Critical Careers - Women Building Careers in Digital Infrastructure - Book - Page 70
Critical Careers
SENIOR LEADER
What are the moments that have shaped
your career journey?
Early on, I was working in logistics real estate at Amazon, and I could
feel the market starting to slow down. In real estate, you feel that quickly
because you don’t want to be managing decline, but rather be where
things are happening. That was the 昀椀rst moment where I consciously
looked around and asked myself, where is the next wave?
That’s when I saw data centres emerging as this completely new asset
class. AWS was investing heavily, there was real momentum building, and
I made the decision to move into that space. It wasn’t an obvious move,
and very few people at that level were making that kind of lateral move at
the time.
What captured me was the scale of capital behind it. I went from thinking
about buildings, aesthetics, locations, and leases to working on assets
where a single interconnection decision could move hundreds of millions.
The infrastructure itself was unglamorous, but the investment logic
was razor sharp. Grid availability, 昀椀bre routes, energisation timelines,
these were not just technical questions. They were the variables that
determined whether a site was worth anything at all. I understood very
quickly that the people who could read those variables earliest were the
ones creating real value.
Blanka
Thibaud
FOUNDER | TECHHER CAPITAL
68
The other turning point was co-founding Sepia Infrastructure with part
of the Google EMEA data centre team. That moved me directly into the
investment conversation. I was involved in structuring deals, sitting in
rooms with infrastructure funds, working through term sheets. You see the
industry very differently when you are on the capital formation side rather
than the execution side. It changed what questions I asked and how I
evaluated risk.
