Yuri Khodjamirian Is An Intentional Investor

We all learn by experience.

Have you ever played chess? If you have, you’ve got experience. It doesn’t mean you’re good, but it means you’ve experienced it. If all you’ve ever done is watched The Queen’s Gambit, you’re not experienced. You might have some working knowledge of how to play chess, but you don’t have the learned experience of actually doing it.

The same is true in a lot of areas of life.

Take global business leaders (and/or investors). They might go to fancy schools, get advanced degrees, and even study impressive sounding fields like the macro and micro economics of international business theories. But, how do we know if they’re experienced?

Most people who are great at some activity start at a young age.

I’m not saying a person can’t become a great global business leader or investor without starting early, but I am saying there’s a difference if you did start early. If the interest was only spawned by the time you got into college, you’re at a disadvantage. Not an impossible one, but what experience does that person really have?

I’m fascinated by those who started early in an area, building a set of learned experiences before they even knew they could be valuable, and have followed through on them for the rest of their lives.

Yuri Khodjamirian is one of those people.

Yuri’s a global investor, who thinks a lot about businesses with sustainable moats, because he’s got first hand learned experience in being a global citizen determined to grow without being stomped out.

He was born in the Soviet Union, in 1985, in Armenia, to two scientist parents. As the Soviet Union collapsed, they emigrated to Copenhagen in 1992, where he’d ultimately grow up.

He watched a lot of The Simpsons in those days (mostly seasons 2-12, ahem), but only after schools. Yes, schools plural.

His molecular biologist mom insisted he (and his twin brother) attended both the local Russian embassy school AND the local Copenhagen “international” school to start, which his theoretical physicist father also endorsed, all the way from Germany, where he’d won a fellowship and landed for work to help support the family from afar.

The UK comes later, for college, as do the world travels, the backpacking expeditions, the various internships and jobs, not to mention the multi-hyphenate mentors across various disciplines.

It all results in his position today, as the CIO of Tema (an active-ETF focused asset manager), running portfolios of globally-scaled thematic investments.

But it all results from those experiences.

Listen to even just the first 10 minutes of our conversation for The Intentional Investor on Epsilon Theory. Life isn’t a textbook, but Yuri could write a whole volume of textbooks about his learned experiences. From his childhood, to his education, to his career, entrepreneurial spirit, and the way he and his wife are now raising their own children—you can’t have his life, but you can learn something from it.

All of this is why Yuri Khodjamirian is an Intentional Investor. Out now on YouTube or wherever you get your podcasts: