Interview: Joyce Mackenzie Liu
The Ivey Business Review is a student publication conceived, designed and managed by Honors Business Administration students at the Ivey Business School.
IBR: In 2009 when you were an Ivey student, could you ever picture yourself in the place that you are now? Or did you have different ambitions as a youngster?
Joyce: In my first year at Western, I was actually imagining myself going to Western Law. Ivey was really - and I don't want to say this necessarily - but a backup plan. It was a way to learn about the business world and ultimately go into corporate law. I had a fabulous time during my first two years at Western because essentially I took courses that were interesting for me since I had the pre-acceptance into Ivey. I took a mixture of everything from history to philosophy, statistics to economics.
IBR: But you didn't become a lawyer. You didn't take the corporate law route - why was that? Was that because of classes that you took at Ivey, or did you know that before going into Ivey?
Joyce: It was a combination of classes I took at Ivey and an internship that I did at GE Capital between my second and third year where I worked with really amazing people on the commercial finance team. It was a very dynamic and intellectually stimulating environment. And I wanted more of it. And they told me, you should go into investment banking because that's where you kind of earn your stripes and get lots of transactional experience. If you asked me in 2009 whether I would see myself still doing this in 2023, I would have said, definitely not. Finance for me at the time was a place where you get your ‘real world military training’, and then you move on and do something else.
IBR: What different disciplines did you explore in your early days of finance?
Joyce: As you can imagine, 2009 was a terrible year to graduate. I remember making over 100 emails and calls to Ivey alumni from all over the world just to get any full-time paying job. I think at the time, only the Canadian banks were hiring because they had a strong balance sheet and visa wasn’t an issue. A lot of the American banks either put people into holding pools, which is what Goldman Sachs did to me and other classmates, which meant they were saying “we're not giving you a full-time offer, but when we do have headcount, we will give you an offer”, which unfortunately puts you in a very bad position with every other bank on the street. So I actually took my GMAT to prepare to do a Master's and I was getting ready to go to the London School of Economics to do a Masters in Finance. Then two months before preparing to move to London, I got a call from an Ivey alumni mentor saying there was an opening in our group - a startup within JP Morgan Sales and Trading, would you be interested? I said, sure - it's a job. Two weeks later, I moved to New York.
IBR: I'm hearing the importance of mentors in your story. Who were these mentors? Who really helped shape your early leadership journey? And how did you reach out to them? How did you really onboard yourself as a mentee?
Joyce: One of the things that I did right, and I think Ivey pushes for, is the importance to identify not only career mentors, but life mentors. I would say to take it to the next level of people that are two or three stages ahead. In your 20s, you need to know people in their 30s and 40s, and so on. I think that is something to keep in mind as a student - always thinking one or two steps ahead. In the beginning, you are building the optionality in your career, because you are building a skill set which is a kind of a commodity in the labour market. As you build that defined skill set, you create more options for yourself. And at some point, you need to then decide, okay, of all those options that I have, which are the ones that will help me further along in my own professional and personal life journey? And having those mentors to help you think about that is really, really important.
IBR: In 2009, I'm assuming [finance] was probably more male dominated than it is now. Were you ever intimidated going into it? Was gender ever a factor that you considered? Or did you just throw yourself in?
Joyce: Yes and no. I think as you become more experienced and senior, you're much more aware of the systemic subconscious bias that exists, which is not something that changes overnight. The role models were different then. If there aren't role models that are women who have families who have done this before, it's kind of hard to take inspiration, so you kind of have to pave that path for yourself. For me personally, it's very much focused on diversity of thought which isn’t a gender specific topic. [Diversity] is also ethnicity, education, work experience, geographic experience - there are intersecting factors.
IBR: I'd really like to go into that role that you had with JP Morgan. In this dynamic startup environment under the umbrella of one of the big investment banking companies, what was that like?
Joyce: It was like baptism by fire. You have to keep in mind that I joined in May 2009, right after financial markets were starting to pick up again. I think at JP Morgan at the time, leadership changes happened every six months, which is quite disruptive. The team I was in at the time, the Pension Advisory Group advised US defined benefit pension plans on their asset allocation strategy. My role specifically within that was to help evaluate alternative investment managers: private equity, growth, venture, real estate, hedge funds, on their strategies, portfolio performance, and ultimately select and allocate money on behalf of pension plans. When I first got into the role, I was wondering when am I ever going to use this skill set again? It was great to have a job at JP Morgan New York in 2009. But at the same time, I was like, ‘this is so niche, when am I going to ever use this?’ Eight months into the role, the division got divested and sold to Pacific Life Insurance Company. All of us had the opportunity to join Pacific Life Insurance Company, but I decided to stay with a bank because I felt the role was niche at the time, and I wanted to have the pedigree - the credentials of working at a tier-one American bank.
IBR: Do you think that was the right decision?
Joyce: Yes, absolutely. I joined the Syndicated and Leveraged Finance group afterwards. And if you do 55 transactions in two years, you learn very quickly how to read an income statement, balance sheet and statement of cash flow, and how to value those businesses and how to pitch it to sales and trading people who talk to investors all day, every day. And the other thing it prepares you for is having a ruthless focus on execution, and being a really great project manager. I look back at those three years at JP Morgan and think that really, it was like graduate studies in the real world, right? Very much real world military training.
IBR: Right. And so what happened after your JP Morgan days? Where did you apply that skillset?
