It has been a long and winding road for me, investment banking in Toronto, NY and London for over 20 years. Then, university teaching of investment management in UK and China. And for the last 8 years, working with early-stage companies in Asia. But there has been one constant, always having one leg in industry and one in education/training.

In 2016, I left my role as Professor of Practice of an MSc Investment Management in China.  Since, I have focused on helping early-stage companies (consulting, fund raising, etc.) and also run several accelerators with Founder Institute. One other new venture is expanding the education of industry to high schools. Schools are good at academic subjects but often fail to prepare young people for many life-aspects, like employment, personal financial management, etc.

Lastly, technology has had a profound impact on both financial markets and education.  So, I find it time to do some R&D and develop some new models for corporate finance using AI.  There are many investors with money in ASEAN, but many won’t lead a deal or invest alone as they are not confident of doing the due diligence.  So, I am building a model producing investor DD documents that does 99% of the investor’s grunt work.  Of course, preparing these documents is time consuming for me, so my new project is to build an AI model that does the ‘first cut’ of these documents and gets rid of 99% of my grunt work.

John D. Evans, CFA

27 July 2024