00:00It's been a phenomenal experience. Citadel is a fantastic place to build your career and I've been there doing that
00:05for a bit and then I came across Moodle Partners and at this time, if you think about all the
00:10things that are happening in the private markets, all the things that are happening with AI, I felt like I
00:14needed to take a step back and have a breadth of experience and work with people who can transform companies
00:20in private markets and Moodle was a fantastic place for me to do.
00:23And I guess, Rob, I mean, this is quite the coup.
00:25I'm so excited. It is quite the coup and it's sort of, for us, it's a big muscle. I mean,
00:32we've been the last 10 years building a private equity firm that's purely focused on financial technology and that overindexes
00:38on operations and innovation and who better.
00:42I mean, it's sort of like the pinnacle of our landmark hiring. So, and we're super excited to have Umesh.
00:48And for me, it's sort of because of what's going on in AI and investment landscape today, there's so much
00:54uncertainty and the ability to have an opinion about something and be an expert in something is so important.
01:01Because of the generic sort of, let's run some numbers, let's put something in a spreadsheet and it pops out,
01:08yeah, we've done it for the last six years. The new world is very different. And opinions around capabilities is
01:14so fundamental for us.
01:15With this world, there aren't many experts because it's not like it's technology that's been around for decades. So, Umesh,
01:20I mean, it's fair to say that this is going to be the bulk of your job is thinking about
01:25how AI is going to be applying and used by portfolio companies.
01:28AI is definitely a big part of it. But if you think about it, in the world of AI, what
01:33is the right kind of product to ship to the clients is super important. So, shaping the product, making sure
01:40that it is exactly fitting the market and transforming companies from within is what I'm going to be focused on.
01:44There's this whole push from these big foundational models, from Anthropic, from OpenAI to partner with private capital firms and
01:53they deploy FDEs to come into the company and sit with portfolio companies.
01:57Rob, is there a world where Umesh kind of supplants that, that you maybe don't need these big model companies,
02:02you don't need OpenAI to necessarily come in because you've just hired an expert in AI?
02:07I think they co-exist very well together. I think that the, the, the new models that we talk about
02:11are super powerful, but there is something called context, history, legacy, and the translation from the power of the model
02:18to the actual execution of reinventing how workflow works actually in financial services.
02:24You have to re-architect everything. And you can't be expert of every, every, every, every given sector. So the
02:29notion of us being the bridge to take some of these models and apply them to our portfolio companies or
02:35to the, the, the industry holistically is what we do.
02:38And that is Umesh's role to make that translation and potentially also re-architect how we do capital markets, how
02:45we do wealth management, how we do asset management and the core capability.
02:48It's always, I say to us, in the beginner's mind, there are many possibilities and the experts, there are a
02:53few. So to have an expert, but to have a beginner's mind to re-architect, to rewire financial services is,
02:59is, is, is our mission.
03:00And it's, and Motiv, I find it very attractive because it is not about one portfolio companies at a time.
03:04It's more like the whole ecosystem. And how do you take an ecosystem and how is it supposed to work?
03:09Motiv has a point of view on that. And they have deep expertise in fintech, in finance, and then have
03:15that expertise drive how you apply AI becomes far more important than just applying AI.
03:20By the way, sorry, go ahead, Rob.
03:22It's not about how sophisticated these models are and if they can leech Einstein's intellectual capability. It's how do you
03:29apply it to delight your clients more if you're a retail bank or to, to be, to have better trading
03:35models.
03:35And that, that is still a long way to go between the power of the model and how it gets
03:39deployed or deployed in financial services.
03:42Financial services is one of the big use cases of AI. And I think a lot of, you know, the
03:46anthropics of the world have really been pushing this too.
03:49And I wonder, you know, someone like a Citadel or a Jane Street, any high frequency trader, it makes complete
03:54sense that they would be someone that implements AI.
03:56I wonder if for those, your past companies, for portfolio companies, is there enough compute in the world to try
04:03to push these transformations through?
04:05How much infrastructure is needed for some of the projects that you want to undertake?
04:09Yes and no. I don't think that is going to be the bottleneck. I think the bottleneck is going to
04:13be one of two things.
04:14One is the people who can envision the new product that needs to be working in, in, in the land
04:19of AI. The second is the engineers that are going to take you there.
04:22The third thing, if I had to add is, uh, like shaping the product. Like what is the boundary of
04:30a product? What is a product worthwhile having?
04:32And what is the competitive mode? And what do you want to preserve?
04:35That's going to be so tough to figure out though, because we are changing so fast at this moment.
04:39How do you assess that when every day there's something new introduced that feels like it could upend one entire
04:44industry?
04:45So I think, I think that's why it's going to be interesting. I think the world of investing is going
04:49to be very interesting.
04:50There's a lot of news and chaos around it. There are going to be few that are going to be
04:53doing the things that need to be done.
04:55And then there might be few that may be wasting a lot of money. So I think that is, uh,
04:59that is a real reason why I think it is going to be important.
05:02You just look at motive partners and look at the people that are on the webpage, for example. Okay.
05:07You will see the list of people that have depth. They have experience, but haven't aged is the way I
05:13would say it.
05:14And I think the two different things, it's not how sophisticated the models are and every quarter something new comes
05:19out is how does it get deployed?
05:22Forward deployment is the biggest issue. And I would still argue that we're at the first innings in financial services.
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