Introducing Alpha & Co.

< TL;DR >

Today, I’m thrilled to unveil a new venture that has been nearly two years in the making: Alpha & Co.

Alpha is a business intelligence firm dedicated to helping brands, boards, and business leaders navigate the challenges and opportunities of growth in the AI era.

Just as electricity and the Internet reshaped entire industries, AI represents a revolutionary technology shift — one that will impact every person, every business, and every aspect of society. While we’re only beginning to grasp AI’s immediate, first-order effects, the deeper, secondary, tertiary, and long-term impacts are still beyond our imagination.

At Alpha, we believe that AI will transform every business into an AI-driven enterprise. Particularly, the entire customer experience will be powered by AI, ushering in true personalization at scale. We’re on the brink of a new era where sales, marketing, and support seamlessly converge into a single, intelligent, and continuous customer engagement cycle. First-party data will become more valuable than ever, and the way we approach consumers, commerce, content, creators, communities, and culture will need to be reimagined through the lens of AI. AI agents will both augment and replace roles, reshaping the workforce and redefining responsibilities across the organization.

In finance, alpha is the measure of how much an investment outperforms a market benchmark, reflecting the value added by the investor. At Alpha & Co., we are driven by this very principle — our goal is to help you unlock the competitive edge, the “alpha,” in your business through AI-driven strategies that push your performance beyond ordinary benchmarks.

But who will lead these AI efforts? Is it technology first or customer first? Will it be the CTO, the CRO, or the CMO who takes the initiative?

What happens to these roles, these teams, and the entire go-to-market ecosystem we know today? Do companies buy, build, or partner? Who will emerge as winners and losers in this new landscape? What should be a proof-of-concept, and when do you scale initiatives internally or externally? How can leaders stay ahead of the ever-changing AI landscape with its constant influx of new research, startups, and regulations? And perhaps most critically, how can the C-suite and boards get educated enough to make informed decisions while balancing the massive opportunities for productivity gains and profits against the risks of disrupting company culture and morale?

This is where Alpha & Co. comes in.

We’re on a mission to help you unlock alpha in the AI era.

Are you ready?

--

< The Longer Read >

This month marks the 25th anniversary of when I joined Akamai Technologies, a company that helped usher in the Internet revolution and an experience that changed my life.

While I've been worked in many industries over the years, the common thread has always been technology.

Indeed, I’ve been mesmerized with tech since I was young.? Whether it was marveling at the cool gadgets, droids, and ships in Star Wars (loved the Millennium Falcon!), playing Pac-Man and Pitfall on an Atari 2600, or typing commands on my Commodore 64, I’ve always been captivated and curious about what is possible with technology.??

I remember how excited I was when I was part of the first group of students to get an email address at Tufts University when I graduated in 1995.? After my year in Mexico on a Fulbright Scholarship using CompuServe 56K dial-up to get online and “surf the web”, it made sense that when I started working in finance as an investment banker that I would focus on technology, media, and telecom (TMT).? And boy, was there a frenzy building about this thing called the “World Wide Web”.??

Netscape Navigator came out in December 1994 and quickly became the first widely adopted web browser, making the internet more accessible to everyday users.? However, it was the IPO of Netscape in 1995 which became a phenomenon and triggered both consumer and investor enthusiasm for internet-based companies, marking the beginning of the Dotcom boom.? There was a dizzying flurry of inspiration, innovation, and investment over the next few years.? 亚马逊 , eBay and 微软 ’s Internet Explorer went live in 1995 and the “big four” search companies 雅虎 !, Lycos, Excite, and Infoseek all went public in 1996.??

By 1999, I had worked on tech, media, and telecom M&A deals and had a pretty good understanding of the technical, operational, and business aspects of the Internet.? So when I got the opportunity to join a startup out of the 美国麻省理工学院 (MIT) called Akamai Technologies in their network infrastructure engineering group, I was ecstatic!? I left my investment banking job, packed my bags and moved from my beloved New York City to Cambridge, MA to join the company.? While most people were looking to join “dotcoms”, I wanted to focus on the internet infrastructure that would effectively be the platform powering these websites.??

The Origin of Akamai

Akamai’s beginnings lie in a challenge posed by World Wide Web inventor Tim Berners-Lee at MIT in early 1995. The “father of the web” foresaw the congestion that was soon to become very familiar to Internet users, and he challenged colleagues at MIT to invent a fundamentally new and better way to deliver Internet content. What he may not have foreseen was that posing the problem in an academic setting would ultimately result in a commercial service that has revolutionized the Internet.

