Some emerging markets will check all the boxes — strong population growth, growing middle class, verge of investment grade, great leadership, and hunger for capital — and then be missing the one ingredient that enables you to monetize your investment: scale. Without scale, you don’t have liquidity. You have no optionality. In essence, you’re stuck.

In trade, it is an almost infallible natural law that a hungry low-end market, an eager dumping ground for the shoddiest work, is an irresistible market force.

The lackluster nature of most multinational corporations emerging market strategies over the past decade does not change the magnitude of the opportunity. The real source of market promise is not the wealthy few in the developing world, or even the emerging middle-income consumers: It is the billions of aspiring poor who are joining the market economy for the first time.

It also opened up new challenges. When you invest in emerging markets, you’re trading the rule of law for growth. If you think you can count on receiving justice in a foreign courtroom, you should think again. So, the first question is always “Who’s your partner?” By that I mean “Who is going to watch your interests on the ground every day?

In order to sell anything, you need demand. We are not trying to create demand. We are trying to channel it.

As a businessman, I believe in healthy competition and market dynamics.

When backing companies, I always look for industries that are ripe for disruption.

Some emerging markets will check all the boxes — strong population growth, growing middle class, verge of investment grade, great leadership, and hunger for capital — and then be missing the one ingredient that enables you to monetize your investment: scale. Without scale, you don’t have liquidity. You have no optionality. In essence, you’re stuck. Africa is a great example. I think many countries, such as Botswana, have potential, but the upper and middle classes are too small for me to get involved. Chile is another example. It has the institutions and leadership, but only 17 million people — no scale.

We are not trying to create demand. We are trying to channel it.

An emerging market is a country where politics matters at least as much as economics to the market.

Creating demand is hard. Filling demand is easier. Don't create a product, then seek someone to sell it to. Find a market - define your customers - then find or develop a product for them.

Draw a circle around the businesses you understand and then eliminate those that fail to qualify on the basis of value, good management and limited exposure to hard times. ... Buy into a company because you want to own it, not because you want the stock to go up. ... People have been successful investors because they've stuck with successful companies. Sooner or later the market mirrors the business.

I believe in markets, but I don't believe in markets understood as private monopolies. I believe in open global, national and regional civic markets. If everybody owns and trades, and there wasn't just an exclusive, dispossessed class, there wouldn't be a radically insecure bottom twenty or thirty percent of society that causes problems for everybody else.

My instinct is always to seek out challenges as opposed to avoiding them.