A CAREER SPENT UNDERSTANDING WHAT CREATES VALUE.

Nazar Yasin is an entrepreneur, investor, and author of The New Smart: The Power of Relational Intelligence that AI Can't Replace.

Across more than two decades in investing and company-building - from Goldman Sachs and Tiger Global to founding Rise Capital and Sol - Nazar’s work has centered on a deceptively simple question:

What makes something truly valuable?

Today, as artificial intelligence transforms how we work, learn, and relate to one another, that question has become increasingly human.

FROM FINDING VALUE TO BUILDING IT

Nazar began his career as an investor, learning to identify companies, markets, and people with the potential to become significantly more valuable over time.

At Goldman Sachs and later Tiger Global, he invested across technology and emerging markets, developing an approach grounded not only in numbers, but in understanding people: the founders they backed, the customers they served, and the cultures they built.

He later founded Rise Capital to invest in ambitious technology companies around the world, particularly in markets and communities often overlooked by traditional Silicon Valley investors.

Across his investing career, Nazar has backed multiple companies that grew into billion-dollar businesses. But investing also led him to a broader realization:

The most important sources of value are often the hardest to measure.

Judgment. Trust. Character. Relationships. Purpose. The ability to see what others miss - and bring people together around it.

BUILDING VALUE WITH PURPOSE

That belief eventually moved Nazar from investing in companies to building them.

He founded Sol, a technology company focused on helping people strengthen the human capabilities that contribute to a meaningful life: self-awareness, emotional intelligence, relationships, resilience, and purpose.

Sol grew from a simple idea—that technology could deepen rather than diminish our humanity - into a community of more than one million people.

The experience sharpened another question:

If technology can increasingly perform the tasks we once associated with intelligence, what will make human beings valuable in the future?

That question became the foundation for The New Smart.

THE NEW SMART

For generations, being “smart” largely meant knowing more, analyzing faster, solving problems, and producing the right answer.

AI is rapidly making many of those capabilities abundant.

Nazar argues that this does not make human intelligence less important. It changes which kinds of intelligence matter most. 

In The New Smart, he introduces Relational Intelligence: the human capabilities that help us understand ourselves, understand others, exercise judgment, build trust, adapt, collaborate, and create meaning.

These are sometimes dismissed as “soft skills.”

Nazar’s argument is the opposite:

As machines become more capable, our most human abilities become increasingly valuable.

ONE IDEA ACROSS A CAREER

For Nazar, the idea of value animates much of our personal and professional endeavors:

Relational intelligence is about becoming more valuable: developing the distinctly human capabilities that allow us to thrive alongside increasingly intelligent machines.

Leadership is about multiplying value: helping people accomplish more together than they could individually.

Entrepreneurship is about creating value: turning ideas into products, organizations, and communities that improve people’s lives.

Investing is about finding value: seeing potential before it becomes obvious.

Technology is about amplifying value: unlocking and scaling something that provides value to the world.

That is the thread connecting Nazar’s work - and the question at the center of his writing and speaking today.

WHAT NAZAR BELIEVES

INTELLIGENCE IS BECOMING ABUNDANT. WISDOM IS NOT.

Access to information, analysis, and expertise is being democratized at extraordinary speed. Knowing the answer will matter less than knowing which questions to ask, whom to trust, what matters, and what to do next.

HUMAN SKILLS ARE ECONOMIC SKILLS.

Empathy, judgment, communication, resilience, trust, and purpose are not simply ingredients of a good life. They increasingly determine who leads, who collaborates effectively, who creates opportunity, and who remains valuable in an AI-enabled economy.

TECHNOLOGY SHOULD AMPLIFY HUMANITY.

Technology is neither inherently humanizing nor dehumanizing. What matters is how we design and use it. The best technology should expand human capability without eroding connection, agency, or meaning.

PROFIT AND PURPOSE CAN REINFORCE EACH OTHER.

The most enduring businesses create genuine value for the people and communities around them. Nazar’s career as both investor and entrepreneur has been built around the belief that commercial success and positive impact need not be opposing goals.

TODAY

Today, Nazar divides his time between building Sol, investing through Rise Capital, writing, and speaking with leaders and organizations about the changing nature of human value.

His talks explore how individuals, teams, and institutions can become more valuable in the age of AI by developing the capabilities machines cannot easily reproduce.

His forthcoming book, The New Smart, develops that argument into a framework for succeeding in a world where conventional intelligence is no longer enough.