PivotalEdge’s Sid Ghatak didn’t set out to build something disruptive. Over his decades-long career in the public and private sector, he helped build so much of the data framework modern finance takes for granted. But he always saw himself as more of a problem-solver than an innovator.
“I preferred Henry Ford to Steve Jobs,” Ghatak admits. “Ford said, ‘If I had asked my customers what they wanted, they would have said give me a horse that eats less and goes to the bathroom less; no one would have told me to build an automobile’. That statement always resonated with me. You have to understand the underlying problem before you can build the most elegant solution.”
Ghatak’s asset management firm, PivotalEdge Capital, LLC, understands that two of the core problems with AI as it is being deployed today, especially in financial services, is a lack of trust in the output and its immense cost.
Putting theory into practice through PivotalEdge
What began as a question in 2017—simply wanting to know whether Ghatak could make a data-centric AI trading model that accurately predicted stock prices—became something of a passion project once he saw that he had. After many years of monitoring, evaluating, and refining the models, during and after the pandemic, Ghatak realised he was confident enough in the project to launch his own asset management firm.
“When I was a consultant or an executive, it became exhausting to continuously solve legacy problems I had inherited,” Ghatak admitted. “I decided if I ever had the opportunity to do it correctly, I would do so from the beginning. I wanted to do something new and profound and interesting, which required starting from scratch. There are no legacy investments or problems – I can do this properly from the start.
“Looking back, these seemingly disjointed career decisions provided me with the core foundational knowledge I needed to launch this firm,” he continues. “It’s not like I said to myself when I was 25 that I’d start an asset management firm at 50. But I did give myself harder and harder problems to solve, all the time, and it all led up to this.”
A paradigm shift in mentality
The launch of PivotalEdge was the natural progression of Ghatak’s professional journey. That’s why he advocates for always developing new skills and insights with a ‘journey of 1,000 miles begins with a single step’ mentality.
“It’s true that a lot of the heroes of the tech world are people who started in their 20s,” Ghatak says. “That made me feel like I’d missed the boat. But then I read an interesting Harvard study that found that in the highest-growth companies, the average age of founders was 45. Magically, I happened to be 45 at the time. So, while there may be a misconception in the industry that you have to be young to start a tech company, that’s not necessarily true.”
