Global Networking, The Entrepreneurial Mindset, and Redefining Success with Sebastian Volcan

Welcome to Studying Law Around the World. I'm Claudio Claus. In each episode, I talk with lawyers, law students, and professors from different parts of the world to talk about legal education, careers, and what the profession looks like in real life. We talk about the hard parts, the surprises, and the decisions that shaped their paths. Whether you're planning to study abroad, thinking about working in another legal system, or just curious about how law works around the world, this podcast is for you. Today, I'm interviewing Sebastien Volkan. He's a Venezuelan lawyer working at the intersection of law, business, development, and international strategy across Latin America. From representing Venezuela at the International Bar Association to helping startups scale through strategic partnerships and innovation, Sebastien has built a career focused on connecting people, idea, and opportunities across borders. Thank you so much for coming to the podcast today, Sebastien. Wow, that's a beautiful introduction. Thank you so much for having me here. I'm so excited. Amazing. And to start us off, I'd love for you to tell us a little more about your career. You've built a very interesting one at this intersection I just mentioned. Law, business development, international strategy. Tell us a little more about that and even what made you realize that you wanted to work at that intersection? Well, I don't know if it wasn't a specific moment. I just think that I've been giving myself the chance to try different things and realizing what I really like and what I don't like. You just have to take the chance. I tried tax law, international law, then corporate law, and I realized that I'm really good with people and connections and partnerships, so that's what I focus on right now. But I just think that that's how it started, just going with the flow of how my career was developing. However, I really think that that breaking point when I realized that I had to do exactly the things that I'm good at and the things that I really love was when I read Start With Why by Simon Sinek. I think that made me realize that I wasn't actually really happy with my job and what I was doing at the time, which was corporate law, and made me have a hard conversation with myself and become clear with my terms. And that's when I started to say, well, I started law school because I wanted to help people. I come from Venezuela, a really hard dictatorship, and my main driven passion was work for the country. Then the year passed and I didn't want to be a political prisoner, so I shifted to corporate and started the corporate ladder. I got to a point that I was really unhappy with my career somehow, even though I was really proud of what I have accomplished. And that's when I took all that knowledge and realized that those things that I'm really good at and that I had the chance to experience for the past years, I just focused on that. So that's how I made the decision and started this path. So it was those things, trying a lot of things and a lot of different things, and then come to terms with myself and decide on what really I wanted to do. That's amazing. I appreciate you mentioning that. I also did a little bit of research to get started on the podcast today, and I saw you've been very active on LinkedIn and you've shared opportunities, for example, scholarships to attend the International Bar Association, annual conferences. You really were trying to help other lawyers as well to internationalize their careers as you've done for yourself. And specifically here, we're mentioning you're currently a Venezuelan lawyer. I wanted to hear a little bit for young lawyers who might feel that geographically speaking, they are isolated or maybe even professionally, they are not in a big law firm, in a big platform. What are some of the steps that taking from your example, they could take today to start building this global legal career or building that career that they really aspire to? Yeah, I think they're different. It's really different. The one that is stuck in a really isolated country, like I was, and the one that is stuck in a job that doesn't have that opportunity, I'm going to give advice for each one of them. For this first one, I think you have to try to collaborate in a global firm. It can be a big four firm, which is in every country, or the biggest law firm in your country probably have international clients. Those spaces, or maybe an international company, maybe you are not working for a law firm, but working for a big company, I don't know. Oil and gas company, or a food company, whatever, from overseas. I think that gives you the chance to even being in your country, being able to work maybe with your region and globally. And usually, those firms, those companies have programs that help young generations and next leaders to make exchanges, they take you to conferences. So that really gives you that opportunity that in your home country, you usually don't have, okay? And I think that's how I ended up in the IBA. Liga is a local firm in Venezuela. However, they work with Lex Mundi and World Services Group, so they have a big connection globally, and they are really active on the IBA. Fernando Pelaez, which was a former managing partner, is a former president of the IBA. Carlos Dominguez, which is the current managing partner, was an officer to the Latin America Regional Forum. So they have this experience, although it is a local firm, you have this international connection. Being part of an organization like that can help you to achieve that. Before that, I was in KPMG, so I used to work with international clients and partners from all over the world. So working on a global firm is a great advice to you. If you don't have the opportunity to work in a global firm, I think, first, I don't think you're stuck in your small firm, although I think small firms have advantages, okay? But if you really want to have an international career, you can always apply to big firms. I mean, you can always change your job, first. There are many opportunities