Scott Gelbard, Founder — SGI Global Partners / Managing Partner — Peak Ventures Early in my career, I worked alongside a CEO who had an extraordinary gift: he could walk into a room full of frustrated stakeholders and, within thirty minutes, have everyone aligned and...

By Scott Gelbard, Founder — SGI Global Partners / Managing Partner — Peak Ventures In 2019, one of my clients — a mid-market distribution company operating across three continents — had what looked like a textbook international strategy. Diversified markets, strong...

By Scott Gelbard, Founder — SGI Global Partners / Managing Partner — Peak Ventures Early in my career, I made a decision that, in retrospect, was almost certainly wrong. I was working on a market entry strategy for a client expanding into a new geography. I had the...

By Scott Gelbard, Founder — SGI Global Partners / Managing Partner — Peak Ventures Not long ago, I sat across the table from the CEO of a mid-sized manufacturing company in Central Europe. He was dismissive. ESG, he told me, was a passing trend — a checkbox exercise...

By Scott Gelbard, Founder — SGI Global Partners / Managing Partner — Peak Ventures Capital is the oxygen of a business. Too little and you suffocate. But here's what most entrepreneurs learn too late: the wrong kind of capital, taken at the wrong time, on the wrong...

By Scott Gelbard, Founder — SGI Global Partners / Managing Partner — Peak Ventures There's a version of cross-cultural business training that I find mostly useless. It goes something like this: don't point the soles of your feet at someone in Thailand, always present...

By Scott Gelbard, Founder — SGI Global Partners / Managing Partner — Peak Ventures Most founders and business owners spend enormous energy building their companies — and almost none thinking about what happens after them. In my 25 years advising businesses across...

The quarterly earnings call is a powerful accountability mechanism. It's also, occasionally, a terrible way to run a business. By Scott Gelbard, Founder — SGI Global Partners Inc. / Managing Partner — Peak Ventures My work spans both the family office world and the...

The most expensive business decisions I've witnessed weren't bold ones. They were impatient ones. By Scott Gelbard, Founder — SGI Global Partners Inc. / Managing Partner — Peak Ventures We live in a business culture that celebrates speed. The language of growth is...