Billionaire F1 boss Toto Wolff didn’t have the privileged start in life many of his peers in elite sports experience.
The Austrian motorsport mogul came up against barriers to entering Formula 1 almost the moment he realized it was his dream job.
Speaking to LinkedIn CEO Ryan Roslansky on the video series The Path, the CEO of the Mercedes-AMG Petronas Formula 1 team remembered his first experience of a race circuit when watching a friend compete in the junior Formula 3.
However, Wolff’s father died when he was just 15, leaving his mother to try to support the family—and there was no extra cash to get into racing.
So the enterprising teen began raising funds from friends, family and the parents of his peers to “invest in his career”, eventually landing him a car and training. But his investors backed out as F1’s reputation was hurt by a series of crashes and driver deaths, leading Wolff to pivot to a corporate life of investment banking, sales and eventually venture capitalism in the late 1990s, specializing in technologies from the emerging Dotcom bubble.
But through every twist on his non-linear career path, Wolff said it “never” felt like he was taking a risk.
The Mercedes team principal explained that his best piece of career advice is intuition: “You kind of feel whether [something] is wrong or right. I don’t feel that I’ve ever taken a risk, it was always calculated. If I could cope with the worst outcome then it was a calculated risk and I was prepared.
“I could have a certain easiness about things.”
And that confidence gives way for flexibility in a career to get to dream roles, Wolff said: “I know we have a lot of responsibilities to our families to make a living, but still don’t lose the easiness of a child to embark on a different path.”
‘I was a complete idiot until I was 23’
Wolff also revealed he’s been pushing hard for Mercedes to take the pressure off younger candidates—both in terms of their qualifications and their drive.
The 51-year-old, reportedly worth $1.6 billion, said society pushes teenagers to find their purpose and their passions too early: “I think that’s all nonsense. How should an 18 or 19 year old know what passion or purpose is? I was a complete idiot until I was 23 or 24, I didn’t even know what a venture capitalist was until then.
“So leave teenagers and young adults the possibility to be an all rounder, to look at various jobs to try, and then eventually focus on one thing. If that doesn’t feel right after five years then move on to the next thing.”
Wolff, who is set to teach a class at Harvard University next year on high-performance leadership and organizational culture, added he never would have landed a job at Mercedes based on his academic background.
As a result, he’s pushing the company to look for talent more widely, saying diversity is “one of the most complex problems” facing businesses today.
It’s a switch many companies may be forced to make. Learning and work think tank The Burning Glass Institute reported last year that the percentage of employers mandating a college degree fell to 44% in 2021 from 51% in 2017.
Likewise according to analytics platform Gallup, the percentage of American adults aged 18 to 29 who view college education as “very important” dropped from 74% to 41% between 2013 and 2019.
Wolff said in his early years at the company Mercedes would only look at candidates from top universities: “I said ‘What about someone that hasn’t been great academically and worked at a set of very tiny businesses?’ And our chief people officer said ‘no chance. Wouldn’t even go through the first round of applications.’
“That’s me, I would have never qualified for a job at Mercedes and what does that say?”