MIT Professor of Applied Mathematics Dr. Tom Leighton , who had an office down the hall from Dr. Berners-Lee, was intrigued by the challenge. Tom, a renowned expert on parallel algorithms and architecture was head of the Algorithms Group at MIT's Laboratory for Computer Science. Tom recognized that a solution to web congestion could be found in applied mathematics and algorithms and he assembled a team of researchers to tackle the problem.

After obtaining his undergraduate degrees in computer science and mathematics from the Technion, a brilliant student named Danny Lewin came to MIT in the Fall of 1996 to work with Dr. Leighton. Shortly thereafter, Danny began making rapid and important progress on a variety of techniques for improving Internet performance. Working with the team, Tom and Danny developed the mathematical algorithms necessary to intelligently route and replicate content over a large network of distributed servers, technology that would ultimately solve what was becoming a frustrating problem for Internet users.? Tom and Danny went on to co-found Akamai in 1998 and by 1999 had amassed over 60 PhDs applying innovative AI/machine learning techniques to their solutions.? The company grew rapidly and delivered its first live traffic (a pixel buried deep in the Disney site) in February of 1999. In March, Akamai gained significant market exposure when it enabled the delivery of March Madness for ESPN and a Star Wars trailer for Entertainment Tonight, both of which experienced historic levels of user demand. Akamai launched commercial service in April 1999 and announced that one of the world's most-trafficked web properties, Yahoo!, was a charter customer.???

The Intelligence Age

That was 25 years ago.

Now in 2024, we are in a moment that feels like a pivotal inflection point—akin to the dawn of the internet but with even more profound implications for business, society, and humanity.?

Welcome to the AI era (or as OpenAI CEO Sam Altman has called it, "The Intelligence Age").

Of course, that sounds like hyperbole. Typically, I subscribe to “Amara’s Law”, what the researcher and futurist Roy Amara said, "We tend to overestimate the effect of a technology in the short run and underestimate the effect in the long run.”? However, this time is different - we are fundamentally underestimating the effect of Artificial Intelligence in both the short and long run.

I believe that the launch of OpenAI’s ChatGPT in November 2022 will come to be recognized as the “Netscape Navigator” moment of the Intelligence Age.??

Netscape’s launch and subsequent IPO was the beginning of widespread public awareness and commercial use of the internet, marking the transition from the internet being a niche tool for academics and tech enthusiasts to a mainstream platform accessible to the general public bringing the World Wide Web into homes and businesses.? It represents the shift in how people interact with technology and sparked the rapid adoption of the internet for communication, commerce, and culture.? It would eventually inspire and ignite major innovations such as the introduction of the iPhone in 2007, the launch of cloud computing with Amazon Web Services in 2002, and the rise of social media in the 2010s.? It’s amazing to see how much technology has permeated our everyday lives.? And we’re just getting started.?

The Road to ChatGPT

OpenAI was founded in December 2015 by Sam Altman, Elon Musk, Greg Brockman, Ilya Sutskever, John Schulman, and Wojciech Zaremba, with the mission to ensure that artificial general intelligence (AGI) benefits all of humanity.? From its humble beginnings conducting research and developing sophisticated AI models for natural language processing, robotics, and reinforcement learning, OpenAI was one of the first to leverage a major technology breakthrough when the Transformer model was introduced in June 2017 by researchers from @Google Brain in their paper titled “Attention Is All You Need.” This paper introduced the revolutionary transformer architecture, which relies entirely on self-attention mechanisms, discarding the traditional recurrent (RNNs) or convolutional (CNNs) networks used in sequence-to-sequence models.? The transformer architecture greatly improved the efficiency and scalability of models for tasks like natural language processing, as it allowed for more parallelization during training and could capture long-range dependencies in sequences more effectively. This architecture became the foundation for subsequent models including the Generative Pre-trained Transformer (GPT) which came out in 2018.? GPT was an innovative new neural network whose machine learning model simulates the human brain - and this became the foundation for state-of-the-art AI models, including OpenAI’s ChatGPT.?

