Generating Alpha Podcast

This week on Generating Alpha, I sat down with David Gross, Managing Partner of Bain Capital, one of the world's largest private investment firms with roughly $225 billion in assets under management, and the first person to lead it alone since Mitt Romney.

David grew up between Ohio and upstate New York. At Wharton in the late 1980s, he became fascinated with Japan, then seen as America's great economic challenger, and on a mentor's suggestion went to see it for himself. He landed in Tokyo in 1992 to join NEC just as the bubble was bursting, then returned for Harvard Business School and Bain & Company before joining Bain Capital in 2000.

It was in Japan where David built the career that would define him. Once convinced private equity there would never work, he opened Bain Capital's Tokyo office in 2006. While other Western firms came and went, he stayed for twenty years, completing 45 deals without a single bankruptcy and building Bain's Asia business into one multi-asset platform. He led the $18 billion acquisition of Kioxia, carried it through a memory market collapse, and exited this summer with roughly $15 billion in profit. In January, he became Bain Capital's sole Managing Partner.

In our conversation, we explored what four years at NEC taught him about Japanese business, why he changed his mind about private equity in Japan, the inside story of Kioxia, the lessons he took from Bain's founding generation, why the firm measures itself on performance rather than AUM and will never go public, how he's training an AI model on Bain's own deal history, and the advice he'd give a 17-year-old today.

It's a rare look inside one of the most patient and globally minded leaders in private markets — and a masterclass in staying the course when everyone else leaves.

This week on Generating Alpha, I sat down with Gavin Baker, founder and CIO of Atreides Management, one of the most respected technology-focused investment firms in the market today.

Gavin grew up in Houston, Texas, the son of two attorneys, with an early obsession with history, books, and games of skill and chance. He arrived at investing almost by accident — a college internship at Donaldson, Lufkin & Jenrette introduced him to equity research, and he never looked back. After graduating from Dartmouth, he joined Fidelity Investments, where he would spend over a decade covering semiconductors, pharma, telecom, and retail before rising to manage the $17 billion OTC fund.

It was at Fidelity where Gavin developed the convictions that would define his career. As a young semiconductor analyst, he was among the first to identify the inventory buildup that preceded the dot-com crash. He built early, high-conviction positions in NVIDIA and Tesla, and was an early institutional investor in SpaceX. After leaving Fidelity, he founded Atreides Management, where he has continued to focus on deep tech, semiconductors, and the infrastructure underpinning artificial intelligence.

In our conversation, we explored Gavin's unlikely path from aspiring rock climber to one of the sharpest technology investors of his generation, the frameworks he built covering commodities and semiconductors early in his career, what makes Jensen Huang and Elon Musk generationally exceptional, how he thinks about the AI buildout relative to every prior technology cycle, the psychology of navigating drawdowns, and the advice he gives to young investors starting out today.

It's a rare look inside one of the most rigorous and historically grounded investment minds in public markets — and a masterclass in finding conviction at the earliest stages of transformative technology.

This was filmed in February 2026

This week on Generating Alpha, I sat down with Jeff Yass — co-founder and managing director of Susquehanna, one of the largest trading and quantitative finance firms in the world — and the first repeat guest in the history of the show.

This one is different. The first time around, we walked through prediction markets. This time we skipped that entirely and went straight at the ideas — the economic myths Jeff thinks the majority of people get backwards.

We covered a lot of ground: why comparing the national debt to GDP is the wrong way to think about whether America owes too much, why consumer surplus means the people we vilify as billionaires may be the ones giving society the most value, what's actually broken about the progressive tax system, and why he believes school choice and vouchers are one of the most underrated ideas in the country.

It's a fast, contrarian tour through the things Jeff believes most people get wrong about taxes, markets, and value creation — and a rare chance to hear one of the sharpest probabilistic thinkers alive lay out his first principles.

This week on Generating Alpha, I sat down with Michael Shvo — real estate developer, art collector, and founder of SHVO, one of the most distinctive luxury development firms in the world.
Michael grew up in Arsuf, Israel, the son of two organic chemistry professors. As a teenager he taught himself to trade oil and gas stocks, made millions, and lost it all before finishing school. He completed his military service, moved to New York at 23 with $3,000 to his name, and talked his way into a job at Douglas Elliman — where he invented the concept of the real estate team, building a group of 27 people around him and doing over $300 million in sales to become the firm's top broker.
He left in 2004 to found SHVO, and within four years had done $15 billion in transactions worldwide. But what set him apart wasn't the volume — it was the vision. Michael pioneered the marriage of fashion and real estate, bringing Armani into residential development before anyone else thought to, and went on to build a firm defined as much by art and culture as by architecture and capital. Today SHVO oversees more than $8 billion in assets across five major American markets, with properties that include 711 Fifth Avenue, the Crown Building, and Big Red in Chicago.
In our conversation, we talked about growing up between two worlds, building one of the most recognized names in luxury real estate from nothing, what he actually means when he talks about luxury, and how he keeps spotting iconic properties before the rest of the market catches on.
It's a rare look inside the mind of a developer who has never once built anything ordinary.

This week on Generating Alpha, I sat down with Christian Angermayer — serial entrepreneur, biotech pioneer, and founder of Apeiron Investment Group, one of the most unconventional private investment firms in the world.
Christian grew up in a small town in Bavaria and dropped out of university at 20 to co-found Ribopharma, a biotech built on groundbreaking RNA interference technology. He sold it to Alnylam Pharmaceuticals before turning 25, and has spent the two decades since founding three unicorns, backing four more, and completing over 50 IPOs and M&A transactions across life sciences, fintech, crypto, and frontier technology.
His most defining chapter has been psychedelics. At a time when psilocybin was still considered fringe science, Christian seed-funded Compass Pathways and founded atai Life Sciences — taking it public on Nasdaq at a $3.2 billion valuation — almost single-handedly transforming psychedelic medicine from a relic of the 1960s into one of the most compelling frontiers in modern psychiatry.
His latest bet is just as bold. This past Friday, Enhanced Games — his performance-enhancing-drug-permitted alternative to the Olympics that doubles as a performance medicine and telehealth platform — debuted on the NYSE at a $1.2 billion valuation.
In our conversation, we talked about betting on ideas before the world is ready, building and IPOing companies across entirely different industries, the science and philosophy behind the psychedelic renaissance, and what Enhanced Games is actually building beyond the headlines.
It's a rare look inside the mind of a builder who keeps finding the future before anyone else does.