When Brent Irvin joined Tencent as group general counsel (GC) nearly nine years ago, the Chinese upstart was already a tech wunderkind, boasting revenue close to RMB20bn. But few foresaw the trajectory it would take from there: with dramatic growth in 2017, the company is now valued at more than $477bn. ‘We have always been …
Continue reading “Asia GC perspective – Tencent on the dollar”
‘You have to, to serve these markets, re-imagine how money can be managed and moved, because there’s going to be more change in the next five years in financial services than happened in the past 30.’ Dan Schulman, chief executive, PayPal Global investment in fintech companies hit an all-time high of US$27.4bn in 2017, an …
‘A good general counsel (GC) should do three things,’ says National Grid’s Alison Kay: ‘Manage the legal requirements of the business, manage their people and manage their budget.’ But as managing the legal requirements of a large business becomes more time consuming, GCs are increasingly finding it difficult to pay adequate attention to costs and …
Continue reading “The New GC Toolkit: Hired help – bringing new skills to legal teams”
Storyteller. Ninja. Scrum Master. Brand Champion. Evangelist. The modern commercial world has created many new genres of work, but sometimes it is hard to know what they mean. As the London School of Economics’ headline-grabbing anthropologist David Graeber once wrote: ‘It’s as if someone were out there making up pointless jobs just for the sake …
Continue reading “Disruptive tech: Riding Schumpeter’s gale”
