20VC Founder: Harry Stebbings – Media, Venture Capital, & What It Actually Costs to Win

The Gstaad Guy sits down with Devon DeJardin, the visual artist working across painting, drawing and sculpture, whose Guardian figures have travelled from a friend’s apartment floor in North Hollywood to private collections and the cover of a number one album. Devon had never picked up a brush. He had a world religion degree, five hundred dollars to his name, a mattress he folded into a laundry closet each morning and a stack of unsold jackets when a stranger in Indiana paid him a hundred dollars for a ten minute phone call to tell him he was meant to paint. Six months later some of the most prominent collectors in Los Angeles were emailing his studio.

The Gstaad Guy sits down with Emily Oberg, founder and CEO of Sporty & Rich, who turned a Tumblr mood board into one of the most imitated brands in fashion. Before the store on Place des Lices in Saint Tropez, before Selfridges, Lacoste, Hôtel du Cap and Le Bristol, there were twenty sweatshirts she packed and posted herself. Ten years on, she is clear that the stretch in between is the part nobody films, and that the day during lockdown when a single drop did fifteen times its usual figure only reads as a beginning because the decade in front of it is invisible.

The Gstaad Guy sits down with Oliver Barker, chairman of Sotheby’s Europe and the man on the rostrum for many of the largest sales in the world, to explore what thirty two years at the same house teaches you about objects and the people who love them. Oliver joined as an unpaid intern in 1993 after Christie’s turned him down, and reflects on a career built on one unplanned afternoon, an eye trained by looking rather than reading, and the conviction that the greatest auctions are celebrations of culture rather than transactions.

The Gstaad Guy sits down with Gary Vaynerchuk, chairman of VaynerX and founder and CEO of VeeFriends, to explore what two decades of watching attention move has taught him about people. Gary built a career on seeing platforms before anyone else took them seriously, and reflects on a trajectory defined by conviction, self awareness, and a willingness to say the thing nobody in the room wants to hear, including about himself.

The Gstaad Guy sits down with Éric Martel, CEO of Bombardier, at the company's completion centre in Montreal with the Global 8000 behind them, to explore how a snowmobile inventor from a small Quebec town became the foundation of one of the world's great aerospace companies. Éric reflects on a career that began on the factory floor and a company whose defining trait is a willingness to take on things it has never done before, from building metro cars without ever having built a train to inventing the regional jet.