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The Alternatives Mason: Building Alts Knowledge Brick by Brick | Episode 33| AI, FinTech, and the Future of Wealth Management with Matt Ober
13 Plays17 hours ago
Join host Brittany Mason as she sits down with Matt Ober of Social Leverage to unpack his path from Bloomberg to hedge funds to VC and explore how AI and fintech are reshaping wealth management. They discuss why wealth tech is still ripe for innovation, the impact of Gen Z/millennial investors, prediction markets, Social Leverage’s investment approach, and the founder traits that drive success. Matt also shares how AI will change financial services and practical advice for aspiring builders and data scientists.
Key takeaways:
- Wealth management tech remains outdated — big opportunity for automation and unified consumer experiences.
- Gen Z and millennial investors will drive platform-led shifts in where wealth is held and how it's managed.
- AI will boost efficiency and personalization in financial services but must be balanced with human judgment.
- Early-stage investing favors founder vision, adaptability, and talent over short-term metrics.
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Transcript
Introduction to Seed Stage Investing
00:00:00
Speaker
think at the seed stage, it's about the team and the the bigger vision. You know, I think a lot of early investors will show their financial model for the next three, four years. And I think that we all would love to believe that they're going to grow two three, four, five, six X every single year. But I think the reality is, is there's going to be pivots and there's going to be things that they're going to run into the product might change completely. And so you're really betting on the team.
00:00:25
Speaker
and their ability to deal with adversity and do they have a big net for initial vision? They get thrown off, like, are they able to deal with what that pivot might look like?
00:00:35
Speaker
Less on the numbers at the early stage.
Podcast Introduction with Rikki Mason and Matt Ober
00:00:43
Speaker
Hello everyone. am Rikki Mason, your host of The Alternative Mason, and we are back with another episode. And today I have Matt Ober as our guest. He is the managing partner at Social Leverage, an early stage VC firm investing in FinTech and vertical AI. The firm is known for early investments in Robinhood, El Toro, Alpaca, and customer acquired by Meta. Before Social Leverage, Matt was chief data scientist at Third Point and an early employee at WorldQuant. I am really excited to dig in today with you, Matt. Thank you so much for taking the time to come on.
Matt Ober's Career Beginnings in FinTech
00:01:22
Speaker
Yeah, thanks for having me All right, well, I like to start the podcast with what your why is and you know how you ended up in the financial service industry in the first place. Tell me a little bit about about your background before entering the space.
00:01:37
Speaker
Sure. I mean, I think it goes back to out of college, long, long time ago, I joined a company called Bloomberg, which I think is famous for the Bloomberg Terminal. And i think that just kind of jump started my financial services career.
00:01:51
Speaker
You know, I started there. At that point, it was like starting on the phones. And I think, you know, you learn how to use the Bloomberg Terminal and ah a full education on what the buy side and hedge funds do, what the banks do and all the different players in the space. And from there it was a good launching ground for me to leave and actually join a hedge fund. So that's how I got going was learning the software side of things.
00:02:14
Speaker
The software side of things. Okay. So were you always interested in tech as a child, as a kid growing up? I mean, what was, what were your passions in? I think so. I mean, I was always in sports and I think it was competition. I think thinking of the stock market and working in investments is probably the ultimate competition. of People trying to be the most successful investor, find the best opportunities in deals. And so I think that's what attracted me to ah joining that that world once I ah you know kind of learned about it out of school.
00:02:50
Speaker
How long were you at Bloomberg for? Just over five years. Oh, wow. Okay. Yeah. So started in San Francisco, then they moved me out to New York. And that's where I think I really learned about the opportunities out there.
00:03:03
Speaker
Do you feel there was a big cultural difference working with working between San Francisco and New York? I know the cities are both very different cities. complete difference. This was before San Francisco was everybody doing startups. And you know, in this world we live in now, everybody doing AI. San Francisco was like a retired wall street. I think everybody I worked with out there that was older had worked in New York or London or somewhere, and then eventually retired in that stuff.
00:03:30
Speaker
So definitely a different culture, faster pace in New York, different mentality. i see. they see.
Challenges in Wealth Management Technology
00:03:38
Speaker
So what problem in wealth management still has not been solved even after a decade of fintech disruption?
