Q&A With Jack Kokko, CEO and Founder of AlphaSense

Former Morgan Stanley analyst in the technology M&A team, and current CEO and Founder of AlphaSense, Jack Kokko, was the founding Chairman of BetterDoctor (acquired by Quest Analytics), a doctor search engine and data provider to health plans. He was also founding CEO of Silecs, a developer of advanced materials enhancing the performance of semiconductor chips. Jack started his career as a senior analyst on Morgan Stanley’s technology M&A team in Menlo Park, California, and telecom team in London, UK.

Jack holds an MBA with a major in finance from the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania, a master’s degree in electrical engineering from the University of Oulu, Finland, and a bachelor’s degree in finance from the Helsinki School of Economics. In 2023, Jack was named an Entrepreneur Of The Year® New York award winner by EY, the preeminent competitive award for entrepreneurs and leaders of high-growth companies. He lives in New York with his family.

AlphaSense is a market intelligence and search platform used by over 4,000 enterprise customers, including most of S&P 500 companies and leading financial firms, enabling them to find key data points and insights to make better strategic decisions more quickly and confidently.

1. What was the inspiration behind AlphaSense?
What inspired me was my own experience as an investment banker where I desperately needed a product like AlphaSense. I started my career as an analyst on Morgan Stanley’s tech M&A team in Menlo Park. Like all analysts, we were poring over large amounts of information and gathering data to help value and execute large M&A deals and financings. In that role, I quickly realized how challenging it was to find key insights and data at the speed and reliability that the job required; searching across large pools of research content had to be done manually and as a result, finding all the impactful data points was a hit-or-miss process. I still remember walking nervously into client board meetings, fearing that I could have missed critical information that could impact the outcome of a multi-billion-dollar deal.

Years later, I met my cofounder, Raj Neervannan, at Wharton. I was shocked to realize that despite all the time that had passed, the research process and tools available hadn’t changed and still nobody had built a search engine for finance or business. Raj and I decided to solve this problem by developing a new type of search engine that could sift through the mountain of available information and easily extract insights from the thousands of sources and billions of data points out there.

We had a vision of leveraging machine learning and semantic search technology to build this intelligent machine that thinks like a human analyst—just like my role back at Morgan Stanley—and created something that helps financial and knowledge professionals across verticals extract key insights at lightning speed. It’s gratifying to now see thousands of the best investment bankers in the world using AlphaSense to solve this very problem.

2. How do you ensure AlphaSense stays the dominant AI platform for the business world?
We created AlphaSense to solve an unmet need in the market, so by definition there were no comparable tools available. Since then, we’ve stayed laser-focused on innovation to deliver more value for our users, continuously refining our AI tech stack and product capabilities, and expanding our content through careful curation of thousands of premium sources – to the point where we offer the world’s broadest collection of top-tier business content in one place.

We’ve also spent over a decade building our AI stack and serving a large and expanding customer audience, which has provided us with a mountain of data. This data helps us to continue optimizing our language models and search algorithms and build the system we have today, which has a refined understanding of the billions of data points within business content. Our incredible R&D team, alongside our world-class AI team, is focused on leveraging this training data and using the latest innovations in AI to solve the workflows unique to our business users.

Our legacy in structuring data for AI, the caliber of our team, and the thousands of refinements we continually make to our models is what cements and extends our lead in the market.

3. How is AlphaSense augmenting the way businesses make strategic decisions?
My mantra is “every company’s enterprise value is the cumulative sum of the decisions that it makes.” We help our customers succeed and compete more effectively in their businesses by having the right information fueling their strategy. They make better, quicker, and more confident decisions at every turn, and those decisions accumulate and turn into business success. 

For example, a client in the tech world was looking to transform its business through strategic M&A, but the Corporate Development team was bottlenecked due to limited resources. AlphaSense helped them survey the relevant landscape to discover potential targets. Our expert call transcript library, Stream, gave them on-demand access to the perspectives of former executives, competitors, suppliers, and partners. By leveraging earnings calls and sell-side research’s meetings with management teams, the client was able to see a window into the mind of target management teams. Automated alerts allowed the team to constantly monitor and mine relevant insights. Building a best-in-class process with the right tools culminated in accelerating the client building a robust M&A pipeline. 

Businesses, especially our enterprise customers, need credible information sources and an accurate search engine they can trust. That's our sweet spot: providing our customers with the confidence they need by providing all relevant information at their fingertips.

4. What do you think is the next revolutionary tech tool to impact the business world?
Generative AI is dominating the tech news cycle for a reason. We’re seeing a fundamental paradigm shift in how machines are augmenting human-thinking and decision-making across every facet of the business world. There’s a lot of hype and, understandably, concern, around how it will impact society, but one thing is clear to me: this is the most transformative new technology in our lifetimes.

At AlphaSense, we are seeing in real-time how generative AI can dramatically speed up the research process, giving financial analysts the ability to cover more ground in a much shorter amount of time. Despite those exciting capabilities that are already available, we are only in the first inning of all the capabilities GenAI will bring to the world of business and finance.

5. What are some of the rewarding aspects of what you do at AlphaSense and what are some of the challenges?
Hearing comments like “AlphaSense has saved a year of my life” keeps me going every day. Building a platform that helps our users do their work better and faster, and go home to their families earlier every night – nothing is better than that. Having experienced the inefficiencies and manual work in the job of an analyst firsthand, it gives me great pleasure to solve those problems for the whole market at large.

I’m also constantly inspired from working with Generative AI technology every day - it gives me goosebumps with its potential. There’s just so much more that we can do to help elevate our users to apply their brain power and do their best work.

In terms of challenges, it is always surprisingly difficult to get the attention of people who are busy with daily work, and convince them that there is a better way to do something they’ve been doing for years. I’d love to find a shortcut to that. But I am sensing a tipping point where the market knows about what we do, and understands how much they need this. Personally, I’m committed to making that happen, and won’t slow down until the whole market is benefiting from AlphaSense. 

6. What advice would you impart on other alumni who are interested in trying their hands at entrepreneurship?
It’s a common challenge for most people in finance to risk giving up a well-paid career to become an entrepreneur. What a lot of people miss though is that often the bigger regret is not trying something.

The next challenge is often what to do. My advice is to think about where you have a unique edge over everyone else. For me, it was the vision of combining financial research and AI – it gave me great passion that remains today, but very few people have the same passion. Also, pick something that will keep you excited for a long time – even when it works, entrepreneurship truly is a marathon. Most ideas require a pivot or two along the way, so picking a field you have passion in will carry you through those pivots and the countless barriers every entrepreneur has to break through.

7. How did your time at Morgan Stanley prepare you for your current role?
I had a non-traditional path to becoming an entrepreneur. Through my early investment banking experience at Morgan Stanley, I learned many invaluable lessons and skills, from core financial and market knowledge, to the discipline, efficiency, and work practices to get a lot done in a short amount of time. 

In hindsight, the analyst program feels a bit like an intense entrepreneur training program that gives you the skills, confidence, high standards and mental toughness to get through anything that you come across later on. This has been invaluable to me. I would not be the CEO and founder I am today without the opportunities and experiences that Morgan Stanley gave me.


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CRC#5925021     09/2023