The Hedgineer Podcast

Michael Watson & Jhanvi Virani
  • 5.0 (4)
  • Technology
  • Updated Weekly

The Hedgineer Podcast covers how AI is reshaping the way hedge funds and asset managers research, operate, and invest. Hosted by Michael Watson (CEO) and Jhanvi Virani (COO) of Hedgineer, we discuss the ways AI is changing how funds run, dive deep into new developments in AI, and host conversations with industry leaders. New episodes drop weekly.

  1. 4d ago

    Can the Marketplace Be Worth More Than the AI Models? S3E17

    Stripe just bought OpenRouter for over $7B. At first glance, a payments company acquiring a model proxy for that much money sounds strange, until you consider what Stripe sees. It watches spend across a very large customer base, and AI spend is rising at an exponential pace. When inference becomes something you shop for rather than something you're locked into, owning the venue where tokens get priced starts to look not just strategic, but immensely lucrative. Underneath the deal is a question every company is now running live: does it make more sense to purchase AI inference through a router, or is sticking to a frontier model subscription still the right choice? The answer depends on how much of your work actually needs the best model available, and on whether you have the engineering capacity to build the tooling that makes a router usable in the first place. Michael and Jhanvi take opposite sides on how long premium reasoning stays worth the premium, which turns into the bigger question sitting under every frontier lab valuation. Those numbers assume companies reorganize around AI, that the work left for people is the hard judgment-heavy kind, and that the labs capture the spend for everything else. The destination is easy to describe. The route there is the argument.  About Hedgineer Hedgineer is building the AI platform for institutional investing — deploying agents, skills, and data connectors directly inside hedge funds and asset managers to transform investment and operational workflows.  The Hedgineer Podcast follows CEO Michael Watson and COO Jhanvi Virani as they navigate the frontier of AI adoption in finance, sharing unfiltered perspectives from the teams, guests, and problems they work with every day.  Subscribe for weekly analysis on AI infrastructure and institutional finance. Watch the full episodes on Spotify at https://isht.ink/dFj5oaqbe or YouTube at youtube.com/@hedgineer. Audio available wherever you get your podcasts. Connect with us on LinkedIn at linkedin.com/company/hedgineer-io or reach out at podcast@hedgineer.io. Hedgineer.io

  2. Aug 18

    Can AI Turn You Into a Creative? S3E16

    Michael and Jhanvi have never edited a video before, and this week they built an entire marketing campaign. They walk through the whole pipeline: Claude Code turning a long prompt about the product into a storyboard of 12 to 16 shots, generating a color scheme and reusable SVG characters, routing clip generation through Runway to Veo, Kling and Seedance, then pulling narration and a score timed to the story from ElevenLabs before stitching it all together with Remotion. Two days to build the process, and it now runs end to end from a phone. They then get into how the role of video will evolve as it becomes easier and cheaper to create. It has always had a place in sales, marketing, and recruiting. But what about IR, BD, and even research?  About Hedgineer Hedgineer is building the AI platform for institutional investing — deploying agents, skills, and data connectors directly inside hedge funds and asset managers to transform investment and operational workflows.  The Hedgineer Podcast follows CEO Michael Watson and COO Jhanvi Virani as they navigate the frontier of AI adoption in finance, sharing unfiltered perspectives from the teams, guests, and problems they work with every day.  Subscribe for weekly analysis on AI infrastructure and institutional finance. Watch the full episodes on Spotify at https://isht.ink/dFj5oaqbe or YouTube at youtube.com/@hedgineer. Audio available wherever you get your podcasts. Connect with us on LinkedIn at linkedin.com/company/hedgineer-io or reach out at podcast@hedgineer.io. Hedgineer.io

  3. Aug 11

    Vibecoding: The Right Way | S3E15

    Building application prototypes has never been easier. The ceiling comes after, when someone has to deploy it, host it, and keep it running without much engineering support. This week, Jhanvi and Michael work through what stands between a good prototype and a good application: setting up AI environments that are faster to work in and harder to break, wiring in MCP connectors thoughtfully, and what changes the moment something has to run in production. Along the way they get into why the same prompt in Cowork and in Claude Desktop produces two very different dashboards, and why only one of them refreshes with live data. They also make the case that not everything needs to be a dashboard, and where scheduling an agent can be more effective. And they share advice for engineers navigating a world with more vibecoding in it, and what providing value looks like when the front office can build its own tools.  About Hedgineer Hedgineer is building the AI platform for institutional investing — deploying agents, skills, and data connectors directly inside hedge funds and asset managers to transform investment and operational workflows.  The Hedgineer Podcast follows CEO Michael Watson and COO Jhanvi Virani as they navigate the frontier of AI adoption in finance, sharing unfiltered perspectives from the teams, guests, and problems they work with every day.  Subscribe for weekly analysis on AI infrastructure and institutional finance. Watch the full episodes on Spotify at https://isht.ink/dFj5oaqbe or YouTube at youtube.com/@hedgineer. Audio available wherever you get your podcasts. Connect with us on LinkedIn at linkedin.com/company/hedgineer-io or reach out at podcast@hedgineer.io. Hedgineer.io

