Alex Sacerdote - How to Invest Through Technology Cycles - [Invest Like the Best, EP.477]
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Most software companies try to maximize your time on their app to juice engagement. Ramp does the exact opposite. Ramp understands that no one wants to spend hours chasing receipts, reviewing expense reports, and checking for policy violations. So they built their tools to give that time back, using AI to automate 85% of expense reviews with 99% accuracy. And since Ramp saves companies 5%, it's no wonder that Shopify runs on Ramp, Stripe runs on Ramp, and my business does too. To see what happens when you eliminate the busy work, check out ramp.com/invest. OpenAI, Cursor, Anthropic, Perplexity
Patrick O'Shaughnessy is the CEO of Positive Some. All opinions expressed by Patrick and podcast guests are solely their own opinions and do not reflect the opinion of PositiveSum. This podcast is for informational purposes only and should not be relied upon as a basis for investment decisions. Clients of PositiveSum may maintain positions in the securities discussed in this podcast. To learn more, visit psum.vc.
My guest today is Alex Sakerdote, founder of WhaleRock Capital Management. WhaleRock is a technology focused investment firm that manages more than $17,000,000,000 across hedge fund, loan only, and hybrid strategies. Over the past few years, it's been one of the best performing funds, compounding at roughly 44% per year. Alex invests through a single lens that he has refined over twenty years. He looks for technology s curves, durable competitive advantages, and underappreciated earnings power. This conversation is a tour through how he applies that framework today. We start with his highest c
When the gun went off with OpenAI ChatGPT in November 2022, we immediately took the firm and did a massive deep dive with our 10 person team. Anytime you have a new compute paradigm, there's a new stack. And that creates new winners and losers on the old stack. Now Jensen talks a lot about it, but it's power at the bottom, chips at the bottom, the clouds, and then the foundational models, and then the applications on top. And at that time, this was 2023 early, we said, we wanna be in the chips and the infrastructure first and not only do they get the demand first, but we know who the winners a
I'm so curious when an investor like you who historically was a public markets investor, you could hit buy and buy whatever you want, is now operating in lots of the most important private market companies. We can talk about Stripe or Databricks or OpenAI or Anthropic. How do you get the positions at the size that you want coming from the legacy of being able to just buy? How much of it is creativity just directly with the company? If it is directly with the company, so they have to it's a double opt in, they have to decide to let you in too. How do you do that? What have you learned about get
We got to know the company, one of our analysts knew people in the finance group there. We had a look at the $60,000,000,000 round and we didn't know the company as well. The gross margins were negative and frankly we hadn't seen coding explode the way it had. And one thing about public markets is you get to know companies over a long period of time and you can kind of invest on your own schedule. Then I got a chance to spend some time with Dario. I started to realize these guys, their management team is excellent. The focus, the dedication, they had almost no turnover, the quality of code, an
As your business scales up, everything gets more complex, especially your compliance and security needs. With so many tools offering Band Aids and patches, it's unfortunately far too e
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