Describe yourself in three words or phrases.
Buzo’s dad, global ctizen, slave of ambition.
What do you like most about your job?
The fulfilment of seeing someone’s life trajectory change because of the access we’re able to create. That feeling pushes me to play my best day in, day out. I’m also incredibly fortunate to work alongside a fantastic team that believes in this mission as deeply as I do.
Describe a project or initiative you’re currently working on that excites you.
One initiative I’m especially excited about is how we’re building out Leverage Careers as part of our broader global talent mobility platform. After years of helping students study abroad and build global lives, it felt incomplete to stop at education when the real goal for many is upward mobility and the ability to earn well for their families.
Leverage Careers focuses on creating trusted, transparent pathways for young professionals to access verified global job opportunities worldwide, especially in sectors facing acute shortages like healthcare, hospitality, and education. What excites me most is knowing this work directly gives people a chance to earn, uplift their families, and build a stable future for themselves across borders.
What’s a piece of work you’re proud of – and what did it teach you?
Building Leverage into the full-stack global talent mobility platform that it is today, helping young people from emerging markets access life-changing opportunities across borders, has been my story, my fuel, my life’s mission all along. It’s hard to put into words the moment you see a student step onto an international campus for the first time; the nervous excitement, the pride in their parents’ eyes, the quiet confidence that this is the beginning of something bigger. We’ve witnessed that moment more than 60,000 times, across students from 16 emerging markets moving into destinations all around the world, and it never stops feeling extraordinary. For many of them, often first-generation international graduates, this isn’t just a degree, it’s the rewriting of a family’s story for generations to come.
The biggest lesson this journey has taught me is how powerfully lack of access can suppress ambition. I lived that reality myself when I received an offer from Oxford but couldn’t afford to take it. At the time it felt like failure, but it showed me how often opportunity is gated not by ability, but by information, systems, and means. What I’m most proud of is turning that frustration into a platform that tries its very best to ensure access is never the reason another ambitious young person has to give up on their big dreams. And every time we’re able to help someone succeed, it sends a quiet signal to another: if they could do it, so can I.
What’s a small daily habit that helps you in your work?
I write goals at every cadence: yearly, monthly, weekly, daily! That discipline helps me zoom out before the day pulls me into execution mode. It keeps short-term decisions aligned with long-term thinking.
What’s one change you’d like to see in your sector over the next few years?
A more serious commitment to internationalisation, not just as student recruitment, but as a principle of global talent mobility and equal opportunity. Too often, education, immigration, and employability are treated in silos, which limits how freely people can move to where opportunity exists. Aligning these systems more intentionally could unlock enormous value, benefiting students, institutions, employers and economies alike.
What idea, book, podcast or conversation has stayed with you recently?
A recent conversation with UK Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer has stayed with me, particularly the candour around how education, skills, and migration policy are now increasingly inseparable from economic strategy. We reflected on how central international education has become in shaping countries’ thinking about competitiveness, productivity, and talent in the long term. Governments are thinking far more deliberately about who they attract, retain, and invest in, and how so, being well conscious of the value global talent can contribute over time towards the economic, social and cultural prosperity of their countries.
What’s one piece of advice you’d give to someone starting out in this field?
Stay obsessively close to the student (or your customer, or whoever you’re solving for). Learn from what they say, and what they don’t. Data and dashboards matter, but nothing sharpens judgment like listening closely to the real aspirations, fears, and trade-offs people are navigating. That empathy will lead you down the right path, always.
