A Trojan Horse for Change

A former trader decides to start a company and build software for other professional investors. His startup marches promptly to $100mn in revenue and sustains double-digit growth for years. It has a long future, and has already changed the market forever. 

The startup creates a new type of synthesis layer—an aggregation of systematic channels, unstructured documents, and proprietary sources. It automates analysts’ undifferentiated heavy lifting. No more browsing long reports or chasing esoteric data. And the product is much better than those of established competitors, whose tools and data are hopelessly siloed. It’s more interactive and plugs into diligence, dealmaking, and trading. Tedious tasks shrink from hours to seconds. Firms make pricing decisions with a speed and completeness never before possible. In time, these improvements to the old ways enable new investing strategies and new types of investment firms.

This is what the Bloomberg Terminal did in the bond and public equity markets in the 1980s. And it foreshadows why we’re underestimating how AI will change private markets. 

Bob Hamill understands how technology transforms investing. He’s spent nearly 35 years leading investment teams at some of Wall Street’s most well-known firms—Drexel Burnham Lambert, Citi, J.P. Morgan, Lehman Brothers, and Jefferies. In this time, he successfully navigated the rise of the terminal, electronic trading, and the internet. Over lunch, he told us how those shifts ultimately reshaped the market in surprising ways.