there that can help you to even work in a small law firm to get into those stages. Like, for example, you can go to the IBA. You can apply to those scholarships, but the IBA is not the only organization you can apply to. For example, you have AIESA. You can have the World Bank make several conferences that give scholarships. You can participate in the Global Shapers community of the web. There are so many places that you can be part of to make international connections. And if you don't have any of that, you'll still have LinkedIn. You can still make connections with people. You can still send them a message, say, hey, I've seen your work. I think that's amazing. Let's connect. I want to hear your story. I think you have many ways to achieve international connections, and those would be the advices I would give. Appreciate that. So I also saw here that you worked with partners and leaders across 18 Latin American jurisdictions in the energy and mining sectors. I'm curious to know, what did that experience teach you about leadership, communication, and even this complex regional collaboration? Yeah, to give some context for those who are listening, LEGA, the law firm in Venezuela I used to work with, was a partner firm to Anderson Global in Venezuela. Even though we were not a member firm, we could participate, and we did participate in every aspect of the partnership. That part also includes collaborating in the regional coordination. Since LEGA has so much background on oil and gas, we were the ones to lead that section specifically the oil and gas for the whole region. That being said, I think it was a really hard and challenging experience for me. Because first, you have to deal with a lot of busy schedules of a lot of people. You have 18 different managing partners across all Latin America, all really busy. So it was really hard to coordinate and also to provide something of value to them. Because it has to be something every month you have to organize a meeting, and that meeting has to be really useful for them. And to achieve that goal sometimes was really hard. And it was really hard because you have to navigate a bureaucratic structure like a big firm like Anderson. So I think what I can learn from this is, on the one hand, the kind of leader I wanted to be. I wanted to be a leader that promotes something different, that innovates in their area, and that provides something of value to other leaders. That's the first thing. And the second thing is, what is the kind of structure that I want to build? I want to build a big company. I want to build a global company. However, I don't want to build a company that is so bureaucratic that cannot innovate. And I think that that was something that did happen on Anderson. That's why I think it was really challenging, although I love that experience. That's amazing. Thank you so much for taking the time to share a little bit about that. It must have been quite a growth opportunity for sure. And you co-founded Crescencia. So can you tell us a little bit more about this company that was born to support startups and innovation across Latin America? And from your perspective, are there a few barriers in entrepreneurship or that entrepreneurs usually face in the region when they're trying to scale internationally? I think the main problem here is that people don't know how to start a business. And that's for a fact. And I started Crescencia because I didn't know by myself how to start a business. I was a really good lawyer. I knew that I was a really good lawyer, but I didn't know how to build a company. And it's something that happens to every profession. I mean, if you're a dentist, you don't know how to start a dental clinic. Or if you are a journalist, you don't know how to start a newspaper. So people are good at their profession, but they don't know necessarily how to start a business. So we started Crescencia because I was, and this comes part of the story, I was in Venezuela. I used to work with a lot of oil and gas clients back in 2025. And then Trump came and they imposed sanctions on Venezuela. From one day to another, I went to the office and I had no work. I came there, do nothing for eight hours and go back home because all the clients stopped their project. So I wasn't in that situation. I said, okay, I need to have something that kind of works internationally, globally, from clients from everywhere, but I don't know what to do. Talking with one of my best friends, she's an economist. We had the same problem. She was a great economist. I am a good lawyer, I would like to think. So we come to, okay, what can we do to start a business? And on that process, we realized people don't know how to start a business. And that's how we started. And what we're trying to do here is to work and to collaborate with governments, with multilateral organizations, with all these stakeholders that works in order to develop entrepreneurial ecosystems, to help people actually to build their business in an easier way. So that's just the history of what we do. And what I think is the greater barrier to any entrepreneur is we're at a university, they don't teach you how to start a business. And I think the future will be every day, people will start to start their own business more and more because AI and technology will take their jobs away. So they need a new way of income, the greater barrier. Amazing. Well, thank you for sharing that. And I'm sure it's been a fun thing to build. It's so interesting when we start going on what really no education really prepare us for, the law school itself. But really, the more I talk with other professionals, I think there is a general acceptance that school will prepare you up to a certain point. But really, there's a lot that needs to be learned on the job. And then being an entrepreneur has like an extra layer of difficulty, because not always you're going to be trained by someone who's starting a business. So you don't get to see a lot of the steps and that become an interesting thing, which I think that a lot of people can learn a lot from. Yeah, you know what, I think, I think as lawyers, we have this attitude that we know