High Net Purpose

In this episode of High Net Purpose, Joe McCarthy sits down with Greg Greeley, CEO of Simon & Schuster and former Amazon and Airbnb leader, for a conversation about purpose, customer obsession, Amazon Prime, transformation, AI and legacy.

Greg describes purpose as giving back to society more than you take by building companies that serve customers, suppliers, employees and stakeholders. The conversation moves from his childhood in a farming community and the bankruptcy that shaped his appetite for risk, through Amazon’s dot-com-era pressure and the creation of Prime, to his current role leading Simon & Schuster through a period of change.

Greg shares:

Why his definition of purpose is simple: give back more than you take
What he learned building Amazon Prime alongside Jeff Bezos and the team
How childhood adversity and family bankruptcy shaped his appetite for risk
Why the best leaders stay obsessed with customers, not competitors
Why transformation requires builders, not just operators
How AI is changing leadership, decision-making and long-term value creation

If you're a senior operator, founder, family office principal, or leader navigating uncertainty, this episode will challenge how you think about purpose, growth and long-term impact.

The practical test at the centre of the episode is simple: are you building something that will outlast you, and are you building the team that can carry it forward?

Greg Greeley | Bio
Greg Greeley is Chief Executive Officer of Simon & Schuster, the 102-year-old publisher now operating as an independent company. He grew up in a small farming community, where his father moved from selling insurance to farmers into running restaurants - an entrepreneurial household whose later bankruptcy, just as Greg left for college, taught him self-reliance and shaped his appetite for doing hard things.

Trained as an engineer with a computer systems degree and an MBA in finance, Greg began his career in aerospace before moving to Sun Microsystems in the mid-1990s. In 1999 he left Sun - then at the top of its game - to join Amazon, initially in finance for worldwide operations. Over nearly two decades at Amazon he led the worldwide media business through the digital transition, created Super Saver Shipping, and was central to the creation and global expansion of Amazon Prime. He went on to join Airbnb in a senior leadership role during its period of hyper-growth, and today applies that builder's playbook to publishing, where he is focused on making a century-old company “work like a 102-year-old startup”.

He describes his purpose simply: to give back to society more than you take by building great companies - and to be remembered as a builder.
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What if teaching kids about money was the smartest economic policy we have?

Louise Hill did not set out to build a fintech. She set out to solve a problem in her own home. Watching her young children spend money they could not really see, she realised there was nothing to teach the next generation how to handle money in a digital world. That gap became GoHenry, the app that has helped millions of families teach their kids to earn, save, spend and invest.
In this episode of High Net Purpose, Louise tells Joe McCarthy the whole story. Founding a company in her forties as a working mum. Breaking the world record for equity crowdfunding. Building across the UK, the US and Europe. And the campaign that put financial education on the primary school curriculum in England. She is honest about the hard parts too, the fundraising rooms, the weight of being the person everything rested on, and what kept her going. It is a conversation about purpose, about impact, and about building something that lasts.

Key talking points
• Founding GoHenry in her forties as a working mum, inspired by her own children.
• Breaking the Crowdcube world record for equity crowdfunding.
• Raising over $100m, and the reality of fundraising as a female founder.
• Scaling across the UK, the US and Europe, and selling the business twice.
• The campaign to put financial education on the primary curriculum.
• Why money habits form young, and what the gap before 2028 means for kids.
• Staying steady through the hardest moments of building a company.

Connect with Louise on LinkedIn
https://www.linkedin.com/in/louise-hill-5197614/

GoHenry / Acorns Early - kids financial education app
https://www.acorns.com/early/

Edison Partners - led GoHenry's Series A round
https://www.edisonpartners.com

University of St Andrews - financial behavioural insights research
https://www.st-andrews.ac.uk

Louise Hill is Founder and Executive Chair of GoHenry, the money app helping kids learn to earn, save, spend and invest. She co-founded the business in 2012 and built it from the ground up, expanding to the US in 2018, acquiring French fintech Pixpay in 2022, and merging with US fintech Acorns in 2023. A passionate advocate for financial education, she campaigned for years to make it compulsory in primary schools in England, with success. It joins the curriculum from September 2028. She appeared as an expert judge on The Apprentice (Series 19), sits on Innovate Finance’s Unicorn Council for UK FinTech, is a Board Advisor to The Payments Association, and is a dedicated mentor of female founders.
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Welcome to the hotseat where Joe McCarthy sits with Sir Ronald Cohen, co-founder of Apax Partners, Chair of the Global Steering Group for Impact Investment, and author of IMPACT.

Sir Ronald is widely regarded as the father of both European venture capital and impact investing. He arrived in London as an 11-year-old refugee from Egypt speaking almost no English, made his way to Oxford and Harvard, and went on to build one of the defining venture and private equity firms of its generation before stepping away to devote himself to what he calls the impact revolution.

His argument is simple and radical: governments are stretched, inequality is widening, and relying on taxation and philanthropy alone has failed. The answer is to redirect the trillions already moving through capital markets by measuring impact the way we measure profit. In this conversation he explains why 2026 is a watershed year for that idea, and how AI is changing what is possible.