00:03:48
Speaker
Yeah, I think if you look across wealth management, technology and software in general is just very old school and it's a lot of manual work. We do a lot of investing in wealth tech, whether it's giving the everyday investor access to things that maybe was only once available ultra high net worth or family offices, things like better lending rates or different lending products.
00:04:12
Speaker
Direct indexing, which is like a great way to invest with taking into account all the tax obligations and reduce your taxes over time. So I think the entire software of a wealth manager is very hands-on and very manual. So I think you can look at every single part from first day you sign up to join an advisor to how do they deliver you your performance and reports and better even understand what you care about.
00:04:38
Speaker
So shifting the energy a little bit, well, where do you where would you see like the biggest gap between what consumers want and what FinTech and what founders are currently building?
00:04:55
Speaker
Biggest gap. I mean, I think at the end of the day, The consumers want ah like answers. They want automation. a lot of people want things to be simplified. I think obviously with the world we live in of ai like that's becoming easier and easier.
00:05:11
Speaker
But i think I think there is that whole idea of like, why can't all of my financial services live within one app, right? Why do i have like dozens of apps on my phone from credit cards to investing to savings to managing my children's accounts? So I do think there's that super app.
00:05:29
Speaker
But also automation of everything. you know Why do we have to do taxes at the end of the year, have an accountant to do things like tell us what to do. Maybe we're spending too much. It should tell us slow down on your spending or move money from one account to another. So I think simplification so that we can go enjoy the things that we want to spend our time on and not think about our own finances.
00:05:50
Speaker
Yeah, I actually run out of space on my phone. I feel like all the time I have so many apps, but I use them, but and it's my phone will be like, Oh, you have to re download this app. And I'm like, I just used it. Why am re downloading this again? It's because yes there's just not enough space. So as far as how we're seeing things evolve with the Gen Z, I feel like they're just disrupting the workspace quite a lot.
Gen Z's Impact on FinTech and Technology Trends
00:06:15
Speaker
How do you foresee things evolving with millennials and Gen Z as they evolve more in this space with WealthTech?
00:06:27
Speaker
You know, I think that with Gen Z, there's a couple of things. There's obviously the whole transition of money being passed down, right? There's a lot of people returning, a lot of people that have small businesses, a lot of wealth that's going to be handed down to the next generation. And that generation is on Robinhood or on apps that are a little bit more modern. They're not sitting at a Morgan Stanley or a traditional wealth manager.
00:06:50
Speaker
So I do think that gives Robinhood really interesting opportunity to capture a lot of the wealth management space. And they've done that with some of the acquisitions they've done. I think it's going to become more and more prevalent.
00:07:02
Speaker
I also think my partner, Howard, always talks about the degenerate economy, but the younger generation wants to do everything from their phone, from trading to ordering food. And now we have prediction markets. And so like sports gambling and investing is all blending together. And I think that that doesn't seem like that's going to change going into next year.
00:07:21
Speaker
What are your thoughts on this new app? I've been seeing a lot of advertisements push for it recently, Kalshi. Kalshi. I mean, I think that's what's, you know, that's what's powering Robinhood's predictions.
00:07:32
Speaker
I think that that's where the future of gambling is going. And we're going to have predictions on everything. I mean, you can... now do predictions on interest rate cuts today to where's the price of Bitcoin going to be to when is Travis Kelsey's wedding going to be or will they get yeah getting there? Exactly.
00:07:50
Speaker
No, I think it's blurring the lines of what is gambling and what is investing. i think it's going be integrated into everything we see. And I think it's going more and more in the media.
00:08:02
Speaker
CNN, CNBC, everybody's signing partnerships and You could argue where everybody's congregating and predicting is going to become topics in the news. Where do you think our focus should be most now then?
00:08:18
Speaker
As an investor? Yeah. Or just as an average person? As an investor, of course. Yeah, I mean, as an investor, listen, I think what we're excited about is, you know, over the next 10 years, everything will be rebuilt from ah an AI native type of technology standpoint. So I think that, you know, blockchain and crypto were exciting a few years ago. I think we're finally finding use cases with blockchain from a uses of stable coins and movement of money. And I think for the next 10 years, everything that was built software wise, apps came out and software was all over the internet. I think everything's going to be rebuilt from an AI perspective. So it's going to be a lot less work for us as end users. And I think it's exciting to think about the free time we get back as AI handles a lot of the, know, small tasks.
00:09:08
Speaker
So you're super pro AI.