how to do business. Well, we know how to negotiate, we know that how to set up a company, we know how to draft a contract. But there's so many things that we don't actually know. Like, we don't know how to make a marketing, marketing campaign, we don't know necessarily how to deal with employees, because you might know the rights, but you don't necessarily know how to handle them, how to have a healthcare program for you for the mental health of your of your employees. There's so many things that lawyers just don't know, and they think they know. And it's funny, because when you when you start your own business, especially when you when your business is not necessarily a law firm, or law related, you get kind of judged somehow. And it's funny, because what I will always say is, if you want to be the managing partner of your firm, at that point, you will have your own business. And you don't know, and you will not know everything that I know now. So if you think that being an entrepreneur is something not for lawyers, you can you cannot be more mistaken. Because I think at some point, you will have to learn all those things. And if you don't, you cannot advance on your career. That's for a fact. I love that. I love that. In so many of the episodes, we talk about the necessity to be an entrepreneur as a lawyer. I think there's this word that some people use that is like intrapreneur in the sense of like being entrepreneurial inside the context where you are as well. On the other hand, I hear quite often from law students that there is there's a little bit of a concern about starting your career outside a law firm. And that could be either because you think that success only can happen inside that law firm. Or really, when you look at traditionally, jobs in house and in other places might have had law firms as part of that trajectory. I feel like your career shows an interesting and different model. And I wanted to ask what kind of advice would you give to young lawyers who are interested in business development, who think that communication is one of their strengths, and they're not looking necessarily into the traditional law practice inside a law firm? What are some of your ideas on that? Society and university and law firms tell you this dream that you will be like this big partner working on big cases and have this sense of your job and like this really fancy life. I don't really think that's the case for everyone, for most of all. However, I also think that that dream with AI and technology going so fast, I don't know if that is achievable anymore. I don't know if you will have 30 years to scale that ladder and to become a partner and to start living your life because let's face it, being a junior lawyer means you have to work from the start of the day until it ends. No family, no friends, no weekends. Just to build that future in 30 years, 20 years, however it takes you. And I don't really see clearly that if that's the case anymore. And the other problem is university and law firms and society doesn't give you the tools that you need to face that reality. And you have a lot of lawyers that get out of school and have a really, really big student debt and go to the market and they don't find a job and they get really frustrated because they want to live this dream that they cannot live anymore. So I think that you have to take the risk by yourself. There's so many ways that you can learn many things. You can download a million books about being an entrepreneur and start your own business and you have to build that mentality. And I think that's really hard. However, I think that universities and law schools and more organizations should work more on create that mentality, that mindset, especially on the legal profession because I don't think that's being spoken really often. And I think that it will be a great challenge for lawyers on the future, on the near future. Very interesting. We did talk a little bit about this before, but I noticed that a big part of your work involves creating opportunities not only for yourself, but also for other young professionals, especially through different organizations that you're a part of. And I'm curious to hear a little bit about personally, where does that mindset of opening doors for others come from? Well, I think it has something related to being an entrepreneur because I think that good things happen to you as long as you make good things for people, you know, something like karma. But in that sense, I also think my personal background helped me a lot to be this way because I come from the poorest country on the Western Hemisphere, you know, and I don't think I really have many opportunities back there. And everything I have, I have to work really, really, really hard to achieve it. My first job after the pandemic, I had to move from my hometown to the big city just to find a job. And I got paid $100 per month. And we're talking that Venezuela is a really expensive country, like you can not imagine, it might be poor, but it's really expensive. And that was my starting point. And it's been really hard to be where I am right now. So I just think that I would really appreciate that someone gave me that opportunity. So if I can help someone to get the chance that might change their life, I would do it. Because I think that will reverse to me on a greater good. So I don't know, I just think that's part of my philosophy. And I will keep doing it because it also helped me to feel alive and to feel useful and to have an impact. And I think lawyers are famous to be this cocky type of guy. I don't want to be that kind of lawyer. I really want to help people, even though I don't work as a lawyer, I could work myself as a human rights advocate. But just by helping one person, I think we're doing a good job. That's amazing. So to wrap up today's episode, I wanted to ask when you think about the future of the legal profession in Latin America, when it relates to technology, AI, global collaboration, all of that is changing this industry so quickly. And I'm curious what gives you optimism and what concerns you the most when you look at both of these points? Well, I'm