The most valuable career opportunities in finance do not always arrive with the most impressive job title. No one makes this argument more clearly than Matthew Kebble, one of South Africa’s most distinguished and succesful institutional investment specialists. He argues that some of the most valuable experiences of his career did not come from sitting at the centre of the investment-management industry, but from working alongside it, lending to private capital funds and observing how the machinery of alternative investments worked from the credit side of the table.
Early in his career, Kebble worked in fund financing, lending to private capital funds across a range of strategies. It gave him an unusually broad view of the industry, including venture capital, growth, buyout, infrastructure, real estate, secondaries and GP stakes. More importantly, it taught him how the industry actually operated.
Experience compounds when you’re learning
“Don’t optimise for the prestigious seat, optimise for the seat where you’ll learn the most about how the machine really works,” Kebble said to me in an interview we conducted recently. He stated that this lesson has shaped a career that subsequently moved from financing funds into helping build an institutional asset management capability from the ground up.
In hindsight, Kebble believes the apparently unglamorous vantage point was preparing him for an opportunity he could not yet see: “I didn’t know it then, but I was studying for a job that didn’t exist yet.”
There is a broader lesson here for professionals navigating increasingly competitive financial-services careers: experience compounds, but only if people pay attention to what they are learning. Kebble’s early years also placed him in an underdog position. Competing against much larger institutions in the North American fund finance market meant that scale was not available as a differentiator.
His response was to compete on something else.
“We were competing against far bigger institutions in the North American fund finance market, so we couldn’t out-muscle anyone, we had to out-care and out-structure them.”
Open communication is a must
He says that particular experience reinforced the value of open communication as a competitive advantage, stating it was a valuable differentiator, and a foundational principle he emphasises in all his dealings today. For smaller businesses and emerging professionals, this lesson is particularly relevant. When resources, credentials or institutional scale cannot provide an advantage, usefulness, reliability and responsiveness can.
Kebble describes the principle simply: “Differentiate through openness when you can’t differentiate through scale.”
Consistency & reliability is key for success
It was also through this period that he began accumulating what he calls “brand capital” inside the organisation: not through self-promotion, but through consistently reliable work. Every transaction completed properly, every problem removed from someone else’s desk and every commitment honoured contributed to a reputation that eventually created access to a new opportunity.
“The uncomfortable truth is that you earn the next opportunity before you can see it, and it’s usually achieved by doing work nobody’s watching.”
That philosophy became particularly important when Kebble was given the opportunity to become the first hire into a new investment-management business. For many professionals, the prospect of starting with a blank sheet of paper would be daunting. For Kebble, the appeal was the mission. He argues that a blank canvas with no purpose is just anxiety; but a blank canvas in service of a genuinely exciting ambition is the most fun you can have professionally.
But building from scratch also exposed the limits of experience. His fund-finance background had taught him how funds looked from the outside. Building an institutional platform required learning how the machinery actually worked. That meant learning through doing, and learning from people who knew more.
Kebble credits an experienced COO, with nearly three decades in asset management, with teaching him the operational craft required to turn the existing origination engine into an institutional platform. This lesson is important for ambitious professionals: confidence should not be confused with having all the answers.
“I had more resilience than experience when I started, and I’ve come to believe that’s the correct ratio for year one. Experience tells you why things can’t be done. Resilience drives you to get them done, no matter what.”
The same philosophy informed the teams he subsequently helped build. His hiring approach was straightforward: “Hire for attitude, train for skill, and be almost unreasonable about the attitude bar.”
Hire for qualities that compound over time
In an early-stage business, he argues, jobs rarely remain static for long enough for a fixed skill set to be the decisive advantage. Instead, he looks for hunger, determination, professionalism and obsessive attention to detail. Those qualities, he believes, compound over time.
But, hiring for attitude only works if organisations are prepared to develop the people they bring in. Training, mentoring and giving people exposure to new responsibilities become part of the investment. In a small team, Kebble found that the most expensive failures were often not failures of capability, but failures caused by people working from different assumptions. He believes the soundest operating philosophy for an environment that upskills individuals is actually quite simple: “Over-communicate, deliberately.”
Speed versus velocity: know the difference
He also distinguishes between speed and what he calls velocity: “Speed is how fast you’re moving, velocity is speed with direction.”
For professionals and businesses alike, that distinction is significant. Activity can create the appearance of progress, but only directed activity compounds towards an outcome.
Looking back, Kebble sees the different stages of his career as less disconnected than they appeared at the time. Fund finance taught him the anatomy of private capital. Being the underdog taught him to differentiate through substance and communication. Reliable work built the reputation that opened the next door. And building a business from scratch taught him how to turn knowledge into institutional capability.
The broader lesson is that careers rarely reveal their logic while they are being lived. That may be the most useful argument for professionals tempted to optimise every career decision for status. Because the prestigious seat may give you the better title, but the seat that puts you closest to the machinery, where you can learn how things actually work, solve problems, build relationships and earn trust before anyone is watching – now that may be the one that ultimately takes you further.
By Thomas Boyd, Economic Analyst