00:09:12
Speaker
I'm pro i AI on the idea that I think it's going to allow companies to build faster and leaner and things in our lives will be easier and we'll have less busy work.
00:09:23
Speaker
I'm less believing that AI solves everything and that you can build a company with just AI or build a website and code everything and just say, I think like we're not fully there yet, but I do think what teams are able to do. A team of two is able to do so much more than they ever were able to before when they're starting a company.
00:09:45
Speaker
Tell me about social leverage.
Social Leverage's Investment Focus
00:09:48
Speaker
Yeah. So we've been around about 17 years. Started by my partners, Howard Linton and Tom Peterson. Howard was the founder of StockTwits, which is like the Twitter for finance. We're still active there, sit on the board. Howard's still chairman.
00:10:03
Speaker
um And we're on our fifth fund. So we write one to $2 million dollars checks. We invest in early stage companies. We call it seed stage. So companies that are below $10 million dollars in valuation and we're We're hands-on, we take a board seat.
00:10:17
Speaker
FinTech and vertical SaaS or vertical AI, those are really our areas of expertise. Probably most well-known for and first investments in Robinhood or eToro, Alpaca, customer with a K. um So my focus is mostly on the FinTech side, which is where I spent most my careers in financial services and that's, you know, both on the business side, but also thinking about like, what's the next consumer app. I think social leverage, the name has always been about leveraging your social network.
00:10:49
Speaker
So instead of financial leverage, we leverage our social network. And I think across our founders, our investors, and just broader network, we get to see a lot of things before anybody else sees them, just given the inbound we you get.
00:11:04
Speaker
So seed stage, let's talk about what, what something founders pitch that matters far less than what they would think.
00:11:18
Speaker
yeah I think at the seed stage, it's about the team and the, the bigger vision. You know, I think a lot of early investors will show their financial model for the next three, four years. and I think that we all would love to believe that they're going to grow two three, four, five, six X every single year. But I think the reality is, is there's going to be pivots and there's going to be things that they're going to run into the product might change completely. And so you're really betting on the team and their ability to deal with adversity. And do they have a big enough for initial vision and they get thrown off? Like, are they able to deal with what that pivot might look like?
00:11:53
Speaker
So less on the numbers at the early stage. Less on the numbers. Yeah. So what do you feel that they should focus more on their pitch? You know, what actually matters the most to you? What's it but for us? We want to.
00:12:09
Speaker
Yeah, for us, we want to see founders that have a product that we can look and feel play with a few customers get some actual feedback from people that want to use it. and see some clients that will actually pay for it. I think that's the most important for us to hear from clients that you love the product or what we can actually use ourselves.
00:12:29
Speaker
And I think for us, we want to see like, is it something that we're not only excited about that, but we think we can help with. Love if it's a product where I can ah pick up the phone and ask people what their opinion and end up making the first dozen sales.
00:12:44
Speaker
What would be an example of like the best pitch you've seen?
00:12:50
Speaker
That was a standout for you.
00:12:53
Speaker
I think it's more like we know, I would say when we meet founders, typically pretty early, right away from just seeing their confidence in what they're building. i can think about our most recent portfolio companies and fund for company called Archive Intel, which is like compliance for the wealth management space.
00:13:11
Speaker
Larry knew exactly what he was building and we knew the exact problem because we had it ourself because we're SEC registered. It's an easy one. I've also used the competitive product my whole career. Not in fintech. There's a founder, Danny Frankel, who worked at Facebook. He started a company called PunchUp.live and I think he knew exactly what he was building.
00:13:30
Speaker
He had a great team that he recruited and you could just see the energy of what he was going after. And so from a person that you're going to spend maybe 10 years working with, you could see yourself talking to on a daily basis and you could also be helpful, which is maybe would argue not our sweet spot of FinTech, but we do do stuff in and around the media space. So yeah, it's another one that's interesting. um And there's a company in Canada called Fiscal.ai that was originally called FinChat.
00:13:59
Speaker
and I spent a lot of my time using data for investing and everything. And I think it's team of four founder or the CEO knew exactly what he wanted to build. And I think he was persistent in, I think we probably met him and talked to him for about a year before we invested.
00:14:15
Speaker
Wow. But just like the constant checking in and transparency and keeping up. We've had a lot of those, I think over the years where we'll meet somebody, maybe it's too early. It's not the right fit at first. They are persistent and keep us up to speed on everything. And it ends up working out in the long run.
