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 - Building something from the ground up without a clear roadmap.
- Hiring and leadership - Hiring people smarter than me and giving them the space to succeed.
- Public speaking and confidence - Walking onto a stage in front of twenty thousand people and performing under pressure.
- Resilience - Keeping going when the spreadsheet says stop.
- Self-belief - Learning to back yourself before anyone else will.
What inspired you to set up your own business?
Impatience. I never liked waiting for permission. I’d see how something could be better and want to build it now, not pitch it to someone who might say no. I started my first company while I was still a student. Not because I had a master plan. Because I couldn’t not. That feeling never left.
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?
Building through the hard middle. Starting a company is exciting. Selling one is a great day. Nobody warns you about the long stretch in between, where it isn’t working yet, the market is against you, and you’re the only one who still has to believe.I’ve had years like that.
Staying steady through them, without losing the team or the plot, is the hardest thing I’ve done. And the most useful.
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.