View from the Office.

Met Mike Ma, Founder and CEO of SixAI, a fintech startup, at Spill the Beans, a coffee shop in the Gaslamp District of downtown San Diego. We each had a cappuccino.

SixAI is leveraging large language models to re-imagine the future of financial research and portfolio management. That’s not what Mike said, but it’s how I’ll describe his stealth-mode venture. I’ll write more about it at some point but suffice to say it’s wicked cool.

I met Mike in March when he DMd me on LinkedIn. After graduating from Wharton, he started his path at Blackstone, and then became a long/short equities analyst. He founded ResearchRabbit in 2020 and SixAI last year.

Usually when I meet people, I’m behind the notebook asking questions. Mike turned the tables, insisting on a photo with both of us and peppering me with questions about the early days of Bloomberg, where I spent three decades as a reporter and product manager.

Mike said he’s interested because he finds the stories helpful to understanding the infrastructure of modern fintech. He said it’s more relevant to him than economic history about, for example, the canals or railroads systems.

As anyone who has met me knows, I could tell Bloomberg stories all day. I told Mike I hired a reporter named Rick Jarvie who insisted our Buenos Aires office be across the street from the stock exchange so he could be first to pick up print outs for closing prices.

He would then run back to type them up and publish on the Bloomberg. It seems so antiquated, of course, but the principle of expediting the delivery of information has been a continuous theme from the days when Reuters used carrier pigeons to the high frequency traders laying cables from New York to Chicago.

We talked about storytelling and how important it is to founders, especially those like Mike who are trying to create something new. I said that it helps to use examples and anchor on an existing product or service that’s familiar.

Mike’s a student of investing so we talked about how financial research has evolved from the days of Warren Buffett’s focus on 10-Ks and Stan Druckenmiller’s macro bet against the Bank of England to the current quant era of alternative data and factor models.

The AI period has yet to be defined, but Mike said it offers the prospect of completely changing the game. He argues that new tech should be accompanied by a new approach.

Mike can be reached via X or LinkedIn or DM me for a warm intro.