going to start with the things that concerns me the most, because there are, as I said, young lawyers and law students right now. I think that they have this dream to work in a big law firm, to work 30 years and then become a partner and then have enough money and time to start living their life. And I don't know, as I said, if that is possible anymore. We need to recreate the concept of success, because that's the picture of a success lawyer that we have been sold. And right now, I don't know if being successful means working 60 hours a week or more, don't have a family for 30 years, don't have friends for 30 years, you're just living in the office for 30 years. And I think what's Robin Sharma that said being successful is doing what you want, whatever you want, whenever you want, with whoever you want. And I think that's the new message we need to sell for young lawyers and law students to ask themselves, how can I be successful? And I think that I am really successful right now, for example, not because I work on business development or international strategy, just because I work on what I want. I do it whenever I want. For example, now I'm a digital nomad, I was in Ecuador, now I'm in Colombia, next I'm going to be to Brazil. So I work with my best friend, whoever I want, and I don't have to ask my boss for an extra hour if I want to have a lunch with a client or whatever. So that's how I feel successful, even though I don't drive a Mercedes anymore. But I think that concept on how we practice law has to change. And I'm really concerned because I don't think law firms and universities are changing that concept. And I think in the future, there will be a lot of people that will be really frustrated. However, the things that I'm the most optimistic about is that I think AI and technology in general is a great tool to allocate the most valuable asset, which is time, to a better place. For example, and I'm going to put my example, I love to be a lawyer, I just hate to draft and read contracts. I just hate it. However, I think AI, it's a great tool to make all those things that I didn't like to focus myself on those things that I really, truly love. And that happens to everyone. And maybe you will have more time not to spend time with your family, to work out, to go on a trekking. I think AI, it's this amazing tool that would allow humanity to really take their time, retake what they want, and to focus on the things they actually love. So I think the future of the legal profession, yeah, the legal profession and any profession actually, will be a future of people doing the things they love because all that time that's being occupied on automatic things by the AI. The great challenge here is I don't think people know what they actually like, that's the first thing. The second thing is I don't know if people can handle the free time because we're so used to be this stress and dopamine overdose that I think we have a challenge that as humanity and as society that we can use all these tools for a greater good, for improve our mental health. I just really don't know if that would happen. But in my case, I will really work really hard to make that happen and to advocate for that and to try to make the younger, the next generation a little more into it and aware of those things. I love that. I really appreciate it. But something that I've been noticing is quite a few people are mentioning things like how AI, we were hoping that it would make us have more free time, but then more often than not, we realize that we're getting busier or we are having other problems. I don't know if it's being one outcome that is one that gives a lot of hope, but I'm sure that with time, we'll figure out how to get there. And we're all new to this, so I'm sure we'll be able to engage it in healthier ways hopefully as we look into being intentional about it too, right? Yeah, totally. I think there's a lot of people afraid that they're going to lose their job. The first thing is if AI took my job, I mean, that's amazing. I mean, if the economy can work without us working, but it's still getting paid, that would be amazing. First, because I will have all the free time to do everything that I love. I mean, I can walk my dog, I can take a shower for an hour long, I can be with my family and friends. I mean, that's amazing. If that's the future, that's great. I don't know what people is worried about. On the other hand, if you're really afraid of losing your job, I just think that you just need to find a new job that will be current to the new age. As any revolution, many jobs will be taken away, but many more will be created. And I just think that you have to adapt yourself to this new age and go with the flow, because otherwise you will have a really bad time. And I think my last take is I've seen more and more often what you said, that people have this free time and now they have to be more practiced. It's amazing how people are so disconnected with the reality. You feel this discomfort if you're just existing. You have to be scrolling on your cell phone or something. There's something that you have to do every time. And I just think AI will be this great tool that can help us to free that time, but it is on us to take that time to recover our humanity, to recover ourselves, to recover our relationships, to recover our abilities, to recover our true value, which is being a human. That's the only thing AI cannot do. You cannot have a conversation with AI, although you can have it, but it will be not a true meaningful conversation. AI cannot take a picture of the view you're taking on your trip. AI cannot make true valuable connections with people. So it is on us to work on that. I really hope that this mindfulness movement, I don't know how to call it, of AI will get bigger and bigger, because otherwise I don't know if people are prepared to affront their new reality. That's a fact. Thank you so much. I appreciate it. Thank you so much for making the time to come today on the show and for sharing your insights. They're much, much appreciated. Thank you so much. I had an amazing time here and I really hope to see you again. Absolutely.