00:14:31
Speaker
Yeah. So you have a quant background. Tell me about that. I think I would say I have a background working at a quantitative hedge fund. okay I wouldn't call myself a quant myself. When I joined WorldQuant, it was less than 100 people.
00:14:48
Speaker
You know majority of them were PhDs, math, computer science. And I was brought in as probably the first non-quant to think about how do we grow the business and like, what do we need to grow the business? And that was why Igor Tchulchinsky at the time, who was a founder, brought me in and and said,
00:15:08
Speaker
We have the smartest people. This is how we're making money. We want to 10 X everything every year. Help us do that. So I'm smart enough to sit in the room with the quants and understand what they're doing. I don't think I could take any of their day jobs. up It's intense.
00:15:23
Speaker
Yeah. Different, completely different atmosphere than good traditional investment firm. So what did that teach you about predicting human behavior in markets?
00:15:37
Speaker
I think for the quant firm, what it teaches you is like, Not everything is explainable, right? There's a lot of, lot of quantitative finances, automating ideas, but then a lot of it is also just pattern recognition and finding anomalies. And when things happen in data, it leads to good performance and strategy. So I think if it taught me anything, there's a lot of different ways to make money and risk management and process, and just
00:16:08
Speaker
the whole operations, that was probably what we were the strongest at. We had very strict operations and process. We used to call it like a factory and like there were factory workers and everybody did their job and it all came together in the end.
00:16:23
Speaker
Beautiful. What, what would you say is like the biggest misconception that people have about data-driven decision-making in a space like that?
00:16:36
Speaker
I think there's a big misconception on how much money firms will spend to buy data. I think in total, they spend a lot of money. I think you meet a lot of companies that think they're going to get paid a million dollars a year to sell ah a hedge fund data.
00:16:50
Speaker
I think that's rare if ever that does that happen. i think also the overthink how, how easy it is to go from like an idea and a strategy to actually making money in an institutional world, right? Like there's a difference between managing 50 million and managing
Regulatory Challenges in FinTech
00:17:11
Speaker
5 billion.
00:17:11
Speaker
And how does that actually work when you start to try and put that strategy in the market?
00:17:20
Speaker
How does regulatory complexity shape which FinTech ideas are even possible?
00:17:29
Speaker
and so I think at the early stage for us, we'll reinvest at social leverage. Like sometimes you're investing in things where they have to figure out the regulatory. We weren't investors in prediction markets, but you can see Kalshi and Polymarket for the last 10 years wasn't really legal or wasn't legal in the US. And then a flip of the switch and things now they're taking off and they're worth 10 billion plus. But there were a lot of prediction markets websites back 10, 15 years ago that never made it.
00:17:59
Speaker
So I think it's a time before it's been tried, it's been tried before in different ways. Maybe they were a little different. They didn't have the scale, but from a regulatory perspective, it's no different than crypto. If you think about it from getting the licenses to have an exchange in the U S or what's legal and what's not legal. So I think a lot of times for seed investing, we're investing in things.
00:18:21
Speaker
early before they're possible. We were investors in Robin hood in the early days where they commissioned free trading. That was the first idea of commission free trading. Wasn't like it was illegal, but it was definitely discussed a lot with payment forward or flow and so forth.
00:18:38
Speaker
What personality traits do you feel are most important to founders who are building like an iconic company? I mean, what sets that type of founder apart?
00:18:51
Speaker
I think they have to have a chip on their shoulder. I think as much as it's about a lot of things have to line up, right? It's gotta be the right timing. They've gotta build the right team. And the best founders are great recruiters at building and bringing people in around them, right? They can only grow so much without great talent around you.
00:19:13
Speaker
They have to be great at fundraising. at the end of the day, like they're going need money to grow. Financial services becomes expensive a lot of times in the long run, depending on if they're regulated and they need access to capital.
00:19:25
Speaker
And so like you're essentially you're selling people to join you. You're selling people to give you money, keeping your team excited about the the bigger vision. And so like you have to have those things line up on top of a little bit of luck in the markets and everything.
00:19:39
Speaker
I think founders that have a, a little bit of grit or have been through things and grit handle adversity is important. It's a great book too. Angela Duckworth wrote yeah bre um that grit. You said a chip on their shoulder. i have to come back to that because I heard Manish Kata actually said that ah in a speech that he did a couple years ago. I heard him speak from Potomac. What do you mean by a chip on their shoulder? Tell me more about that.
