Great Business Minds

Hello and welcome to another episode of the Great Business Minds podcast, the definitive show for the business of digital infrastructure.
I’m your host Joao Marques Lima and I use my experience as a digital infrastructure journalist to dig deep into business issues but also get to know those who build our digital world.
Great Business Minds is brought to you by Portman Partners, the premier executive search firm for the digital infrastructure industry.  With 50+ years of experience, no other firm can match their knowledge, discretion, and connections with the best top-level talent in the sector. Are you seeking great business minds for your digital infrastructure business? Contact Portman Partners at www.portmanpartners.com.
This week we are joined by someone who I have been waiting to chat for a long time, not only for what he is building at the moment and where, but also for his slightly unusual background when compared to other data centre executives.
From Portugal, Afonso Salema is heading one of Europe’s largest data centre capital deployments as its chief executive. With a price tag of US$4.2 billion US Dollars, Start Campus’ project in Sines aims to create one of the largest European data centres and redesign how colocation and hosting is done.
In this episode we delve into Start Campus and the ins and outs of the venture and much more.
For background information, Afonso has a degree in Industrial Engineering and Management from Instituto Superior Técnico in Lisbon and has spent 15 years in investment banking in London, New York and Madrid, covering the renewable energy, energy and infrastructure sectors, having briefly worked for EDP between 2009 and 2011.
This deep dive into capital markets around the energy segment has given the executive an interesting advantage in the climate transition that every data centre operator is facing today as well as an exposure to different market challenges.
In this episode of GBM, we cover this as well as current topics around data centres becoming a utility, the looming economic recession and how the sector should not ignore the warning bells of Wall Street, and how to navigate the backlash against data centre developments in different geographies due to land, power or water usage.
Here at the GBM podcast, we hope you enjoy this episode and do leave us a review and share it with your contacts. We invite you back again for the next episode with another big name in the digital infrastructure space.
If you want to get more from the definitive podcast for the business of digital infrastructure, make sure you subscribe to Great Business Minds.
See you soon!
 
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This episode features our commercial partner Portman Partners, the leading executive search firm working exclusively in the digital infrastructure sector. Visit www.portmanpartners.com for more information.
 
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Get more from the GBM Podcast on:
Official Website
LinkedIn
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Welcome to another episode of the Great Business Minds podcast, the definitive show for the business of digital infrastructure.
 
Great Business Minds is brought to you in partnership with Portman Partners, the premier executive search firm for the digital infrastructure industry. 
 
This week we are joined by cricket and tennis player Rajiv Ramaswami, who is also an accomplished Indian entrepreneur and chief executive of American cloud computing company Nutanix, a role he took on during the height of the Covid-19 pandemic.
 
He joined Nutanix from VMware, where he served as Chief Operating Officer of Products and Cloud Services.
 
Prior to this role, Rajiv led VMware’s Networking and Security business, one of the fastest-growing units in the company, as executive vice president and general manager.
 
Before joining VMware, he served as Executive Vice President and General Manager, Infrastructure and Networking at Broadcom, where he established Broadcom as a leader in data center, enterprise, and carrier networking.
 
In his prior General Manager roles at Cisco, he led multibillion-dollar product lines in switching, data center and storage, and optical networking.
 
Earlier in his career, he held various leadership positions at Nortel, Tellabs, and IBM.
 
Rajiv earned his BTech in Electrical Engineering at the Indian Institute of Technology and his Master’s and PhD in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at the University of California in Berkeley.
 
He is an Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers Fellow and holds 36 patents, mostly in optical networking, and joins GBM from his home in the Sunny State.
 
Here at the GBM podcast, we hope you enjoy this episode and do leave us a review and share it with your contacts. We invite you back again for the next episode with another big name in the digital infrastructure space.
 
If you want to get more from the definitive podcast for the business of digital infrastructure, make sure you subscribe to Great Business Minds.
 
See you soon!
 
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This episode features our commercial partner Portman Partners, the leading executive search firm working exclusively in the digital infrastructure sector. Visit www.portmanpartners.com for more information.
 
///////////////////////
 
Get more from the GBM Podcast on:
Official Website
LinkedIn
Facebook
Instagram
Twitter
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Welcome to another episode of the Great Business Minds podcast, the definitive show for the business of digital infrastructure.
 
Great Business Minds is brought to you in partnership with Portman Partners, the premiere executive search firm for the digital infrastructure industry. 
 
