Alex Sacerdote
Alex Sacerdote is the founder, CEO, and portfolio manager of Whale Rock Capital Management, a Boston-based technology-focused hedge fund he launched in 2006 after earlier stints at Fidelity Investments, where he ran large-cap and small-cap tech funds. He is best known for an investment framework built around S-curve adoption analysis — identifying technology platform shifts at their inflection points before the market fully prices in the growth trajectory — a thesis he has refined over a 25-year career in TMT investing. Whale Rock manages approximately $17 billion across hedge fund, long-only, and hybrid strategies, with concentrated positions in software, semiconductors, cloud, and AI companies.
“Alex at Whale Rock has this great way to frame it. That less than 0.2% of people on Earth are actually using AI in an agentic way.”
Source→“Anthropic kind of was this dark horse candidate, the startup. They focused really purely on the enterprise. OpenAI had kind of won the consumer. Anthropic has something like 14 or 15 million DAUs... Claude Code has gone to almost completely agentic.”
Source→“We did a 90-page PowerPoint deck where we used Claude Code to scour the internet for all the feedback we could about the coding market and what their products were good at, where they might need to improve. And we also did our whole overview of what the coding market would be. They welcomed us into this round.”
Source→“I started to realize these guys, their management team is excellent. The focus, the dedication, they had almost no turnover, the quality of code, and then the business plan was really starting to play out.”
Source→“When we were buying NVIDIA in 2023, we were paying four times earnings.”
Source→“We noticed they were the sole supplier of the Google TPU server three years ago. The stock was trading at eight times earnings... They've got like 50, 60 percent share of the cloud Ethernet switch market, which is a crucial market for AI because AI is incredibly network intensive.”
Source→“We also own Elite Materials, which makes the leading ingredient, which is copywriting, copper clad laminate, which goes into these boards. The PCB units are growing. The layer counts are rising. So you've got like a 50 to 60 percent CAGR just in the units.”
Source→“Corning, they make the fiber. They've got some ridiculously high share of the fiber... I was reading this Microsoft data center they just built. There's enough fiber to circle the world four and a half times in that one thing.”
Source→“We owned Adyen, which is a fantastic payments company... you can't invest in Adyen unless you know Stripe like the back of your hand... we realized this is Coke and Pepsi.”
Source→“It really started to look like a three-horse race and somewhat of an oligopoly. Very similar to how the cloud market evolved, where three companies underpin the entire SaaS cloud world and have really excellent businesses.”
Source→“We really were watching Brett Taylor at Sierra... He's building this fantastic company called Sierra. We're not involved. But that's where the rubber hits the road.”
Source→“Karpathy said last year's code tools could write 20% and 80% would be handwritten. That flipped when the latest model came out, and now he hasn't written a line of code except in English.”
Source→“They developed a great relationship with Adam Ferrogi. He's one of the best managers out there.”
Source→“Peter Lynch, I started at Fidelity, and he loved to mentor the kids. So I got some time with him. He said, white out the chart. It's all about the future. So it's okay to miss.”
Source→“We commissioned this gentleman, Horace Dadu, used to work with Clayton Christensen to go look in history. And we have the big S curves on our wall over the last 100 years.”
Source→“I met with Sean McGuire like three years ago. And he said, I wish I could come back and be a hardware hedge fund because all the companies are public and they all have powerful IP.”
Source→“Invest Like the Best, EP.477 — Alex Sacerdote - How to Invest Through Technology Cycles”
Source→“Gemini can never be counted out. We love Google as well. It's one of our largest positions.”
Source→AI-extracted from podcast / newsletter / paper summaries. May contain errors.