Sam Neckar

My time at Oxford at the College had a profound impact at so many levels – perhaps best illustrated by the enduring force of critical themes unearthed in reading History that have so formatively shaped my life ever since.

Power – how it is won, lost and sustained, and tracing this into the origins of the modern state has held a constant orientating allure for me. After concluding my history degree (and during my subsequent law conversion degree) I worked with Professor Eric Hobsbawm to dive deeper into this theme – raising questions whose scope and gravity I am only beginning to understand.

To a large extent, these questions drove me to leave my practice as a corporate M&A lawyer at Slaughter and May in London and move to Burma in 2012 to experience a frontier economy re-opening after 50 years of military dictatorship – and to see how bold entrepreneurship can be a bridging element, driving innovation notwithstanding the decay in a state’s institutional fabric.

Expanding beyond Burma into investing principally in Pakistan, Egypt, Jordan and East Africa (in businesses ranging from banking, airlines, branded consumer goods, education, healthcare and more) further embedded this conviction that strong private sector leadership can be an innovation highway, bridging gaps in a state apparatus – while never overlooking systemic fragility to regression.

Venturing into conservation at scale in Sub-Saharan Africa (principally in Mozambique, Malawi and South Africa) was an organic addition – since conservation even more starkly demonstrates the criticality of private sector investment, innovation and philanthropy in driving regional stability and impact, bridging the gap left by governments to act in safeguarding these wilderness landscapes (reflected into my role advising the Milton Group and as a trustee to GAWPT).

State structures. Gaps. Innovation bridges. In founding Oak Creek with Michael Warren, we take on these themes at a policy and investment level – partnering for example with the America’s Frontier Fund (AFF) to catalyse an innovation revolution in US defence with critical geo-political ramifications. Similarly, my work with Dr Roger Ferguson to originate and invest in early-stage disruptive founders in the US and UK (via our vehicle, “Oxbridge Ventures”) supports innovation at the inception level.

But my view of the future begins in the past, perhaps best described by Philip Bobbitt, in his seminal work on the evolution of states (“the Shield of Achilles”), namely:

“there are times when the present breaks the shackles of the past to create the future…. But there are also times when the past creates the future by breaking the shackles of the present”.

History in action. Get yours at St Edmund Hall.

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History

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