Alejandro Betancourt López finished part of high school and all of college in the United States, at Suffolk University in Boston. Two decades ago, he said, the idea that he would end up raising a family in London would have sounded far-fetched.

“If you would ask me about 20 years ago, I end up living in London and my family would be based in London, I would say you’re crazy,” he said in 2022.

What the CEO Data Shows

Suffolk, the private university in downtown Boston that Alejandro Betancourt López attended, sits outside the group of schools often assumed to feed the top of corporate America. Only 11.8% of Fortune 100 chief executives earned their undergraduate degrees at Ivy League schools. Fewer, 9.8%, held an Ivy League MBA. University of Southern California professor David Kang compiled the figures, which were reported in June 2023.

Kang has tracked CEO alma maters since 1999 and expected a different result. “Like everyone else, I thought Ivy Leagues would dominate,” he told Fortune. Seven or eight of the 500 chief executives he analyzed had no undergraduate degree at all.

Alejandro Betancourt López on What Replaces the Pedigree

“It’s not like you’re the smartest guy in the world, but you have to have elements where you get to meet the right people and they have the right idea, the right time, and they let you in,” he said of his own path.

“It’s not how smarter you are than most people, it’s about how much dedicated you are and how sure you are, you’re going to achieve that,” Alejandro Betancourt said in a separate conversation.

Hunger matters more than wealth, in his account. “Either you’re born with that motivation and being hungry of achieving more and more, not for wealth, but for the sensation that you won an objective,” he said.

The ambition showed early. “I was in South America thinking, I want to go to Europe, I want to go to other places, I want to see what I see in the movies,” he said of his years growing up.

His family office, O’Hara Administration, now holds stakes in Spanish companies and a West African banking group, according to his résumé. Alejandro Betancourt López runs it from London, a city he once never expected to call home, more than 3,000 miles from the Boston campus where he studied.