Post by INSEAD NYC Trek

🗽𝗜𝗡𝗦𝗘𝗔𝗗 26D 𝗡𝗲𝘄 𝗬𝗼𝗿𝗸 𝗧𝗿𝗲𝗸 | 𝗗𝗮𝘆 2 Day two in New York for INSEAD 26D cohort! From a patient-capital impact fund, to a global scale-up engine, to a career that's been reinvented five times over, the cohort got four very different windows into what a meaningful career can look like. Acumen (Daniel Waldron and Christopher Wayne , with a drop-in from founder & CEO Jacqueline Novogratz ) showed us how "patient capital" works: raising philanthropic money and investing it as early-stage equity in businesses that fight poverty. 25 years, $335M across 241 companies, and neither of our hosts came through a finance track (one started in theatre, the other in journalism and smallholder farming). Jenny Santi (Saint Partners), an INSEAD alumna who has been a philanthropy advisor to billionaires, an author, a painter, and now a psychotherapist, reframed reinvention as growth rather than failure. Her smartest move at INSEAD wasn't recruiting, it was a year of curious coffee conversations, one of which became her first job. Her reminder to a room full of high-achievers: the INSEAD personality is brilliant at delivering and dangerously prone to burnout and comparison, and success is worth redefining beyond the obvious markers. Jade Huang (StyleSage, acquired by Centric Software) walked us through the founder journey from idea to exit. StyleSage was born in P2 of her own INSEAD year, ran two years with no revenue, and exited with a client roster from H&M to LVMH. Her hardest-won lessons: founders have to learn to sell before anyone else can, and the first 20 hires set the culture, so fire faster than feels comfortable. Linda Rottenberg (Endeavor) brought the "elsewhere" thesis: talent is everywhere, innovation can scale anywhere, and the future is elsewhere. Endeavor backs scale-up founders in markets the usual investors overlook (ElevenLabs in Poland, Mercado Libre in Argentina, Cashea in Venezuela, now a verb that runs roughly 7% of the country's GDP). Her mantra, and the title of her book: crazy is a compliment. Three completely different answers to one question, what a career can actually be, all in a single afternoon. The cohort left buzzing. #INSEADNYCTrek #INSEAD #MBA #ImpactInvesting #Leadership #Entrepreneurship #CareerJourney #INSEADNYCTrek2026