  4. Aug 4

    How Do You Hedge Against AI? S3E14

    AI names were sold off for several days, a heavily levered AI fund wound down its entire equities book, and then one earnings print reversed most of the damage within hours. The same industry supported two opposite readings in the same day, which says more about how funds are measuring their AI exposure than it does about AI. Michael and Jhanvi start with why so few funds formally manage their exposure to an AI factor the same way they monitor crowding or market beta, and what happens when crowded exposure to the same handful of names gets booked as idiosyncratic risk and banks are comfortable lending against a portfolio that looks market neutral. From there they get into what makes a business resilient when public sentiment continues influencing public markets, why Microsoft has a head start against their cloud competitors, and how AI is pulling those funds into compute spend they would never have taken on before. Also in this week's episode: an Anthropic model published a malicious package to PyPI, one of the most trusted repositories in the developer stack, and the accountability question that opens up when a model running inside your infrastructure harms someone outside your company. They also get into the widening gap between the people using AI at work every day and the people booing it off commencement stages, and why Meta may be better positioned than any frontier lab to serve the small businesses through WhatsApp.  About Hedgineer Hedgineer is building the AI platform for institutional investing — deploying agents, skills, and data connectors directly inside hedge funds and asset managers to transform investment and operational workflows.  The Hedgineer Podcast follows CEO Michael Watson and COO Jhanvi Virani as they navigate the frontier of AI adoption in finance, sharing unfiltered perspectives from the teams, guests, and problems they work with every day.  Subscribe for weekly analysis on AI infrastructure and institutional finance. Watch the full episodes on Spotify at https://isht.ink/dFj5oaqbe or YouTube at youtube.com/@hedgineer. Audio available wherever you get your podcasts. Connect with us on LinkedIn at linkedin.com/company/hedgineer-io or reach out at podcast@hedgineer.io. Hedgineer.io

  5. Jul 28

    Crafting an Enterprise AI Policy | S3E13

    Almost every fund has a couple of power users spending their weekends in Claude Code, prototyping automations, and proving out how useful AI can be. But then what? How do they hand it to a teammate, and how does a prototype become a production automation that compliance signs off on? Michael and Jhanvi make the case that the gap is a governance problem sitting upstream of every technical one. Everyone can build with AI. The harder half is getting compliance, IT, and cybersecurity aligned on the enablement guidelines: which tools are approved, on which operating systems, with what runtime and network observability, and who reviews usage after the fact. Answer those and you can put more powerful capabilities in your team's hands, including scheduling, skills, memory, and shared knowledge bases. Also in this episode: the case for sending email as an AI rather than as yourself, why em dashes get a message ignored, and what happened when frontier models refused to help investigate a breach that one of them had been used to cause.  About Hedgineer Hedgineer is building the AI platform for institutional investing — deploying agents, skills, and data connectors directly inside hedge funds and asset managers to transform investment and operational workflows.  The Hedgineer Podcast follows CEO Michael Watson and COO Jhanvi Virani as they navigate the frontier of AI adoption in finance, sharing unfiltered perspectives from the teams, guests, and problems they work with every day.  Subscribe for weekly analysis on AI infrastructure and institutional finance. Watch the full episodes on Spotify at https://isht.ink/dFj5oaqbe or YouTube at youtube.com/@hedgineer. Audio available wherever you get your podcasts. Connect with us on LinkedIn at linkedin.com/company/hedgineer-io or reach out at podcast@hedgineer.io. Hedgineer.io

  6. Jul 21

    Kimi K3: End of the Model Moat? S3E12

    Kimi K3 shipped this week, topped multiple coding benchmarks against Fable and Soul, and its full open source release is expected before the end of the month. Where does that leave the frontier model providers? Michael and Jhanvi get into why Anthropic and OpenAI have new incentive to lock down session data, conversation history, model reasoning, tool and skill calls, so a competitor can't distill their models into cheaper alternatives. That leads into Fable's 30 day data retention policy, and a sharper question underneath it: who owns training data that was compiled from knowledge that was never proprietary in the first place? They also reflect on this week's Hedgineer AI training sessions across clients, and what's separating the top 10% of AI users from everyone else.  About Hedgineer Hedgineer is building the AI platform for institutional investing — deploying agents, skills, and data connectors directly inside hedge funds and asset managers to transform investment and operational workflows.  The Hedgineer Podcast follows CEO Michael Watson and COO Jhanvi Virani as they navigate the frontier of AI adoption in finance, sharing unfiltered perspectives from the teams, guests, and problems they work with every day.  Subscribe for weekly analysis on AI infrastructure and institutional finance. Watch the full episodes on Spotify at https://isht.ink/dFj5oaqbe or YouTube at youtube.com/@hedgineer. Audio available wherever you get your podcasts. Connect with us on LinkedIn at linkedin.com/company/hedgineer-io or reach out at podcast@hedgineer.io. Hedgineer.io

