Who’s Ludo?
I ride road bikes, routinely taste great wines, work (a bit) on old buildings, forests (carbon captures) and diversity/inclusion 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, and sit on both its investment committee, and its wine committee; the latter being a much more serious affair than you may think.
Over the last twenty years, I have been actively researching the private equity industry. It was a baby back then compared to today but people continue to be intrigued by this business of businesses. Data point after data point, article after article, I found that virtually everything sold as a fact was not quite so. I published about ten articles in leading academic journals on the subject (freely available on ssrn); they have been downloaded nearly 100,000 times and cited more than 3000 times (source: Google scholar). This research has also been presented in multiple (over 100) universities as well as at major academic and practitioner conferences around the world, and featured in the media internationally (including The Economist, Financial Times, The New York Times). I have been fortunate to work directly with a number of large institutional investors regarding their private equity investment decisions as well as benchmarking systems.
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.
I have also received some awards, none of which I deserve. 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. 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 couple of Master degrees (Economics, Mathematical Finance) from the University of Southern California; and a PhD in Finance from INSEAD.