Adam Torres and Alina Plaia discuss the Korea Conference.
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Show Notes:
Listen to coverage of The Korea Conference in Marina Del Rey, California. In this episode, Adam Torres interviews Alina Plaia, Co Founder & CEO at Wide Bridge, Inc., explore entrepreneurship and the Korea Conference.
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About Alina Plaia
A proactive advocate for public and private companies that rely on cutting and bleeding edge technologies in advancing their products and services. With nearly 20 years of experience in investor relations & communications, investment banking & equity research sales, SEC and FINRA regulatory reporting, technology sector (IT services & software) coupled with CPA background, She brings invaluable multi-faceted approach in preparing companies for successful interactions with public and private investors.
Being a strategic thinker and the influencer, her passion is working alongside of C-suite, M&A teams, CMOs, and heads of business lines, anchoring aligned marketing and communications strategies to consistently strengthen financial and corporate brand. Nominated in 2017 by IR Magazine for Innovation in IR. she advised, led and managed successful placements of companies listed on NYSE, NASDAQ and LSE. Her expertise also includes helping companies determine whether they are ready for capital markets, introduce them to potential investors, conduct non-deal roadshows, help select most synergistic placement syndicate, and lead the best-in-class proactive investor relations / communications strategy.
Full Unedited Transcript
Hey, I’d like to welcome you to another episode of Mission Matters. My name is Adam Torres, and if you’d like to apply to be a guest in the show, just head on over to missionmatters. com and click on be our guest to apply. All right. So today I’m in Marina Del Rey, California, and I’m at the Korea conference, 2024, and I was able to get Alina on the show for a quick interview.
Alina, welcome. Thank you so much for having me, Adam. All right, Alina. So we’re in beautiful Marina Del Rey. We’re at the Korea conference. What are you looking forward to? I’m just looking forward, of course, to meeting like minded people, just like, you know, while we’re all here, because ultimately, we all have one goal to Raise money to make the world somehow better place through impact investing, through profit investing, for profit, not for profit, and so on.
And where people collaborate, obviously like minded people. Yeah. Create beautiful things happen. Amazing. And I understand you’re a CEO, you’re an entrepreneur advisor, many things. Maybe tell me a little bit about your background and how you got started. Sure. Well, my parents pushed me out of Eastern Europe.
Hmm. And sad that I really should be finding myself elsewhere, outside of the wings of my grandpas and grandmas. Were they entrepreneurs too, Hannah? No, not at all. My dad actually is a biologist. Oh, okay. And a geneticist. And my mom was at the roots of building investment banking industry in Russia, which was very Wow.
Yeah. So I got a little bit of, it was in the blood a little bit of both sides. Yeah. Well, my mom had super strong influence on me, but also my dad with his love of investing. Nature and camping. So I like very fine things, but I also very deeply connected with nature, which is actually, thank you so much for these questions because it just helped me realize why, no, I’m serious.
I’m having good thoughts. Why I actually do what I do because I don’t, I wanted always to be a banker because I always wanted to be like my mom. But I had to do like an uphill battle, I guess, a keto, like my son would say, and make it the harder, the longer route to banking. So I took public accounting in bachelor’s.
I went to Pace in New York and then I studied finance for my master’s. But my first job was at Credit Suisse in regulatory and then I moved to Deloitte and Touche back then. Now it’s at Deloitte. So it’s very heavily focused accounting background. And then I moved to finance through regulatory, through middle office.
And so when I finally made it to the investment banking on wall street, it was very intuitive for me because I could read prospectuses very well, and I could see kind of the entire story of the company, not just through the sales eyes, but it through the operations, their risk, yeah, and the accounting, for sure, financial statements.
But, not to make this interview too long. No, I love it. Tell me. This is great. So, yeah. I left banking, investment banking, in 2010 because my mom moved to the States. And we started, actually, no, I left it in 09. We started a company, it’s called Whitebridge, in 08, 09. So it’s about 26, 27. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, my goodness, 26 years ago.
Am I dating myself? You’re not. I’m curious about, but I want to talk, like a lot of entrepreneurs, a lot of startup founders watch this. And I’m just curious when you finally made that jump from, let’s just call it corporate America. I mean, you’re an investment bank. You were doing a lot of entrepreneurial activities already anyway, just based on the nature of your business and knowledge.
When you finally made that jump, like, what was that like for you? It was so scary. It was so scary. And well, for me, too, by the way, for me, too, by the way, and I was actually 20 weeks pregnant at a time. So, and I was in between jobs and nobody, unfortunately, well, fortunately, actually, would hire me. In retrospect, though, so that’s a big statement that she just said, like, sometimes we think that, like It was so scary and I wanted, like I like to say, to get back right into the revolving door.
Yeah, I get it. Which I just got out because this is what I know. I know sales trading. I know how to sell companies. I know how to raise money. Yeah, I just led me back on my W 2, I don’t know what I’m doing. And after first two years of struggles, really, and doing a lot of work for free, what goes around comes around, always.
And I never looked back. So 20, not, 2009 through 2011 were pretty tough. And then I never looked back. But what I wanted to emphasize, you know, the part of the background that you said, Yeah. Investment banking from nature is very, very far, but that’s exactly what I’m actually doing right now. After taking companies public on our So did it go kind of, did it come with kind of like full circle?
I don’t want to put like words in your mouth, but like I’m seeing it as like, wow. So you kind of got, you know I just realized that, yeah, it came full circle. So when it was taking companies public, we also played sometimes a role of IR, investor relations. We would train the management to talk to the funds from which they want to raise money.
Because it’s very important to understand the language of each fund. Yeah. What are they trying to achieve? What is their mandate? Because the investors, into their fund, their LPs give them money for a certain purpose, right? So, if you just do a blind pitch. It’s very many times, right? It’s just going to fall on deaf ears.
So we coached management to raise money, to create, you know, their investor base. And then I realized that a lot of investors are actually asking about things like culture, about things like. Well, how would you, is that a little bit of a shift? Cause you’ve been in the business a while. So like, if we go back to the beginning, I, I don’t, was that a little bit of a shift?
It’s just the numbers, right? It’s just the, yeah. And investors started asking about other risks since they have thought of non financial metrics. Wow. And that’s hopeful to me, like it not, I mean, we want to make money. That’s a given. That’s a, that’s a given. Okay. But, but the new consumers are smarter, like all the things when you look further down, like downstream, like that’s a hopeful thing to me for the environment, especially as you were mentioning.
Well, exactly. Yes. That’s, that’s precisely right, Adam. And a lot of, especially younger investors that even have their own family offices and Europe is a little bit more ahead. I’d imagine that. I’d imagine. They want, you know, that. They are investing also with Impa. Yep. Not only, you know, give me the hard dollars.
Yeah. Because ultimately if we’re going to damage people. Damage nature damage or somehow, you know, disrupt the climate or, you know, whatever fertility of our, you know, increase acidity of our ocean. Somehow it’s going to come back to haunt us either through, you know, shifts in weather or neighborhoods being destroyed.
You’ll have nowhere to lend money into or sell your products. And so younger generations definitely prefer the balance between hardcore dollars. And what else can I do with it? Because I can get the profit, but I also can make an impact. And given, keeping in mind the great generational shift that, well, Yeah.
You know, it’s very important to understand that. So this is what I’m actually focusing on. Oh, yes. Combination of profits and impact. Oh my gosh. I think we get, the listeners might be able to hear this, which is okay, because I want to keep this in. We’re not going to edit this out on purpose. Alina, we’re about to take off.
Thank you so much for coming on this show today. I guess we got to cut. Captain saying, we’re leaving. Thank you. Appreciate you.