As a bachelor of commerce student at the University of Cape Town in the mid-1980s, Jake Klein was certainly not contemplating a career in the gold industry. Rather, he saw himself as an investment banker.

“When I graduated from university as an accountant, if you’d given me a list of careers that I was going to pursue, gold would not have been on it. Nor would gold in China, nor gold anywhere,” says Klein, founder and executive chairman of Evolution Mining, Australia’s third-largest gold explorer.