On the agenda:

• Why one of BlackRock’s youngest directors quit his seven-figure job.
• The best early-stage investors of 2023 with proven track records.
• We can pinpoint the moment the US’s housing market turned upside down.
• The do’s and don’ts of dressing like a Wall Street rainmaker.

Bill Gates’ AI bet

Speaking at an event in San Francisco last week, Gates said that the big winner in the AI tech wars will likely have created a personal digital agent. Instead of going to Google to search for information, or to Amazon to order dog food, users will simply converse with this personal AI.

And while Gates is rooting for Microsoft (no surprise there), he said he’s been impressed by a startup called Inflection. I’ve been playing around with its app for a few weeks now, and I’ve been seriously impressed.

I recently told Pi that a part of my job is thinking through big themes and how we could report on them. One topic I’ve been thinking about is how to report on the epidemic of loneliness. Each time, Pi addressed my response, and then posed a question, prolonging the interaction.

At its best, the conversation felt like brainstorming with a colleague over Slack. I even found myself forgetting that I was in fact talking to an AI.

Burnout at BlackRock

Khe Hy was sucked in by the glitz of the industry, but after his first decade in banking, the fancy dinners and $50 whiskey shots soon lost their sheen.

Becoming a father was the final event that put Khe’s life in perspective. He realized that “success is like an addiction,” and that his career wasn’t bringing him happiness.

Burnout lessons from a former director.

Also read:

• Meet Wall Street’s rising stars of equity research, the ones to watch as the stock market faces one of its biggest challenges yet

The Seed 100 is our annual list of the best early-stage investors, based on data analysis. These investors have proven track records and are on course for continued success. Serena Williams comes in at No. 70, while Peter Thiel is at No. 75.

See the full Seed 100 here. 

Also read:

• Seed 30: The best early-stage women investors of 2023.
• Ed Sim got into venture capital by answering a newspaper ad. Today he’s the industry’s No. 1 seed investor.
• Serena Williams raised a $111 million venture fund a year ago. Now she’s the No. 4 female seed investor.

Jessica Cadmus, a personal stylist specializing in dressing Wall Street execs, says crisp, white sneakers are in, while pantsuits and big logos are out.

How she dresses VIP finance clients.

The housing market has entered a new Ice Age — and this frosty new reality means fewer sales, a smaller pool of available homes plummeting, and historically high mortgage rates for the foreseeable future.

Looking back, we can see the exact moment when the comet that triggered this new era hit: July 2020 — a time when space-starved remote workers and collapsing mortgage rates caused a frenzy. Those halcyon days pushed the market directly into its current frigid situation.

Read the full report.

Putin’s bunker, home prices, & more

• Why the age-old taboo against revealing your salary is proving impossible to break.
• Americans aren’t mixing with each other or exploring their cities as they did before the pandemic.
• How rich families use trusts that last as long as 1,000 years to save on taxes and benefit future heirs.
• Ghost jobs, AI résumé screening, and a lopsided economy are making job searches suck.
• Markets dipped after an apparently AI-generated hoax of an explosion at the Pentagon explosion went viral.
• An entrepreneur infused himself with blood from his teen son to try and stay young forever.
• How people are using ChatGPT to make more money and become better at their jobs.
• Tech companies continue to cut perks — and may start lowering 401(k) matches and healthcare benefits.

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