Two things have changed the industry dramatically in the last couple of decades. When I was first starting out, the computer was a lot less important than it is now and the internet was virtually nonexistent. We were sort of at the forefront of the digital revolution by accident. Back then, we did everything on the phone or on paper, calling up companies, extracting every little piece of data, compiling all that information into a cohesive narrative. It was incredibly difficult but gratifying as hell.

Now, that’s not difficult at all because most basic processes and tasks have been automated. What’s difficult is the exact opposite. There’s so much data on individuals, especially in the fields we’re covering—high level executives, hedge funders, employees of public companies, basically, people reporters like to write about. Think about it, most hedge fund managers are close to me in age: they’ve been working fifteen, twenty years and over those past fifteen, twenty years they’ve been getting news stories written about them three, four times a week. Add that up, and you’re looking at tens of thousands of items that we have to wade through. That’s tough. People think we just click a button in a browser, but that couldn’t be more wrong. It’s actually harder now than it was fifteen years ago to investigate someone because of the sheer volume of data we have.

Most people would think of the task of verifying someone’s work history as a very straightforward process. Where this falls apart is that there is a tremendous number of companies that are no longer in business or have merged. It’s not like most people work for IBM or GE. On top of that, people’s biographies are scattered in five or six different places. So they’ll have a LinkedIn profile, an article in The New York Times, resumes they’ve circulated among their professional connections, and so on. It’s about taking these different biographical streams and painting a picture.

The other thing is that data is so permanent now. None of these profiles ever go away. I submitted my first resume to my first boss in early 1987. There’s no chance that resume exists anywhere. It got tossed in the trash, and that’s that. Now, this never happens, and I have yet to figure out why people aren’t more careful about sounding credible and consistent with what they put out there about themselves. Someone will post something on LinkedIn that they don’t include in their resume or vice versa, which is astonishing to me.

The volume of records, the permanency of data and the power of computing are the major changes to our industry. The reason why most of our competitors don’t do this work very well is it’s way too expensive to sift through all the archival material and, if you do, it’s time-intensive to identify or interpret certain minute details. It’s like looking for a needle in a haystack.