Sep 25, 2025 · 44m · capital-allocators
Jack Kokko – Building the Google of Finance at AlphaSense (EP.461)
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gold bands on the timeline = statements, start to end. Hover to read, click to jump. CC turns on captions
In this episode of Capital Allocators, AlphaSense co-founder and CEO Jack Kokko joins Ted Seides to discuss the transformation of financial research through semantic search, proprietary expert transcript networks, and autonomous AI agents.
How this conversation actually went
Every chapter scored 0–10 on four independent dynamics. Hover any point for the reasoning behind the score. Ted holds 12.4% of the talking time here. How this is scored →
Ted as informed peer 3.8 Guest teaching 3.4 Guest disagreement 0.5 Ted pushing back 0.8
speaking balance: gold is Ted, purple is the guest (3 minute bins)
Sharpest disagreement ▶ 15:37 Reframing the loss of investment alpha
Jack pushes back against the notion that AI levels the playing field completely, arguing instead that alpha shifts to prompt sophistication and cross-industry inquiry.
Hardest push from Ted ▶ 15:05 Ted challenges table-stakes commoditizationTed directly pushes Jack on whether automated 10-page research reports destroy hedge fund edge by making deep research table stakes for any subscriber.
Biggest teaching moment ▶ 25:13 Jack explains multi-model benchmarking and orchestrationJack details the technical reality of benchmarking black-box LLMs, discounting external vanity metrics, and dynamically routing tasks to specialized models.
Ted holds their own ▶ 30:04 Ted probes unit economics of token-heavy AITed demonstrates sharp financial fluency by asking how AlphaSense models unit profitability when high-cost LLM compute is coupled with proprietary data rights.
the scores for every segment, with the reasoning behind each
| Chapter | Topic | Ted as informed peer | Guest teaching | Guest disagreement | Ted pushing back | Why |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Episode Hook: AI Acceleration in Investment Diligence | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 | Introductory hook, host monologue, and promotional segment. No interactive conversation takes place. | |
| Jack Kokko's Background and Analyst Frustrations | 3 | 2 | 0 | 0 | Ted opens with standard biographical prompts regarding Jack's background. Jack explains his early career in Finland and investment banking in Silicon Valley. | |
| Founding AlphaSense: Building the Google for Finance | 4 | 4 | 1 | 1 | Ted probes on how AlphaSense built semantic search before the modern ChatGPT era. Jack educates on the complex manual sentiment and classification models built in-house. | |
| Aggregating Core Data and Acquiring Expert Networks | 4 | 3 | 0 | 0 | Ted asks about core data and alternative data acquisition. Jack describes the acquisition strategy behind Stream and Tegus to capture proprietary expert transcripts. | |
| AlphaSense User Experience: Natural Language and Citations | 4 | 4 | 1 | 0 | Ted asks how hedge fund analysts experience the product. Jack outlines the granular citation mechanism that differentiates financial research from consumer chatbots. | |
| Preserving Investor Alpha and the Art of Prompting | 6 | 4 | 2 | 4 | Ted challenges Jack on whether widespread AI adoption commoditizes investor edge and turns AlphaSense into table stakes. Jack reframes edge around prompting quality and creative angle selection. | |
| Generative AI Breakthroughs and the Autonomous AI Interviewer | 3 | 5 | 0 | 0 | Ted asks how ChatGPT changed the company's trajectory. Jack shares a deep technical breakdown of launching an autonomous AI interviewer capable of conducting expert calls. | |
| LLM Orchestration, Benchmarking, and Stylistic Adaptation | 5 | 5 | 1 | 1 | Ted inquires into LLM evaluation processes. Jack describes building an LLM-agnostic orchestrator and discovering distinct stylistic needs between buy-side investors and corporate executives. | |
| Customer Base Expansion: From Hedge Funds to Corporations | 4 | 3 | 0 | 0 | Ted asks about customer expansion beyond hedge funds. Jack outlines the viral expansion through investor relations into corporate strategy and C-suite functions. | |
| Business Economics, Pricing Models, and M&A Strategy | 6 | 4 | 1 | 3 | Ted presses on unit costs, token consumption, and monetization strategy. Jack details how pricing shifted from per-seat subscriptions to enterprise and variable API models. | |
| Key Business Metrics, Growth Drivers, and Product Leadership | 4 | 3 | 0 | 0 | Ted asks about key business metrics and leadership tactics. Jack highlights accelerating revenue growth and his personal choice to act as head of product. | |
| The Future of Finance: An Always-On Intelligence Machine | 3 | 4 | 0 | 0 | Ted asks for a long-term outlook. Jack details his vision of an autonomous, 24/7 intelligence engine that monitors portfolios and initiates research calls proactively. |
Statements from this episode (16)
Kokko: LLMs Still Struggle with Deep Industry-Level Understanding
“Even today's LLMs still struggle to be able to do that kind of thing at that deep industry level understanding.”
