$100B - 1 Person

Author

Matt Ober
March 08, 2025

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We keep hearing that soon there will be a startup that’s worth $1B with 1 employee. I think we will soon see 1 person managing $100B.

AI Agents, data availability, data collection, computing - everything is changing so quickly. Every day, I am amazed by the startups I am meeting and what is possible with AI. Finchat, a Social Leverage portfolio company, is a great example. The speed at which they are releasing features, new data, and AI capabilities is mind-blowing. I can’t even imagine where they will be 24 months from now.

I think we are going to see the ability for a hedge fund manager to manage $100B by himself while leveraging the latest in AI Agents and research tools. The tools that are coming out or are already built are automating models, summarizing research, and extracting insights & sentiment from transcripts. The AI capabilities are making it so that you can train a model on your historical notes, how you build convictions, and how you write investment memos, and it is making it possible to save hundreds of hours per month of grunt work and research. I have seen what is possible with the tooling today, and Ethan on our team at Social Leverage has even trained an LLM to write investment memos based on our CRM of notes, pitch decks, and transcripts. It’s scary good!

The future of investment managers is going to be lean, mean, alpha-producing teams leveraging the latest in tooling. Will $SPGI ( ▲ 1.69% )  $FDS ( ▲ 0.82% ) Bloomberg & $MORN ( ▲ 0.85% ) be the winners in the investment management world in the future? I think we will see these firms get stronger, given some of their data moats and workflow moats, but new entrants are bound to show up. The data moats are getting harder to maintain, the need for fewer people to build these state-of-the-art AI first financial research products is getting easier, and what once took thousands of people offhsore to maintain will now be small lean teams supporting these billion-dollar hedge fund managers. The future looks exciting. I used to require my data science team to have strong Python or R coding skills. If I were managing a data science team within a hedge fund now, I wouldn’t technically care what their coding skills were as long as they knew which of the latest AI tools would allow them to do the data analysis necessary to get the answers we were after. Skills are changing, skills necessary to be successful are changing, and the need for more headcount is changing- all positive, but it also requires new thinking, new training, and access to these new tools. Those that are experimenting, testing these tools, and leaning in are closer to being that $100B hedge fund with 1 human.

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