Inspirations

Toto Wolff

Toto Wolff is the person who made me realise that the two worlds I care about most, motorsport and business, don't have to be separate. He started as an investor, built his way into racing, and became the most successful team principal in Formula 1 history. What I find compelling about him isn't just the results. It's the way he operates. Calm under pressure, ruthlessly strategic, but genuinely invested in the people around him. He built a culture at Mercedes that dominated a sport for nearly a decade, and he did it through leadership and relationships as much as through technology. He represents something I aspire to: the idea that you can be deeply passionate about something and also be the person who runs it at the highest level.

Leonardo da Vinci

Da Vinci is the ultimate example of what happens when curiosity has no limits. He was a painter, an engineer, an anatomist, an architect and an inventor, often all at once. What draws me to him is not any single thing he created but the way his mind worked. He refused to stay in one lane. He saw connections between things that other people kept separate, between art and science, between beauty and function, between observation and imagination. In a world that constantly asks you to specialise and stay in your box, da Vinci is a reminder that the most interesting thinking happens at the edges, where disciplines meet and unexpected ideas are born. That is the kind of thinking I try to bring to everything I do.

Hedy Lamarr

Most people know her as one of Hollywood's biggest stars of the 1940s. Almost nobody knows that she also developed together with a collaborator frequency hopping spread spectrum, the technology that underpins WiFi, Bluetooth and GPS today. She received no credit, no patent royalties, nothing. What stays with me about her is not just the brilliance but the indifference to recognition. She solved a problem because it needed solving. The world caught up about fifty years later. There is something in that about doing the work regardless of whether anyone is watching.

Nelson Mandela

Twenty seven years in prison and he came out without bitterness. That is the thing I keep coming back to. Not the politics, not the history, not even the extraordinary achievement of what he built afterwards. Just that. The capacity to absorb that much and still choose dignity over anger. He could have come out broken or consumed by rage and nobody would have blamed him. Instead he became the person the moment needed. I do not know if I would have that in me. But I think about it.