In this episode we are joined by an industry titan who has leading experience in creating, scaling up, and exiting businesses delivering on high return rates.
 
Byrne Murphy is an entrepreneur with more than thirty years of operations in international development and investment. Three times he brought US concepts to Europe and grew start-up companies into US$1+ billion global enterprises.
 
After developing high-end mixed-use projects in Washington, DC in the 1980s and ‘90s, Byrne co-founded BAA-McArthurGlen, the company that imported the designer outlet concept to the UK and Europe. After opening the company’s Paris office in 1992, he led its expansion across Europe, resulting in more than US$1 billion in sales.
 
He then developed private residence clubs, starting with restoring Palazzo Tornabuoni, a 15th-century Medici palazzo in Florence, Italy. The Palazzo underwent a $250 million re-development and is now managed by The Four Seasons. In 2010, the project won Urban Land Institute’s prestigious Award of Excellence for EMEA.
 
More recently, he co-founded DigiPlex, a sustainable data centre business in the Nordics, with Bill Conway, the Co-founder of The Carlyle Group. The two have recently sold the operator to affiliates of IPI Partners, LLC, a global investment platform focused on cloud hosting and other technology and connectivity-related real assets.
 
Author of the award-winning book “Le Deal: How a Young American, in Business, in Love, and in Over His Head, Kick-Started a Multibillion-Dollar Industry in Europe”, Byrne also owns and runs Kitebrook Partners, a real estate development and investment company.
 
In his first major public interview since the DigiPlex transaction was announced in July 2021, Byrne shares with GBM the ins and outs of the deal, as well as his vision and projections for data centre and digital infrastructure investment across different regions.
 
Byrne also delves into his life journey, the ups and downs, and how he turned things around when things turned really bad.
 
Here at the GBM podcast, we hope you enjoy this episode and do leave us a review and share it with your contacts. We invite you back again for the next episode with another big name in the digital infrastructure space.
 
If you want to get more from the definitive podcast for the business of digital infrastructure, make sure you subscribe to Great Business Minds.
 
See you soon!
 
///////////////////////
 
This episode features our commercial partner Portman Partners, the leading executive search firm working exclusively in the digital infrastructure sector. Visit www.portmanpartners.com for more information.
 
///////////////////////
 
Get more from the GBM Podcast on:
Official Website
LinkedIn
Facebook
Instagram
Twitter
YouTube

Welcome to another episode of the Great Business Minds podcast, the definitive show for the business of digital infrastructure.
Our guest in this episode is a successful entrepreneur who has spent the last decade building a business that is today valued at more than US$5 billion.
Felix Van de Maele has led data intelligence firm Collibra through record growth and is responsible for its global business strategy.
But prior to co-founding Collibra, he served as a researcher at the Semantics Technology and Applications Research Laboratory (STARLab) at the Vrije Universiteit Brussel, where he focused on ontology-focused crawlers for the semantic web and semantic data integration.
He holds a Master’s in Computer Science and Software Engineering from the Vrije Universiteit Brussel and a Master's in General Management from the Vlerick Business School.
Outside his HQ, he is a big fan of kitesurfing and in 2019, Felix was named the EY Technology Entrepreneur of the Year in New York.
Here at the GBM podcast, we hope you enjoy this episode and do leave us a review and share it with your contacts. We invite you back again for the next episode with another big name in the digital infrastructure space.
If you want to get more from the definitive podcast for the business of digital infrastructure, make sure you subscribe to Great Business Minds.
See you soon!
 
 ///////////////////////
 
This episode features our commercial partner Portman Partners, the leading executive search firm working exclusively in the digital infrastructure sector. Visit www.portmanpartners.com for more information.
 
