By Shalene Gupta
features
Spencer Lake’s path to the highest echelons of global finance began in an unlikely spot: the cab of a Budweiser delivery truck, traveling back roads around Rock Springs, Wyoming.
There are many routes to success. Lake’s would lead him from Rock Springs to Suffolk University in Boston and then to Manhattan, Hong Kong, and London, where he scaled the ladder at leading investment banks including JPMorgan Chase and Merrill Lynch. At HSBC, one of the world’s largest financial institutions, he led the team that helped Greece restructure its 260-billion-euro debt, ran the markets division globally, and rose to become vice chairman of global banking and markets. Today he’s a co-founding partner in a $130 million venture capital fund focused on fintech.
Lake was just 21 when he found himself behind the wheel of that Budweiser truck, but he’d already done a lot of living.
He’d grown up on a small island off the coast of Newfoundland, Canada, where his parents ran one of the province’s largest and most successful fishing companies. The Lake Group had ocean-going trawlers that fished the Grand Banks, multiple processing plants, and distribution chains in both Canada and the U.S.
It was expected that Spencer, the oldest boy in a family of five children, would one day run the business. “He was like a little made man,” jokes his older sister, Sarah Lake. He was also a born prankster, adds younger sister Suzanne Lake Giles—“funny, playful, and stubborn as hell.” “A total hellion,” agrees Sarah.
At age 15, like all the Lake children, he was sent off to boarding school in the U.S., a rude shock for a teenage boy used to island life and a large, boisterous family. He excelled at sports, scraped by in the classroom, and moved on to Clarkson University in upstate New York to study engineering. There, he admits, engineering often took a back seat to partying, and after two years “it was suggested I might take some time off to find myself.”
That search took him first to Iceland, where he worked in a fish-packing plant, and then to South Africa, where he worked as a welder and a door-to-door salesman. By his own admission, Lake was “starting to bottom out.” He felt far from home and family, and far from the life he once imagined he might lead. And by now, there was no family business to fall back on. The Newfoundland commercial fishing industry was collapsing, done in by declining fish stocks and mounting debt. Major companies like the Lake Group were nationalized, and the family sold its holdings for pennies on the dollar, leaving them with virtually nothing.
After his South Africa jobs ended, on a whim Lake followed a friend to Wyoming, where he landed a job driving a Budweiser truck. He was good at his job—so good that one night his manager invited him to dinner in his Winnebago home in the distributorship parking lot and told him that if he kept it up, one day Lake might have a shot at his job. It was meant as a compliment, but Lake panicked. This was not the future he wanted. He needed to reroute.
“It was almost like a physical sensation,” Lake says now. “I thought, ‘I gotta get out of here.’”
Within a year, Lake was sitting in a Suffolk classroom, building a new road forward.
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Photography by David Woolfall
If hard times offer hard-won lessons, Lake was ready to learn his.
He quit his truck-driving job and moved to Boston, where his parents had settled, and began applying to colleges. With his checkered résumé, most schools wouldn’t give him the time of day—until he sat down with an admissions officer at Suffolk.
“Suffolk was the one place that said, ‘We think you’ve learned a lesson. We think you’re ready to apply yourself,’” Lake says. He took the opportunity and ran with it. Enrolling in the Business School, he crammed two-and-a-half years’ worth of courses into 18 months while working as a bartender, and graduated in 1984 with a degree in finance and marketing. He went on to get an MBA at NYU, and joined JPMorgan Chase in 1987.
Suffolk also taught Lake something not found in the curriculum: Look at the person, not just the résumé, a lesson he put into practice when he began hiring people himself at Merrill Lynch and HSBC. “Almost to a person,” he says, “everyone I’ve hired has been an underdog—practical people with a sense of gravity who are willing to work hard.”
Today, as he and his partners weigh which fintech companies are worthy of investment, their “preferred founder is someone who’s had a range of experiences, including some failures, and has learned how to work through them,” he says. “Business is not smooth. There are always going to be rocky points. You want someone who understands that. That person is better able to take risks and better able to sell because they’re actually more human to customers.”
Look at the person, not just the résumé
Although Lake never became an engineer, he still thinks like one. He sees banking as an engineering problem, and looks for ways to build structures that will solve problems in banking and create success stories.
“I’ve never met someone like him,” says Marc Murphy, CEO of the Irish fintech firm Fenergo, now valued at over $1 billion. “He can see the way the market is going—the problem and the solution.”
A few years after he joined HSBC, Lake was asked to become the global head of capital markets, a new group that encompassed eight different financing businesses that had never been bundled together before. “That reflects not only the trust that HSBC had in him, but also the vision that Spencer had about what needed to be done,” says Roger Thomson, who worked with Lake at HSBC for a decade. Lake created a business division that generated $11 billion in revenue, with 4,000 employees operating out of 65 countries, and helped make HSBC’s capital markets team No. 1 in the world for several consecutive years.
Lake was working 12- to 14-hour days, six or seven days a week—and having the time of his life. “I really thrived on that—dealing with all the cultures, all the people, all the issues,” he says. “I was so happy to get that chance because I never in my life thought I’d get that kind of job.”
What sets Lake apart, friends and family agree, is that he isn’t just about hard work: He prioritizes people. Thomson recalls a simple going-away party for a junior employee that grew into a 500-person bash—and Lake doing some fast footwork to make sure HSBC covered the expense.“Spencer created a real esprit de corps,” Thomson says. “You felt you were part of a team—the best team.”
Family is Lake’s most important team: He and his wife, Heather, have three children, now in their late teens and 20s. And while London has been his home since 1999, he is very close with his sisters and brothers, and travels to the States multiple times every year to visit them. The boyhood prankster remains “extraordinarily fun,” says his sister Sarah. “You want Spencer on your guest list.”
Increasingly, Lake’s sense of family includes Suffolk University, the place that believed in him when few others did. “That was a catalytic moment for me, and I think about it all the time,” he says. A generous supporter of the Sawyer Business School, he is a member of the Dean’s Cabinet, and has hosted Suffolk events in London.
In 2016, HSBC went through a leadership change. Lake was among those in the line of succession to become CEO, but when the firm went a different way he decided to make a clean break and chart a new path forward.
Lake served on a number of boards. He traveled to Bhutan and hiked the Himalayas with a guide. When he returned—after helping the guide build a wellness and mindfulness company—he knew the problem he wanted to solve: invest in financial technology to give banks the tools they need to improve services and reduce their costs.
“Banks have built the right structures; what’s needed now are technology solutions that enable all of us to go from here to there with just a click,” Lake says. “In everything, that’s what I look for: simple changes that make life better.”
In 2019, Lake joined two other venture capitalists to raise a $130-million fund and form Element Ventures. They invest in technology companies that make it easier and safer for people to bank. One of their latest investments is a company that ties a purchaser’s identity and password irrevocably to bitcoin as soon as they buy it, so it’s impossible to lose even if a computer or hardware storing the bitcoin gets lost.
Lake knows a thing or two about finding what’s been lost, about what success looks like and finding the right road to get there. “There are no shortcuts,” he says. “I’d like to be known as the guy who really cared about his people and his business, who rolled up his sleeves and worked hard.”
Banking as engineering
– Spencer Lake
“Banks have built the right structures; what’s needed now are technology solutions that enable all of us to go from here to there with just a click. In everything, that’s what I look for: simple changes that make life better.”
