Ian Ball, former president of McEwen Mining, opens up. We talk opportunity next to Canada’s largest gold mine through Abitibi Royalties.
HALIFAX, NS (MINEWEB) – Ian Ball made a surprising career choice earlier this year. He left the relative comfort of McEwen Mining – groomed by Rob McEwen, the company’s chairman, controlling shareholder and also the former head of Goldcorp, to the position of president – to join a much smaller junior explorer called Abitibi Royalties. He’d been at McEwen for over a decade.
Or maybe it wasn’t so surprising.
In leaving, Ball, the right hand man of McEwen – who is no conservative in his approach to company building and discovery – showed he too is a risk taker, not just a career seeker.
Ball, now President of Abitibi, says in leaving McEwen he looks to create something according to his own vision, “the best gold company in the world,” he says at one point in a recent interview.
In describing his approach to building companies, and the reason why he wanted to join Abitibi Royalties, he turns to analogies meant to inspire awe, examples that struck him earlier this year and last in the tech sector. He looks at market darlings Uber (car sharing) and Airbnb (house sharing) that have turned traditional industries on their heads and garnered massive, multibillion-dollar valuations in doing so.
Take Uber. Ball was introduced to it last year at a conference by a friend while waiting for a taxi. It amazed him, especially after it got an $18 billion valuation. This for an app that connects urban hitchhikers with nearby cars willing to pick up rides foregoing the taxi.
“And I said, ‘They don’t own any cars. They have no drivers. They basically took the taxi model and blew it out of the water and now it has a valuation bigger than Barrick.’”
If it all sounds a little grandiose, in it there’s a healthy tinkerers heart that Ball attributes to McEwen: to question fundamental assumptions. Such industry revolution helps drive Ball’s pursuit of opportunity in the mining sector.
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