Joyce: So at some point, what happens when you focus so much on transactional financing is you get into what I call “monkey brain mode”. You stop doing that high-level thinking and you get into this high execution focus, and it starts getting a bit boring. I started getting calls from recruiters asking if I’ve considered going to the buy side and getting paid more, and having better work-life balance. So then you start getting enticed. And similarly your Ivey and banking cohort that you've surrounded yourself with also starts thinking like this. I went through about nine months of interviews with 20-30 funds and ended up clicking with one and decided to be an industry specialist. That's how I ended up moving from New York to LA in 2012; I started focusing on software investing, mostly from a debt perspective. I did two years of that, and then had to make some personal decisions, which is what eventually led me to Europe.
IBR: Europe, America - very different, right? What are some of those differences? And how did you essentially make that choice of what firm to work in? And how did you adjust to European life?
Joyce: One of the reasons I moved from LA to London was because at the time I had done long distance with someone I met on holiday for two years. And at some point, I was like I've developed enough skills, and a network where I feel that it's transferable across geographies and industries. Also, because I always liked London - when I was younger, I lived in Manchester with my parents. So for me, it kind of felt like I was going on a journey back to my origins in a way, back to the roots. Unfortunately, that relationship didn't work out. But I ended up falling in love with the European tech ecosystem. And that's what led me to stay here since 2014.
IBR: And what was so attractive about the European tech space?
Joyce: Diversity - of thought, opinion and backgrounds in education. I think it's really interesting when you start working in different international environments, because you’re going back to the topic of pattern recognition. You will start noticing different cultures based on the first five questions that someone asks when they meet you. And there's definitely common patterns between what Canadians ask, Americans ask, British people ask, and Dutch people. I think in American business culture, people form views of you quite early, based on what college you went to, what sports teams you follow, and what businesses you’ve worked at. It can be stereotypically resume-oriented. I think in continental Europe, countries have more of a left-wing approach: society tends to be less around your career and more around your core values, their relationship with you, and things like that.
IBR: So you've fallen in love with European tech, I can definitely see the connection between that and what you're doing now with helping European scale ups develop, but what was that progression like?
Joyce: Again, it goes back to curiosity and growth mindset, and having studied a lot of economics and history, and just generally being interested in that from a young age. I think of every individual business and organisational dynamics as market supply and demand. You never want to be the lowest priced solution. You don't want to be in commoditized markets for too long because there isn't differentiation. And when I look at the labour market, you know, ultimately, what led to me to start Pegafund is I felt there was an oversupply of cheap financial capital that wasn't super differentiated at the early stages. And I was seeing firsthand the struggles and the challenges of an overfunded venture ecosystem.
IBR: And so this segway into entrepreneurship, doing your own thing wasn't completely unique. Were there parallels that you drew between your experience at JP Morgan and building the company?
Joyce: I feel like I've kind of gone in a circle in a way. Before starting Pegafund, I spent five years in two different venture funds. One was a startup venture fund, started by Ivey MBA grad, Craig Netherfield. It was four of us in a tiny room sitting around building websites, setting up the CRM system, and sending outbound emails. It was really exciting and I loved building something from scratch. From there on, some co-investments at Columbia Lake Partners led to the opportunity to join Dawn Capital, which is when I moved from the debt side to the equity side.
IBR: You spoke about how you were kind of baptised by fire when you entered the corporate world. Would you say that it's been a similar experience with entrepreneurship?
Joyce: I think Ivey does a great job of creating that psychological safety to learn and practice. What you don't really learn until you get into the real world is that an entrepreneurial setting is how you learn to fail fast. Once you’ve failed three times or more, and you get up, you then revisit the problem and figure out, okay, how can I do this better, and develop that authentic confidence in yourself that you have the ability to do this over and over again. Fail fast and iterate quickly.
IBR: And so in failing and learning to fail, as you call it, would you say that it becomes easier to fail over time?
Joyce: Make sure you have the right support system around you. What I mean by that is not necessarily people that have great hard skills from a professional perspective, but also people that can really relate to you, have seen where you've come from, and where you're going; people that you share similar values with, people that see you for you, and not the outcomes of your CV - these factors are really important. Having that support system around you will help you from spiralling in your first and second failures. The second, third, and fourth failures become easier because you don't look at it as a failure. You look at it as necessary life lessons and learnings.
IBR: I would like to end with one last question. Looking back on your career spanning finance, private equity, European tech, and now with Pegafund, is there anything that you would do differently or any overarching lessons that you would give to a young Joyce, who had just finished her HBA and was looking for jobs in 2009?
Joyce: I don't know if I would have done things differently; but definitely, I would have placed more weight and value on the courses, curriculum and life experience when it comes to developing soft skills, which become more and more important as you grow in your career. So courses like Negotiations, Communications, and Presentation. I would have taken more of those and put myself in situations where I could practice more often. Because at some point - and this is a bit of a loaded question - is EQ or IQ more important in life and in business?
IBR: Probably EQ.
Joyce: Both are important, but I think EQ is what allows you to be able to be effective in different environments. And communication is so so so important. So I think that's probably what I would have done differently, especially coming from a Finance background, you tend to focus a lot on the analytical and technical skills. But at some point, once you have the fundamentals and have enough practice in the real world, they become less relevant because it becomes much more about building lasting relationships.