  7. Jul 14

    We Got Rid of Our Forward-Deployed Engineers | S3E11

    Hedgineer stopped hiring forward-deployed engineers. Michael and Jhanvi explain why and reflect on when the FDE operating model breaks. Hedge Fund clients showed up assuming a shared context about their business that even the strongest engineers could never have. They also talk through what replaced it: forward-deployed analysts who have worked in similar roles as the teams they're deployed to (TMT research, credit underwriting, fund accounting). After going through extensive AI training with the Hedgineer team, these FDAs are much better equipped to handle building solutions in the forms of agents and skills, leveraging the platform that our AI Engineers build. Before getting into that, they cover the week in AI: first impressions of Fable (where it earns its cost, and where it's a bazooka for a problem that needed a scalpel), and a teardown of how Claude Tags actually works under the hood, and why Tags and Claude's separate managed-agents runtime still don't talk to each other. About Hedgineer Hedgineer is building the AI platform for institutional investing — deploying agents, skills, and data connectors directly inside hedge funds and asset managers to transform investment and operational workflows.  The Hedgineer Podcast follows CEO Michael Watson and COO Jhanvi Virani as they navigate the frontier of AI adoption in finance, sharing unfiltered perspectives from the teams, guests, and problems they work with every day.  Subscribe for weekly analysis on AI infrastructure and institutional finance. Watch the full episodes on Spotify at https://isht.ink/dFj5oaqbe or YouTube at youtube.com/@hedgineer. Audio available wherever you get your podcasts. Connect with us on LinkedIn at linkedin.com/company/hedgineer-io or reach out at podcast@hedgineer.io. Hedgineer.io

  8. Jul 7

    What Does It Mean to Own Your Own Context? S3E10

    Anthropic has been quietly redacting pieces of what Claude Code and Cowork report back through its telemetry logs. First the model's own reasoning disappeared from the traces. Then, briefly, so did users' prompts. No release notes, no explanation, just a feature flag that got flipped and eventually flipped back. Michael and Jhanvi use the incident to get into a bigger question: what does it actually mean for a firm to own its own context? Context, in their view, is everything that happens around a model call: the reasoning traces, the prompts, the environment data, the exhaustive record of what a team did with AI. As open-source models close the gap through distillation, frontier labs have a stronger incentive to lock that context down. The conversation gets into what that means for staying model-agnostic, and why a growing field of agent harnesses and open routers adds pressure on that setup. The discussion then turns to what owning your context makes possible beyond avoiding vendor lock-in. Once a firm is capturing its own usage data, it can build training around what people are actually doing, rather than a generic curriculum, and use that same data to decide where AI adoption should expand next.  About Hedgineer Hedgineer is building the AI platform for institutional investing — deploying agents, skills, and data connectors directly inside hedge funds and asset managers to transform investment and operational workflows.  The Hedgineer Podcast follows CEO Michael Watson and COO Jhanvi Virani as they navigate the frontier of AI adoption in finance, sharing unfiltered perspectives from the teams, guests, and problems they work with every day.  Subscribe for weekly analysis on AI infrastructure and institutional finance. Watch the full episodes on Spotify at https://isht.ink/dFj5oaqbe or YouTube at youtube.com/@hedgineer. Audio available wherever you get your podcasts. Connect with us on LinkedIn at linkedin.com/company/hedgineer-io or reach out at podcast@hedgineer.io. Hedgineer.io

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Ratings & Reviews

5
out of 5
4 Ratings

About

The Hedgineer Podcast covers how AI is reshaping the way hedge funds and asset managers research, operate, and invest. Hosted by Michael Watson (CEO) and Jhanvi Virani (COO) of Hedgineer, we discuss the ways AI is changing how funds run, dive deep into new developments in AI, and host conversations with industry leaders. New episodes drop weekly.

Information

  • Creator
    Michael Watson & Jhanvi Virani
  • Years Active
    2023 - 2026
  • Episodes
    44
  • Rating
    Explicit
  • Copyright
    © Michael Watson & Jhanvi Virani
  • Show Website
    The Hedgineer Podcast

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