I Squared's Dr. Sadek Wahba - it's time to "Build"

Welcome back to the Alt Goes Mainstream podcast.

We went to Miami to sit down with the professor of infrastructure investing and Founder, Chairman, and Managing Partner of I Squared, Dr. Sadek Wahba.

Sadek has blended academic knowledge and a practical approach to infrastructure investing to build I Squared into a $60B infrastructure investment firm in 14 years, some of which he has adroitly distilled into the 2024 book that he authored, Build: Investing in America’s Infrastructure.

We had such a fascinating and wide-ranging discussion that I’ve decided to break down our conversation into chapters.

“We are enormously boring by design”: From the World Bank to building a $60B infrastructure investing behemoth

[00:00:00–00:16:19]

Sadek has been investing in a category, infrastructure, that he calls “invsible until it’s missing.” He’s brought experience as an economist at The World Bank and running Morgan Stanley Infrastructure as CEO to bear as he has built out I Squared into a leading infrastructure investment firm.

Some notable quotes from this chapter:

“You open your tap water, you never think where the water comes from … So you take a lot of that for granted.”

“For better or worse, it may say something about us being enormously boring, but the only thing we do is infrastructure.”

“With the boom in AI, and the need for power and data centers … add another five-plus trillion dollars that will need to be invested in transmission lines, power generation, data centers, fiber optics and all sorts of infrastructure.”

No free lunch: ownership, regulation, and the ghost of Flint