00:20:11
Speaker
You know, you got to be. I think of a chip on a shoulder is like you're a little bit angry about how something went or you were overlooked for something or there's something that's driving you. Yeah. you To prove somebody else wrong or. want thinking something should be done better If you can tap into that, it is such excellent fuel. And his what he said is chips on shoulders, create chips on in pockets. chips and shoulders create chips in pockets i love that and so it's kind of always stuck with me because i had a very different background and made a massive switch over to the financial service industry only really during the pandemic so massive career change and so That's why I have such a diverse group of listeners. So obviously now I have a career in this space, but still have a lot of followers that are also, i get a lot of young women that are coming to me now and wanting to learn. And so, um but I love that saying, and i only made the switch into the space because yeah, I had a lot of, I had to go, i actually had to make an alternative message.
00:21:19
Speaker
decision and an alternative path in life from what I was doing. So my next question is for you. yeah I felt like I had a lot to prove in the financial service space. So my next question for you is, have you ever had a time in your life And I'm sure you have, because we all do at some point where you've had to make some tough decisions, a totally alternative path from what you thought you would be doing.
00:21:48
Speaker
And what is that? and How did you come through? How'd you make it back on top? Yeah. i mean, when I started my career at Bloomberg, i definitely started and it was like Ivy league graduates. I went to the top universities, all these things. i got a job there and I think It was great.
00:22:07
Speaker
And I was excited for the role. I went to a state school. I didn't have the best GPA, but I knew enough to get a job because I did well in the group interview, which really was because I studied abroad and learned something overseas that nobody else in the group interview knew. But I think I had this, I had a two week window where they said like, you really want to be and be here and or be at a hedge fund one day and do something, you gotta leave San Francisco and go to New York.
00:22:33
Speaker
And they're like, you gotta, want you to pack up and move in two weeks. And I think i grew up in the Bay area, my family, i oldest of five. It was like ah complete switch. Yeah. And even when I got to New York, it wasn't like I had a new job, but I think the people in San Francisco knew, go there and you'll be able to get to where you want to be. And so it was, I didn't know anybody in New York. I had like maybe one or two people I knew from high school but no close friends and uh packed up and left and uh never looked back thankfully now i'm back on the west coast after 15 plus years in new york it was the right decision in that short time window that's fantastic so you said how long in new york i was in new york for about 15 years 15 now i'm in san diego oh now you're in and so now you're back to california so now
00:23:21
Speaker
Yeah, it's a little more relaxed there now. Yeah, a little bit more quiet. I travel a little bit now since I've got to get on planes here and there for meeting companies and board meetings, but not the day to day New York City grind.
00:23:35
Speaker
I never thought I would leave New York. I lived in New York for a while too. And once you're there, it's it's very hard to leave it. You really do feel like you're in the center of the universe. You know? Yeah. Yeah, that is true. So what do you think distinguishes a product first founder from a market first founder and which one wins?
Traits of Successful Founders
00:23:56
Speaker
I think there's a lot of companies that build great products but don't figure out the sales side of things. I think you've got to be able to sell. So whether you have a great product or a good product,
00:24:08
Speaker
the best founders I've met are really good salespeople and the product can catch up. they can They obviously it's helpful to have a technical team, but I think in the world of ai that I know we keep talking about, but I'll go back to it, like it's easier to build products now, but it's hard to get distribution.
00:24:25
Speaker
So if you can build a good product, know not distribution or haven't figured out sales it's hard to just bring somebody in to do that you've got to do the sales yourself at first so i think you've got to have some domain expertise right some experience in what your the area you're going after and then you're a good sales person can get you a long way yes everything comes back to sales i feel like yeah you know in some way or another everybody's always everybody's selling something exactly exactly in one way or another
00:24:57
Speaker
Where do you see the next breakout category emerging with the intersection of ai and financial services?
00:25:07
Speaker
I think that there's obviously exciting things happening in the wealth space and wealth management. I think there's a lot of interesting things happening in, I'll call it like the capital markets data space. So, you know, in investing, there's large data and information services companies like S&P and Faxed, Bloomberg.
