The Dawn of the Neo-Generalist

Our Journey into Specialization and Back Again

My career started on Wall Street, first in investment banking and later as a co-founder of a hedge fund. It was the epitome of a specialist’s world.

We lived and breathed financial models, risk arbitrage, and market minutiae. We were trained to be experts in a very narrow, very deep sliver of the universe: the movement of capital.

For a time, it was intellectually thrilling.

We were moving risk and value around the globe, and the complexity was captivating. But a nagging feeling began to grow. The more I looked at the companies we were analyzing and investing in, the more I saw a fundamental difference in our roles.

We were masters of reallocation, but they were masters of creation. We moved risk around and they really built stuff. They solved problems. They created new experiences. They added to the world. We didn’t.

Seeing the relentless march of machine learning, the plummeting cost of compute power, and the soaring capabilities of technology, it became glaringly obvious that while …