2026 Sohn Montreal: Whale Rock’s Alex Sacerdote on Investing Across the AI Stack

The opening session at the 2026 Sohn Montreal Investment Conference was supposed to be a stock pitch. Alex Sacerdote and his team had built what he called “a beautiful PowerPoint deck” to make the case for Anthropic, one of Whale Rock Capital Management‘s favorite ideas. Then Anthropic filed, and the quiet-period rules made the pitch off-limits. So the founder, chief executive, and portfolio manager of the $17 billion Boston technology hedge fund did the next best thing. He sat down with Mario Therrien of La Caisse and talked through how he is investing across the entire AI stack.

It made for a useful tour of where one of the better-performing tech managers thinks the opportunity sits. Whale Rock was recently ranked fourth overall on three-year performance, a stretch Therrien pegged at 44% annualized. Sacerdote’s message was that the trade is far earlier than the headlines suggest, that the real money is in enterprise rather than chatbots, and that the loudest bear arguments are falling away one by one. He also named the risk that worries him most, and it is not valuation.

Sacerdote is the founder, chief executive, and portfolio manager of Whale Rock Capital Management, a Boston technology and growth hedge fund that runs about $17 billion. He built the firm around a single thesis, that picking the winners and losers of each technology platform shift is where the durable returns sit. He began his investing career at Fidelity, where he interned in 1998 before going on to run technology money there.