In this conversation, Sir Ronald and Joe discuss the following topics:
Why optimising for impact is a route to superior returns, not a trade-off
The hidden risks of impact-blind investing: carbon taxes, consumer flight, and talent
Why carbon tax is the single lever that moves the dial on emissions
How impact-weighted accounting turns tons of carbon and water into monetary value
The 1929-to-GAAP parallel and why transparency built modern markets
What Harry Markowitz and the measurement of risk teach us about measuring impact
Whether public market sustainable investing has any real additionality
Measuring social impact: pay, representation, and the cost of unemployment to a community
Where AI meets impact, from education at scale to the first AI-derived drug
How families and family offices should build impact at the portfolio level
Governments shifting from funding inputs to paying for outcomes
His advice to a younger self: start young, think big, stick with it, and bring impact to it

Follow us on:
YouTube: @HighNetPurpose
Instagram: @highnetpurpose
Twitter: @HighNetPurpose
LinkedIn: high-net-purpose

Connect with Sir Ronald Cohen:
LinkedIn: Sir Ronald Cohen
Website: sirronaldcohen.org

Books: IMPACT: Reshaping Capitalism to Drive Real Change (2nd expanded edition, 2025), The Second Bounce of the Ball, ON IMPACT

00:00 Introduction and Episode Overview
02:33 Sir Ronald's Sense of Purpose
05:18 Refugee Roots and Early Life
06:44 Oxford Union and Learning to Speak Without Notes
09:14 From McKinsey to Founding Apax Partners
10:38 Building European Venture Capital from Scratch
11:48 Deciding to Leave Apax at 60
13:02 The Government Call That Started the Impact Mission
15:36 The Social Impact Bond - From Idea to Peterborough
17:57 Challenges and Surprises in the Impact Journey
20:03 Why Impact Is Not a Trade-Off for Returns
22:54 Carbon Tax as an Investor Risk
24:52 Consumer Preferences - Cycle vs Long-Term Trend
28:12 Impact Weighted Accounting - Origins and How It Works
33:24 From ESG 1.0 to Rigorous Impact Measurement
35:27 Additionality in Public Markets
38:10 Leaders and Laggards - Sector-Level Impact Transparency
41:36 How AI Is Unlocking Impact Data at Scale
44:00 Monetising Social Impact - Diversity Deficits and Employment
46:58 Impact Lenses Across the Whole Portfolio
51:06 Advice for Families and Entrepreneurs Deploying Capital
55:53 Where to Go for Reliable Impact Information
58:23 Governments, Outcomes Funds and the Systemic Shift
01:03:13 Advice to a Younger Self - and the Second Bounce of the Ball
01:04:07 How Sir Ronald Stays Energised
01:05:29 Closing Reflections

This podcast is prepared by Islandbridge Capital Limited who are authorised and regulated by the Financial Conduct Authority.

All content on High Net Purpose is provided as general information only. It does not constitute any advice or recommendation or representations, and is not intended to influence listeners or users into making any specific investments or any other decisions.
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Two-time Pulitzer finalist on the scientist who won the Nobel Prize and may not be able to stop what he started.

What if the person trying to make artificial intelligence safe is also one of the people racing to build it?

In this episode of High Net Purpose, Joe McCarthy sits down with Sebastian Mallaby, bestselling author and two-time Pulitzer Prize finalist, whose latest book explores Demis Hassabis, Google DeepMind and the quest for superintelligence.

Over the course of the conversation, Sebastian unpacks the extraordinary story behind DeepMind: why it was built in London, how Demis held onto a mission formed in childhood, and why the race for AI sits at the intersection of science, ambition, safety and power.

From AlphaGo’s victory over Lee Sedol to the battle for AI safety oversight inside Google, this is a conversation about what happens when human purpose meets machine intelligence. It asks whether AI will deepen human potential, undermine it, or force us to redefine what purpose means altogether.

Along the way, we explore the role of founders, family offices and capital allocators in a world where the technology changes faster than the rules around it.

This is the story of the AI paradox, and the man trying to understand the people building the future.

00:00 Introduction and Episode Overview
02:31 Sebastian Mallaby on Purpose and His Career
05:34 Diplomacy, Complexity and the Economist
06:46 How Mallaby Gets Access to Exceptional People
09:24 Research as Therapy: The 360 Method
10:41 Finding the Central Paradox in Every Subject
11:50 First Encounters with Demis Hassabis
14:46 Hassabis as Authentic Entrepreneur: The 1993 Vision
17:44 Mustafa Suleiman, Geoffrey Hinton and the Co-Founders
19:48 Safety Baked In: DeepMind's Founding Tension
22:22 Leaked Documents and the Fight with Sundar Pichai
25:39 Can Governments Actually Control AI Risk?
26:51 The Innovator's Dilemma and the ChatGPT Moment
29:35 Hassabis as Leader: Science, Likability and Scale
30:32 AlphaGo vs Lee Sedol and What It Revealed
33:31 Human Purpose in an AI World
35:19 Hassabis on Consciousness and the Meaning of Being Human
36:18 AI Investment Framework for Capital Allocators
39:27 Health, Writing Discipline and Final Advice
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For the past two years, High Net Purpose has been a series of conversations about other people’s purpose.

What we didn’t expect was how much those conversations would change us.

In this episode, we’re taking a break from the usual format to look back at the moments from the first 26 episodes that most influenced our thinking - and ultimately shaped Islandbridge’s journey to becoming the Purpose Driven Multi-Family Office.

This isn’t a highlight reel. It’s a reflection on the ideas that challenged our assumptions, sharpened our values, and changed how we think about allocating financial, human, and intellectual capital.

Along the way, we revisit lessons from guests including: Martha Lane Fox, Diego Piacentini and David Miliband.

This episode is for anyone asking what purpose really looks like in practice - and how listening carefully can shape the way you lead.
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