00:25:29
Speaker
These companies employ tens of thousands of people, mainly offshore collecting data. In a world of AI, you don't need 10,000 people. You could do it with 100. And so I think that it brings a really interesting opportunity to think about like, who's the next Bloomberg or Faxit.
00:25:47
Speaker
And we always hear those a lot and they're like some nice fancy login and terminal, but I mean like more like the underlying data infrastructure. And I think you can build some really exciting companies, exciting for the investors, maybe not to the end consumers day to day, but you can build some really s and P and Faxit. Those are $10 billion dollars plus companies.
00:26:06
Speaker
Yeah. what's um So let's talk a little bit about your funds and you are on Fund 5 now.
00:26:17
Speaker
Tell me about that. That's correct. We are on Fund 5. We are about five companies in in Fund 5. Um, fund four, we deployed as of the end, beginning earlier this year, we made our last investment.
00:26:31
Speaker
And we also had a fund to fund at one point where we backed 19 other managers. The idea there was, we have a network of a lot of funds that we personally invested in. And so we put that into more of a structured vehicle so we could invest in back other managers that do similar things to us, but maybe have deeper domain expertise.
00:26:50
Speaker
whether it's crypto or healthcare or different areas that we wouldn't be as experts as some of the counterparties, which has been great for our network. And so in Fund5, you know, five companies so far, three, maybe four of them more on the financial services side and one more on like vertical AI side.
00:27:11
Speaker
Interesting. And OK, interesting. And what patterns did you notice when evaluating for the funds of funds?
00:27:23
Speaker
No, I think how we look for founders, the fund managers, like experience, you know, how do they think about discipline around valuations and what type of expertise do they bring to the table when they're working? What were the top traits though? If you could sum it up the top traits of those who consistently showed up on top as top performers.
00:27:45
Speaker
Discipline. Right. It's hard to say no most of the time to founders. um I think that experience, like we believe, like we invested in mostly guys with deep experience and expertise.
00:28:00
Speaker
You know, when you meet a founder, like they can help the person more than just like everybody says they can help, but like they understood the problem set and really understood what those founders were trying to achieve.
00:28:12
Speaker
Those are probably the top two. Okay. Where do you see social social leverage in the next five years? I think we'll continue to do what we've been doing for the last 17 years, which is back the best early stage founders. I think financial services and FinTech is an area of our expertise.
00:28:33
Speaker
We continue to do vertical SAS or vertical AI now is what everybody's calling it. um I think we'll expand more and more into the wealth side and we'll see different products. Explain more our listeners, vertical SAS.
00:28:44
Speaker
explain more for our listeners vertical sass So you have vertical SaaS and then you have enterprise SaaS typically.
00:28:56
Speaker
Enterprise SaaS would be like the next Slack or the next Microsoft Word, right? It's a software used by every industry, by anybody. A vertical SaaS, so that'd be enterprise SaaS. Vertical SaaS would be specific software for an industry, just for construction industry, just for the wealth management industry. And I think where we're moving towards now is a lot of people calling it vertical AI, which is AI just for a specific industry. So I want to use artificial intelligence just for the legal industry. Right. And it's just going to be to help lawyers be more efficient versus open AI is kind of ai for everybody. Right. Yeah. You can ask it a question about a cooking recipe, or you could ask it to help you draft a legal doc.
00:29:40
Speaker
it It can do everything more verticalized, understands the workflows, understands what your day to day is really about. And so I think vertical SaaS is more and more becoming vertical AI.
00:29:52
Speaker
And so we'll focus on that and financial services as our main areas of expertise.
00:30:00
Speaker
What's a vertical that you think will produce the next Robin sized company?
00:30:09
Speaker
I think that I think the legal space is interesting. i think we've been doing stuff there on our firm. I think that, uh, the wealth management industry, I think we will see like a emerging new AI company and wealth.
00:30:24
Speaker
Robinhood is great, but it's obviously not a fit for everybody. And so I think like, we'll see something come from that side of the world. um And then listen, think obviously we have prediction markets, right?
00:30:34
Speaker
So that's obviously been taking off.
00:30:39
Speaker
Looking back from Bloomberg to hedge funds to VC and everything that you've done, What, how would you define your
Matt Ober's Career Reflections
00:30:49
Speaker
journey? How would define my journey?
00:30:54
Speaker
Yeah, sum it up. I think I went, I, learned an incredible amount of knowledge from Bloomberg was, I tell people that are graduating from college, Bloomberg is the best place to learn. They train you, they teach you, there's classes, you get everything.
