Moving On

I want to ask a little more about the various career moves that you have made in your life. You were at Intel for 19 years, where you worked your way up to vice president, which is extraordinary, because Intel doesn't have that many vice president positions, it's quite hard to get. And then you left Intel to become a managing partner at the Wesley Group, the investment group, and then you moved on to National Grid, where you are now. Those previous jobs you had prior to your current position all sounded pretty good. How do you know when it's time to leave, when it's time to move on?

Well, some of it is when you get an opportunity, some of it is, and should be, you challenge yourself to do something different. I mean, that's the thing I mentioned earlier, I think I should have challenged myself to do something different than Intel in 19 years. I think that may have given me another perspective, another set of experiences that would have been valuable in my career in the long term. So I think there's lots of things that move you. As I say, Intel was a great place to work, it was a great place to cut my teeth on the tech sector, they treated me very well there. And so that's the other temptation, if things are going really well that maybe you don't move, but keep the long term in mind because unless you think you're going to be able to achieve your highest ambition at a single company, then you need to be thinking about "Where can I do that and what are the set of experiences that I need in order to achieve it?" And I thought when I left Intel that working in a private venture capital firm would be an interesting experience, because I'd worked at corporate all my career as an investor. And so I thought that would be interesting working in clean tech, it was a fairly hot sector for many years, and it was starting to have a bit of a renaissance or resurgence. And so I think that would be interesting. And of course, working with Steve Leslie, who is the former executive at eBay and was former comptroller for the State of California, very interesting guy. I thought that would be a challenge and some fun as well. And so that job looked really attractive to me. I would have stayed longer at that company, to be honest with you, but we were raising fund number three and weren't able to raise as large a fund as we had hoped. Some of that was just performance of the first two funds, some of that was the time that we were raising was the best time to do fundraising. And so it caused me to think about whether I wanted to stay there for long term or whether I wanted to do something else.