scribbles; here they are, at last!

I have also received some awards, none of which I deserve but these things go into biographies to show that the author is a serious dude. Besides some teaching awards at the University of Oxford and University of Amsterdam, I have been honored to be named as one of “The 40 Most Outstanding Business School Profs Under 40 In The World” by the business education website Poets & Quants in 2014. And in 2016, realdeals magazine listed me as one of the 20 most influential individuals in private equity in Europe – the only academic listed.

Finally, I stayed at school for a long time, ending up penniless but full of degrees (and of myself): Bachelor in Economic Engineering from Toulouse School of Economics; a Master in Economics and a Master in Mathematical Finance both from the University of Southern California; and a PhD in Finance from INSEAD.