Knowledge as an addictive drug—an investor’s guide to the expert network industry

What this means is that there's a period early in a company's life when investors have a larger-than-usual opportunity to get a competitive advantage by understanding the industry better than anyone else in the public markets. Since most companies are not completely unique, and even the ones that are have suppliers and customers, a few expert netwo... See more

But there's a lot of overhead to creating and maintaining that network; GLG has to find people, vet their expertise, and, in recent years, find a way to ensure that people don't share information they shouldn't. The expert network business has gone through two booms: GLG started in 1998, with an original model of publishing deeply researched indust... See more

The service is still valuable, and getting more so, but there aren't strong forces driving the expert networks to be much less fragmented than the people they connect their clients with. There are still advantages to scale, and of course the biggest network will be able to find more unique people to contact than the smaller ones, but the unique-tal... See more

GLG has a network of a million industry experts, on topics that range from cloud computing to chemical engineering. They connect those experts to 60,000 users at 2,700 companies, who call them up in order to vet product ideas, research companies, and understand industries.

We believe that investors in any market need “edge” … knowing something (thesis) or somebody (access) better than almost any other investor. We also focus heavily on geographies.

Then, how do you connect the right consumer to the right expert? How do you make sure you have enough of these experts available online? How do you ensure that customers would have someone to talk to when they wanted? I would break down the problem, and then get intimidated about it.