Kokko: Tegus Acquisition Added Over 1,000 Buy-Side Firms to AlphaSense
“That, of course, led to our much bigger acquisition of Tegas where they were the market leader in that. They'd built by far the largest expert transcript library and a really incredible operation working with a thousand buy side firms out there who were doing …”
Kokko: AlphaSense's Searchable Repository Indexes Half a Billion Documents
“The system is now able to precisely understand what you're looking for from your prompt, and now it goes across all the half a billion documents in our system and is able to find the most relevant ones and then dig deep into them and ask those same questions f…”
Kokko: AI Report Generation Matches Three Weeks of Team Research Output
“Often hear from clients that a single deep research report that our AI produces now gives them same 10 pages that they spent three weeks producing with a team of people.”
Kokko: AI Shifts Investor Edge to Asking Better Questions
“We are raising the bar, for sure, as any technology that is introduced into the investment process, now everybody's able to do things much more quickly, efficiently, and move more in an agile way, because the research can be applied to so much more that you, i…”
Kokko: Prompting AI Effectively Mirrors Managing a Junior Analyst
“I'd go back to how do you ask an analyst that's working for you? How do you make sure that you convey all the information that the analyst needs to know so that you can be sure that your request has been understood? It's the same thing with the machine. If you…”
Kokko: Search Modes Range From Six Seconds to Fifteen Minutes
“We've built our system so that you have different modes. You can ask questions in fast mode generative search where the average answer comes back in six seconds. There's a mode where you let the machine think longer. It takes maybe one or two minutes of chain …”
Kokko: AlphaSense's Legacy Sentiment Model Still Outperforms Modern LLMs
“Although I mentioned the sentiment piece, that is still, you know, the incredible sentiment model we built with the prior generation of technology still is running and is doing a job that's better than what we see LLMs doing.”
Kokko: AlphaSense Just Launched an Autonomous AI Expert Interviewer
“One thing that we built and released Just weeks ago was a new AI interviewer. So our Tegus expert transcript library, it's created by buy-side firms doing interviews with experts and analysts that are hedge fund or VC firm, private equity firm has to get on a …”
Kokko: AlphaSense operates an LLM-agnostic orchestrator across leading models
“We've built this, our system as kind of an LLM agnostic orchestrator that is working with just about every one of the leading edge models in the market.”
Kokko: AlphaSense Deploys Different LLMs for Buy-Side and Corporate Clients
“We've ended up even giving financial services, the buy side, a different model, and the corporate world, a different model. We've learned that there are different stylistic references as to how you want the LLM to be speaking to you.”
Kokko: The vast majority of AlphaSense's pricing remains fixed
“The vast majority of our business is still fixed in terms of how we price.”
Kokko: AlphaSense Deployed Nearly $1B to Acquire Tegus
“We made a much smaller investment at first, and then we're able to make this very big investment, almost a billion dollars that we deployed in that Tegus deal.”
Kokko: AlphaSense Has Grown to Employ Over 2,000 People
“I feel like at our size of the organization, over 2000 people, you get to the point where people assume that things that are blocking them are not changeable.”
Kokko: AI Can Fully Automate Portfolio Monitoring and Cross-Industry Analysis
“Our system can be monitoring that portfolio and analyzing what's happening with every one of those companies, every new piece of information that comes out. It can proactively go figure out what's the meaning of that. What other impacts does it have in other i…”
Kokko: AI Will Autonomously Detect Market Shocks and Interview Experts
“When it doesn't find the information, it can recognize that autonomously and go and generate expert calls and have the AI do more expert calls, bring back the information, and now tell you that what does this new thing mean? When the next DeepSeek-like event h…”