///////////////////////
 
Get more from the GBM Podcast on:
Official Website
LinkedIn
Facebook
Instagram
Twitter
YouTube
 

Welcome to another episode of the Great Business Minds podcast, the definitive show for the business of digital infrastructure.
In this episode we are joined by someone who has become a walking font of knowledge within the data centre sphere as some would say.
David Liggitt is the Founder and Chief Executive Officer of datacenterHawk which he started in 2014 with the vision to help customers make better decisions about data center real estate.
His 15 years of industry experience and leadership have helped create a global platform trusted and depended on by the world’s largest data center owners, investors, consultants and users of digital infrastructure.
His data centre journey started however in 2007, right at the cusp of the boom of the data centre economy.
David has also started the datacenterHawk Podcast, an industry-focused video and audio experience exploring relevant digital infrastructure topics.
Here at the GBM podcast, we hope you enjoy this episode and do leave us a review and share it with your contacts. We invite you back again for the next episode with another big name in the digital infrastructure space.
If you want to get more from the definitive podcast for the business of digital infrastructure, make sure you subscribe to Great Business Minds.
See you soon!
 ///////////////////////
This episode features our commercial partner Portman Partners, the leading executive search firm working exclusively in the digital infrastructure sector. Visit www.portmanpartners.com for more information.
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Get more from the GBM Podcast on:
Official Website
LinkedIn
Facebook
Instagram
Twitter
YouTube

Welcome to another episode of the Great Business Minds podcast, the definitive show for the business of digital infrastructure.
Our guest this week has a strong capital market background as well as a solid international track record with experience in start-ups through to large international businesses. He has also successfully conducted IPOs and raised private equity for data centre expansion projects.
Josh Joshi is a household name in the data centre space having started his career in the 1990s, just before the dot com bubble imploded and dramatically reshaped the gaming board which had a heavy impact on him.
Post-bubble, Joshi has led teams across several businesses including at Telecity which became one of the first major data centre M&As globally when it was acquired by Equinix (NASDAQ: EQIX) in 2016 for US$3.6 billion. He has also spearheaded the financial efforts of European player Interxion which was later also snapped up by Digital Realty (NYSE: DLR) in 2020 for US$8.4 billion.
Today, Joshi is an operating partner for DigitalBridge (NYSE: DBRG), one of the world’s most active investors in digital infrastructure and he serves as executive chairman of AtlasEdge, Europe’s newest hosting player. 
Here at the GBM podcast, we hope you enjoy this episode and do leave us a review and share it with your contacts. We invite you back again for the next episode with another big name in the digital infrastructure space.
If you want to get more from the definitive podcast for the business of digital infrastructure, make sure you subscribe to Great Business Minds.
See you soon!
 
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This episode features our commercial partner Portman Partners, the leading executive search firm working exclusively in the digital infrastructure sector. Visit www.portmanpartners.com for more information.
 
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Get more from the GBM Podcast on:
Official Website
LinkedIn
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This week we are joined by someone who is building what will most likely become the world’s largest data centre campus. The site is so big, it could nearly contain three Cities of London. The most intriguing thing: he says this is the smallest project on the table for the business.
We are talking of course about Josh Snowhorn, founder and CEO of Quantum Loophole, who values approachability, accessibility, collaboration, innovation and growth, qualities that have guided Josh’s leadership in the interconnection industry over the last 20 years and building over US$10 billion of value along the way.
Josh has pretty much seen and done it all through key founding and executive positions at Terremark, Verizon, Cincinnati Bell, and CyrusOne, recently acquired by KKR and GIP for a whopping US$15 billion.
Outside of the data halls, his love for speed and cars has led him to launch TrackRats, LLC, the premier car club for track enthusiasts. He has also been a surfer for 39 years and a snowboarder for 25 years, traveling the globe in pursuit of experiences.
Here at the GBM podcast, we hope you enjoy this episode and do leave us a review and share it with your contacts. We invite you back again for the next episode with another big name in the digital infrastructure space.
If you want to get more from the definitive podcast for the business of digital infrastructure, make sure you subscribe to Great Business Minds.
See you soon!
 
 ///////////////////////
 
This episode features our commercial partner Portman Partners, the leading executive search firm working exclusively in the digital infrastructure sector. Visit www.portmanpartners.com for more information.
 
///////////////////////
 
Get more from the GBM Podcast on:
Official Website
LinkedIn
Facebook
Instagram
Twitter
YouTube

Our guest this week is a scale-up enthusiastic, board member and advisor. He has worked in the recruitment industry for more than 25 years helping several brands grow their businesses both nationally and internationally.
Dave Pye says his style in working alongside Founders and CEOs is very much focused on four ‘Cs’: Creativity, Curiousness, Culture and Collaboration.
He has been working with some tremendous clients during the past five years and he often gives keynotes on business and leadership.
According to Pye, running a recruitment business today is “tremendously exciting” despite the most unusual and challenging of years that we have faced. Having an advisor alongside you working on things such as people engagement, mastering data, allocating intangible capital and creating increased shareholder value makes the journey even more compelling, he says.
In the last few years within the companies he has worked with these have achieved two MBOs, the opening of new offices around the globe, the reshaping of the leadership team and the creation of new products and services.
Here at the GBM podcast, we hope you enjoy this episode and do leave us a review and share it with your contacts. We invite you back again for the next episode with another big name in the digital infrastructure space.
If you want to get more from the definitive podcast for the business of digital infrastructure, make sure you subscribe to Great Business Minds.
See you soon!
 
