COMING OF AGE

In just 13 years, Daniel Stojanovski has risen from summer intern to chief investment officer; a meteoric rise for someone who had a laundry list of career options in mind. Matthew Wai writes.

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Ventura Funds Management chief investment officer Daniel Stojanovski is all about new experiences, embracing challenges through the lens of personal development.

At the moment, the challenge is learning to surf - but when he was younger, it was navigating the extreme culture clash he grew up in.

With strong Macedonian roots, Stojanovski was part of a multigenerational household. There, he would speak, read and write Macedonian and then he'd venture out into the Australian streets and be forced to reconcile his surname was "very difficult" for some.

While he found the collision of cultures taxing, it was home that buoyed him.

"I think that close-knit family structure has really helped shape my career. My family's motto was always about hard work and responsibility, which have become nonnegotiable values that I adhere to," Stojanovski explains.

"I was always taught that, 'The world is your oyster, and you're the pearl'. It's a cliché, but it is an indication that you must work hard and remain determined on what you're trying to achieve.

"That mindset has helped shape credibility in everything I do; take calculated risks, and persist through challenges, where you're learning from failures and not trying to fail again... and try to be the best version of yourself."

This perspective has helped him greatly since starting out as a summer intern at Morgan Stanley fresh from graduating from the University of Wollongong in 2012. He thinks of this as his first career crossroad. Why? Because he was also considering a career in commercial law, and one in medicine, or something in the field of history.

"I say that because I remember always being told, 'It's like a jungle gym out there' because you don't know where you will end up... but I continued in the financial services space because of that internship," he says.