{"type":"rich","version":"1.0","provider_name":"Transistor","provider_url":"https://transistor.fm","author_name":"Alt Goes Mainstream: The Latest on Alternative Investments, WealthTech, & Private Markets","title":"I Squared's Dr. Sadek Wahba - it's time to \"Build\"","html":"","width":"100%","height":180,"duration":4586,"description":"Welcome back to the Alt Goes Mainstream podcast.\nWe went to Miami to sit down with the professor of infrastructure investing and Founder, Chairman, and Managing Partner of I Squared, Dr. Sadek Wahba. \nSadek has blended academic knowledge and a practical approach to infrastructure investing to build I Squared into a $60B infrastructure investment firm in 14 years, some of which he has adroitly distilled into the 2024 book that he authored, Build: Investing in America’s Infrastructure.\nWe had such a fascinating and wide-ranging discussion that I’ve decided to break down our conversation into chapters.\n“We are enormously boring by design”: From the World Bank to building a $60B infrastructure investing behemoth\n[00:00:00–00:16:19]\n\nSadek has been investing in a category, infrastructure, that he calls “invsible until it’s missing.” He’s brought experience as an economist at The World Bank and running Morgan Stanley Infrastructure as CEO to bear as he has built out I Squared into a leading infrastructure investment firm.\nSome notable quotes from this chapter:\n“You open your tap water, you never think where the water comes from … So you take a lot of that for granted.”\n\n“For better or worse, it may say something about us being enormously boring, but the only thing we do is infrastructure.”\n\n“With the boom in AI, and the need for power and data centers … add another five-plus trillion dollars that will need to be invested in transmission lines, power generation, data centers, fiber optics and all sorts of infrastructure.”\n\nNo free lunch: ownership, regulation, and the ghost of Flint\n\n[00:16:19–00:32:40]\n\nU.S. infrastructure has shifted from private ownership to overleveraged municipalities. Sadek breaks down what has gone wrong with different infrastructure investment models around the world by dissecting who owns an asset, who manages it, who regulates it, and why collapsing those three roles into one is exactly what happened in Flint, Michigan.\nSome notable quotes...","thumbnail_url":"https://img.transistorcdn.com/AFAZ1vkAT92lFJtqt-r0HeFQ55KTdcbJHmgKXaMlAtY/rs:fill:0:0:1/w:400/h:400/q:60/mb:500000/aHR0cHM6Ly9pbWct/dXBsb2FkLXByb2R1/Y3Rpb24udHJhbnNp/c3Rvci5mbS9zaG93/LzE5MDA4LzE2MTQ1/Mzk1MDUtYXJ0d29y/ay5qcGc.webp","thumbnail_width":300,"thumbnail_height":300}