 ///////////////////////
This episode features our commercial partner Portman Partners, the leading executive search firm working exclusively in the digital infrastructure sector. Visit www.portmanpartners.com for more information.
///////////////////////
 
Get more from the GBM Podcast on:
Official Website
LinkedIn
Facebook
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Twitter
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Our guest this week, is a master of cryptocurrency, an entrepreneur and philanthropist. He has acquired over 30 years of experience in corporate restructuring; M&A; IPO privatisation; private equity and hedge fund investments across mainland China, Hong Kong, and Taiwan before establishing himself as the founder and CEO of Hamilton Investment Management, a global fund manager with multi-billion assets under management, which includes private equity investments in licensed banks, Fintech and social media projects and multi-strategy algorithmic trading funds. 
William Je is also the founder of Himalaya Exchange, a global digital exchange with a full ecosystem including a blockchain payment App, a stable coin and a trading coin.
Prior to that, Je was the chairman of equity capital markets, Greater China at the Macquarie Banking Group for 10 years, managing its Greater China capital markets and principal investment activities. Prior to Macquarie, Mr. Je served as the joint venture partner and managing Director of China Merchant Securities (Hong Kong) Limited, help building its business in Hong Kong from scratch. 
Je has also served as an Executive Director at Credit Agricole Indosuez and a Board member of its securities arm, Indosuez W.I. Carr Securities; Director & Head of Business Development at Dresdner Kleinwort Wasserstein and a Vice President at NatWest Markets.
In this episode, the executive delves into his own story of how he became with the sector as well as the lessons he learnt throughout his journey. Je shares several pieces of advice on how to stay positive and motivated, even in the face of challenges.  
Speaking of his passion, cryptocurrency, Je explores the infrastructure needs to support this booming market, as well as the main differences between cryptocurrencies and flat currencies, and why professionals must now start to change their perspective on cryptocurrency, particularly in relation to what institutional investors consider to be an asset class, and adapt processes to enable investors to deal with cryptocurrency more effectively.
Here at the GBM podcast, we hope you enjoy this episode and do leave us a review and share it with your contacts. We invite you back again for the next episode with another big name in the digital infrastructure space.
If you want to get more from the definitive podcast for the business of digital infrastructure, make sure you subscribe to Great Business Minds.
See you soon!
 
 ///////////////////////
This episode features our commercial partner Portman Partners, the leading executive search firm working exclusively in the digital infrastructure sector. Visit www.portmanpartners.com for more information.
///////////////////////
 
Get more from the GBM Podcast on:
Official Website
LinkedIn
Facebook
Instagram
Twitter
YouTube
 

Our guest this week is a data centre legend and he is the man responsible for matching talent with the right job, setting the foundations for hundreds of data centre businesses to succeed.
 
Peter Hannaford has worked for Societe Generale, Waterfields, Schneider Electric and Datacenter People amongst others, and today runs Portman Partners, a boutique executive search and strategic advisory firm focussed on the digital infrastructure sector worldwide.
 
In this week's episode he shares his journey from how he landed his first job in digital infrastructure to how he became a household name in the sector, having launched several disruptive projects that remain crucial to how data centres function today.
 
Hannaford also goes over the skills needed to enter this sector and how things are shifting in terms of requirements and diversity. 
 
You will also learn and listen to critical advice and tips on how to break into the digital infrastructure space.
 
Here at the GBM podcast, we hope you enjoy this episode and do leave us a review and share it with your contacts. We invite you back again for next week’s episode with another big name in the internet space.
If you want to get more from the definitive podcast for the business of digital infrastructure, make sure you subscribe to Great Business Minds.
See you next week!
 
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This episode features our commercial partner Enboarder, the first Experience-Driven Onboarding platform and the new way businesses onboard. Check them out here.
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Get more from the GBM Podcast on:
Official Website
LinkedIn
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