When ChatGPT came out in November 2022, I again was captivated by what technology could do.? Using a deceptively simple prompt, this chatbot and generative AI tool produced quick responses to all of my queries.? And that was it - I knew this was going to be the start of something revolutionary, transformative, and pervasive.? Like the Internet, it will completely impact every person, every business, every government and every society on the planet.??

Just the Beginning

Fast forward to 2024, and we are seeing interesting parallels with the advent of the AI era and the internet era before it.? While there are certainly similarities such as they are both disruptive technologies with global reach, economic transformation and ethical and societal challenges, the differences must not be downplayed or even dismissed.??

The pace of development is different.? While both the internet and AI have developed over several decades, beginning with academic research in the 1950s (AI) and 1960s (Internet), the incremental technological breakthroughs in AI are exponential because improvements in one area (like data availability, computational power, or algorithm design) reinforce and amplify advancements in others. Breakthroughs are happening faster due to the compounding effects of larger models, more powerful hardware, increased investment, and open collaboration, leading to rapid progress across industries and disciplines. This exponential growth is only expected to continue, with the expectation of new models every 12-to-18 months.

AI is no longer just a powerful tool; it’s becoming an essential enabler of innovation, transforming industries at an accelerated pace and reshaping the way we work, live, and interact with technology.

By the end of this decade, it will be clear that those professionals and businesses who were the early adopters, investing the time and effort to understand and implement AI as a strategic competitive advantage will be the new market leaders.? AI is no longer just a way to optimize operations - it will be the key differentiator that unlocks new business models, enhances new customer experiences, and creates greater leverage.? I’m convinced that the brands that fully embrace AI-driven transformation are likely to dominate their industries, leaving behind those that are slow to adopt.??

Of course, there are existential ethical and societal risks and implications that must be addressed as well.? With the rise of AI comes the heightened responsibility to address ethical concerns around data privacy, bias, job displacement, and governance. We’re in a moment where conversations about responsible AI development are as critical as technical advancements. Governments, companies, and individuals are grappling with how to harness AI’s benefits while mitigating its risks, shaping policies and frameworks that will guide AI’s future role in society.? In essence, the AI era is both an engine of disruption and a beacon of opportunity. It’s shaping not only industries but the very fabric of society, offering immense potential while calling for thoughtful stewardship.

Introducing Alpha & Co.

With this context, we come full circle to how this post started.

Today, I’m thrilled to unveil a new venture that has been nearly two years in the making: Alpha & Co.

Alpha is a business intelligence firm dedicated to helping brands, boards, and business leaders navigate the challenges and opportunities of growth in the AI era.

Just as electricity and the Internet reshaped entire industries, AI represents a revolutionary technology shift — one that will impact every person, every business, and every aspect of society. While we’re only beginning to grasp AI’s immediate, first-order effects, the deeper, secondary, tertiary, and long-term impacts are still beyond our imagination.

At Alpha, we believe that AI will transform every business into an AI-driven enterprise. Particularly, the entire customer experience will be powered by AI, ushering in true personalization at scale. We’re on the brink of a new era where sales, marketing, and support seamlessly converge into a single, intelligent, and continuous customer engagement cycle. First-party data will become more valuable than ever, and the way we approach consumers, commerce, content, creators, communities, and culture will need to be reimagined through the lens of AI. AI agents will both augment and replace roles, reshaping the workforce and redefining responsibilities across the organization.

In finance, alpha is the measure of how much an investment outperforms a market benchmark, reflecting the value added by the investor. At Alpha & Co., we are driven by this very principle — our goal is to help you unlock the competitive edge, the “alpha,” in your business through AI-driven strategies that push your performance beyond ordinary benchmarks.

But who will lead these AI efforts? Is it technology first or customer first? Will it be the CTO, the CRO, or the CMO who takes the initiative?

What happens to these roles, these teams, and the entire go-to-market ecosystem we know today? Do companies buy, build, or partner? Who will emerge as winners and losers in this new landscape? What should be a proof-of-concept, and when do you scale initiatives internally or externally? How can leaders stay ahead of the ever-changing AI landscape with its constant influx of new research, startups, and regulations? And perhaps most critically, how can the C-suite and boards get educated enough to make informed decisions while balancing the massive opportunities for productivity gains and profits against the risks of disrupting company culture and morale?

This is where Alpha & Co. comes in.

We’re on a mission to help you unlock alpha in the AI era.

Are you ready?

SWP