Bridges in a Smaller World
What a Danish sovereign fund reminded me about trust, capital, and strategy.
Yesterday morning, Alexa and I recorded a conversation with Erik Balck Sørensen, CIO of Denmark’s sovereign wealth platform, and it snapped a few threads together for me: capital, geopolitics, and the oldest human question, “who can you trust when the rules get wobbly?” Sovereign wealth funds are, in a strange way, the public version of corporate venture. They have to balance financial returns with societal returns to taxpayers, and those goals are not actually competing in practice. They are intertwined. If something isn’t financially sustainable, it dies, and the impact dies with it. But ignore purpose, and you lose legitimacy with the very people whose capital you steward.
What I loved was how unromantic and disciplined Erik was about the tradeoff. This isn’t a branding exercise. It’s a daily operating system: stay professional as an investor, stay honest about the political momentum, and don’t confuse “good intentions” with durable outcomes. It reminded me of every great corporate VC seat I’ve seen. Strategic value and financial value aren’t separate lanes. They’re the same road. The difference is whether you can hold both truths at once without getting sloppy.
Somewhere in the conversation, my brain went back to why I attended Columbia in the first place. Not just New York, though that was a real perk given my love of East Coast hip hop, but the core curriculum. Being forced given the opportunity to read the canon and wrestle with Western history was my early attempt to understand why the world was the way it was before trying to predict what it would become. I doubled down on that curiosity and chose economics and political science because I couldn’t stop noticing how superpower nations and multinational companies were starting to behave like city-states, with their own incentives, alliances, and gravity. Listening to Erik talk about a country of 6 million people with a strategy in a shifting order made that whole mental model feel less academic and more alive.
And that’s the field note: even in a world getting more insular and polarizing, the opportunity is still in building bridges. When globalization strains, it doesn’t end. It decentralizes. It becomes person-to-person, firm-to-firm, state-to-state. The winners won’t just be the biggest or the loudest. They’ll be the ones who can form real partnerships, build trust across borders, and make the relationship itself a strategic asset. Find the bridge-builders. Invest in the bridge-builders. Be the bridge-builder.
Swimming with Allocators is back soon, and you can hear all of Erik’s great insights.
Catch up on past episodes here: https://www.youtube.com/@AllocatorsPod/videos