Programme studied and graduation year: MSc Management and Strategy, 2018
Entrepreneurship, creativity and a passion for community have shaped Marco Nobel’s career since graduating from LSE. From building a student platform that reached more than a million people across 200 cities to performing as an international DJ, he has followed an unconventional path driven by ambition and curiosity. In this Alumni of the Month interview, he reflects on founding and exiting his first company, launching Fuse to reimagine community living, and the lessons he has learned about resilience, leadership and taking risks.
What are your current areas of focus, professionally or otherwise?
Right now it’s about how people live.
I’m the founder of Fuse, a real estate company built around community. The idea that where you live should come with the people you live alongside, not just four walls.
We’re building out our portfolio across Central and Eastern Europe, with buildings live now in Hungary, Latvia, Austria and the Czech Republic. Later this year we expand into Poland.
The bigger question underneath all of it: how do you get people to actually live well together? That’s what I want to keep building toward.
Tell us about your career journey since graduating from LSE?
After LSE I moved to Hong Kong and started my first company, a global community and events platform for students studying abroad. It began in Asia, then expanded into Europe and North America. By the end we were in more than 200 cities, with over a million students. I exited in 2025.
At the same time, I was building a career in music as a DJ. That took me around the world too. I played stages at Tomorrowland, Ultra Music Festival and EDC, and released tracks with Grammy winners like Lil Wayne, Juicy J and more.
What skills have you learnt along the way?
- Starting from nothing: You don't need the whole plan. You need an idea and the guts to begin. Be ambitious, stay flexible, take the openings other people walk past. You'll pivot plenty. Being more consistent than everyone around you is what gets you the result.
- Hiring and leadership: Hire people smarter than you, then get out of their way. Giving good people room to run is the best thing I've done.
- Resilience: Keep going when most people would stop. The best things I've built came right after the moments I most wanted to quit.
- Selling the vision: Getting people to believe and join before there's any proof it works. Early on, that's the whole job.
What inspired you to set up your own business?
It started by solving my own problem. I was a student abroad in South Korea and couldn't find a way to meet other international students. Everything around me was built for locals. So I built a small community to fix it for myself. It grew fast, from a facegroup group into events, then into a company across 200+ cities. I never sat down and decided to become a founder. I saw something that didn't work and couldn't leave it alone. That feeling never left. It's still what I do at Fuse today: build places where people feel at home in a new city.
Has your career worked out the way you envisioned?
Strangely, yes. Almost to the plan. When I was young I mapped my life out in five-year chapters.
20 to 25: be a student.
25 to 30: Explore the world, and life in different places. Build a company that let me see all of it, and chase music at the same time. I moved to Hong Kong, scaled a company to 200+ cities, and DJ’d my way around the planet. Both happened.
30 to 35: build something more essential. How people live, and how they live together. That became real estate and Fuse.
After that: move into investing, and eventually academia. Teaching is where I think I’ll end up.
What were the most valuable lessons you took away from studying at LSE?
Two things. First, the people. Suddenly I was surrounded by ambitious people from everywhere, all at once. You learn fast when the person next to you is brilliant and from a completely different world.
Second, how to actually understand things. LSE taught me to get to the bottom of a problem. The real cost of a decision, how a system actually works, why a thing is the way it is. Not the surface answer, the real one. I still do that with everything I build.
What’s the greatest challenge you’ve had to overcome?
The pandemic. We were built almost entirely on offline events, and overnight that business case was gone. But we still had the online communities underneath it. So we repositioned around those and built a new business on top of them. Losing the obvious plan is what forced us to find the better one.
If you had one piece of advice you could give your younger self, what would it be?
Start before you feel ready. You never will. And build in public. Share what you’re making while you make it. The feedback, the network, the luck, it all finds the people who are visibly building, not the ones perfecting something in private. Waiting is the most expensive thing you can do.
Share with us your fondest memory of the Department of Management.
Impossible to pick one, so let me cheat and give you a few. The dinners and the nights out, with some of the smartest people I’ve ever met. The study sessions where we taught each other. You explaining the thing you understood, them explaining the thing you didn’t.
Professors who had literally written the book they were teaching from. And the guest lectures. Where else do you get Tony Blair one week and Angelina Jolie another?
Put it all together and that’s the LSE I remember. Not one moment. The level of the room, all the time.
If you would like to be our Alum of the Month or if you would like to nominate a Department of Management alumni, please email dom.alumni@lse.ac.uk.