00:31:12
Speaker
I got to see quantitative hedge funds. I got to go to third point, which is activism and structure credit. I feel like I got the best institutional training I could possibly ask for to now be doing venture and sharing all that knowledge with founders.
00:31:29
Speaker
leveraging the network I built for that long time period in New York. So I think I couldn't ask for a better learning and experience to then be able to leverage that to help the next big company.
00:31:41
Speaker
Excellent. Well, what are three pieces of advice you would give someone who perhaps want wants to become a data scientist or go into this space, you know, a quant or one FinTech in some capacity? What are three pieces of advice you would give to them?
00:31:58
Speaker
think it's more generalized, which is like the network is everything, right? Like you've got to build your own network, show up to events, reach out to people. Like you never know from senior to junior.
00:32:11
Speaker
People that I met 15 years ago are now leading businesses, right? That you would never have thought would have the role they have now. I think the learning really starts after school, right? You get the building blocks when you're in school to learn, but you've really got to like dive in and hone your craft and like pick something that go deep on something and become an expert.
00:32:32
Speaker
And I think tools are changing so much now that I think you've got to decide if you want to be somebody who's really in the weeds all day, or if you want to be more of a leader and that sales type of person.
00:32:47
Speaker
Yeah. Yeah. I think that you can be successful on both sides. Which do you prefer? i less, I don't like being in the weeds all day. I think I'm more for better or for worse, better on the phone.
00:32:58
Speaker
Yeah. More of a people person. Yeah. How would you describe your leadership in three words?
00:33:07
Speaker
Fair,
00:33:11
Speaker
transparent, hardworking.
00:33:18
Speaker
What are some resources that people can look up as well to for more education in this space? What are perhaps your favorite books, podcasts?
Advice to Future Entrepreneurs
00:33:30
Speaker
I love the podcast, Invest Like the Best, Fundamental Edge by Brett Coffrin is a great learning classes and stuff. i think there's a ton of newsletters out there.
00:33:41
Speaker
I write, my partner Howard writes. I think like you can consume endless newsletters that are out there. If you want to be in the hedge fund space, reading the the great hedge fund managers, their quarterly letters, right?
00:33:55
Speaker
It's a great way to just think about how they are going about things or what's what's driving their thought process. Michael Parekh is a great writer on everything AI and really makes it simple.
00:34:07
Speaker
um Those are topic of mine.
00:34:11
Speaker
Is there anything you'd like to leave our listeners with? Anything else? Any final thoughts?
00:34:18
Speaker
Yeah, I mean, I think in the world we live in right now, it's it's an exciting time to start a business, whether it's for venture firms or that's just to start your own company. I don't think you have to be technical anymore to do that.
00:34:31
Speaker
There are tools that are out there. We can all learn to build something. and can build something that you're passionate about and the money can come from that in its own way. Right. I think there's, we're a investor in a company called Beehive that you can have your own newsletter and podcasts and sell things. You can be a creator you can really monetize that if that's, what's exciting to you. And so I think it's a exciting time to build something, whether it's your main job or a side hustle.
00:35:00
Speaker
It's no better time to be an entrepreneur. That is right. Yeah. Yeah. And it's never too late. Correct. I love it. Well, thank you so much. Thank you so much, everyone, for tuning in and listening to another episode of The Alternative Mason. And where can they find you, Matt, if they'd like to give you a follow or perhaps follow your newsletter? You said that you write a newsletter. Yeah, you can follow me on LinkedIn. My newsletter is mattover.co, socialleverage.com.
00:35:31
Speaker
Those are probably the three best places to find us. Excellent. Thank you so much for all of your advice. I hope you all learned something today. i know I did. and we will see you next time on the Alternative Mason. Thank you.
00:35:48
Speaker
The opinions expressed in this program are for general informational purposes only and are not intended to provide specific advice or recommendations for any individual or any specific security. It is only intended to provide education about the financial industry.
00:36:02
Speaker
To determine which investments may be appropriate for you, consult your financial advisor prior to investing. Any past performance discussed during this program is no guarantee of future results. Any indices referenced for comparisons are unmanaged and cannot be invested into directly.
00:36:17
Speaker
As always, please remember investing involves risk and possible loss of capital. Please seek advice from a licensed professional.