Yes, in 2018, I was awarded the Breakthrough Prize for the discovery. I was a bit dumbstruck, never expecting that kind of thing to happen. I was keen that the money should be used well and the best way to do that seemed to be to encourage a more diverse research student population from under-represented groups.

Well, it is of course a step-by-step process that started back in the 80s. I was struggling to retrieve a little bit of DNA from things that were just a few … starting with just dried tissues that, you know, that were just a few months old, going back in time and struggling with the technological issues with that over a decade. And then it became possible to retrieve DNA from things like the mammoths or cave bears that lived at a similar time as the Neanderthals. And then I was very lucky to get a job in Germany, where of course Neanderthals is a big presence in our, in the imagination of people, so it was then very, an obvious next step, in a way, to try to do that.

I think chess — actually, a number of things that I learned when I was young — it wasn't so much the chess itself; it was the skills that you were training while you were playing chess. So problem-solving, imagination, creative thinking, strategic thinking, all of these things — if you play chess to a high level, what you're really honing is those meta-skills. And I realized from quite young, that's one of the reasons I liked chess was this is a great practice for me to get good — sort of like a mental gym, if you like — to get really good at those other skills, which you could then translate to all sorts of other subjects like science or business.

The friends with whom I sat on graduation day have been my friends for life. They are my children’s godparents, the people to whom I’ve been able to turn in times of trouble, people who have been kind enough not to sue me when I took their names for Death Eaters.

I could be strong and not tough. I could be kind without being soft. ... But in that moment, that olive branch of kindness was actually one that became a physical hug, and I think it taught me and the room a lot. And I said: You know what? I think this is an advantage.

We cannot afford to be color blind. We have to be color brave. We have to be willing, as teachers and parents and entrepreneurs and scientists, we have to be willing to have proactive conversations about race with honesty and understanding and courage, not because it's the right thing to do, but because it's the smart thing to do, because our businesses and our products and our science, our research, all of that will be better with greater diversity.

We would constantly have to move because we couldn't quite afford the places that we were living. And sometimes we got evicted. And it was just very, very difficult as a child to try to understand that.

I wrote about this in our first quarter client letter, actually, the concept of polycrisis, and I talked about the fact that my belief is that we've all become firefighters.

I remember the day. It was just such a big day. It happened to be the same day that I got to be on the cover of Forbes. And I remember just being so overwhelmed by the opportunity that we had at hand, that we had closed this $1.45 billion fund - first time - probably in the top five of first-time funds ever that had been closed.

You see, researchers have coined this term "color blindness" to describe a learned behavior where we pretend that we don't notice race. If you happen to be surrounded by a bunch of people who look like you, that's purely accidental. Now, color blindness, in my view, doesn't mean that there's no racial discrimination, and there's fairness. It doesn't mean that at all. It doesn't ensure it. In my view, color blindness is very dangerous because it means we're ignoring the problem.