Building models manually to know the business

Ehsan Ehsani is executive director at Crescendo Partners, adjunct assistant professor at Columbia Business School, and author of “How Not to Be Replaced by a Spreadsheet That Talks” who uniquely bridges quantitative analysis, and traditional fundamental investing while organizing Columbia’s generative AI conference.

The episode is sponsored by TenzingMEMO — the AI-powered market intelligence platform I use daily for smarter company analysis. Code BILLIONS gets you an extended trial + 10% off.

https://www.tenzingmemo.com/

3:00 - Born in western Iran at 14,000 feet, strict education emphasis pushed Ehsan toward chemical engineering before discovering his talents lay in management and innovation.

5:30 - Winding path to NYC: Sweden and MIT master’s degrees, European consulting, project-driven relocation to New York in late 2000s.

7:30 - The Prometheus Warning: AI companies like Alphabet disrupted by their own creations. “Analysts benefit from using Gen AI tools in automating repetitive activities, but by embracing such technologies, they’re working themselves out of a job.”

12:00 - Sell-side blueprint: Top 10 banks had 200-300 analysts each; now 300 total combined. Buy-side headcount could drop to two-thirds or half within 20 years.

18:00 - “Gen AI is transformative because it allows automation of not just repetitive tasks but core analytical functions”—fundamentally different disruption than Bloomberg or alt data.

25:00 - Size advantage: Large firms will mine 15 years of institutional memory—emails, memos, channel checks—to identify patterns smaller funds can’t access.

35:00 - Contrarian take: Beyond “do more with less” hype, rapid bifurcation looms: “This separation of better and worse performance will happen much faster than with previous technologies.”

45:00 - Next frontier: Voice/video training. CEO says “no” versus “no...”—transcripts miss hesitation that reveals truth.

55:00 - “We humans tend to forget. It’s a blessing in general, but for pieces of wisdom we read, they might not remain top of mind. AI can remind us.”

60:00 - Success definition: “Tranquility and content where your values, interests, and priorities align with what you’re doing. I didn’t define it in economic form because that doesn’t embody true success.”

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