Why is expert research valuable?
What is expert research?
Expert research is the process of gathering insights directly from individuals with firsthand experience with a company, product, or industry.
The desire to learn from experts is timeless. To learn something new on a topic, you often start by looking for resources written by experts on that topic. Whether you supplement this with your own primary research, resources written by existing experts can significantly accelerate your learning curve.
How to leverage experts and pick the right ones is an informal but highly important component of most white-collar jobs. For example
- CEOs of large corporations carefully choose a roster of advisors to seek advice from
- Scientists seek experts in related fields so they can pull in insights or tools developed outside their primary domain.
- VCs frequently create CRMs of talent in specific markets of interest that they can consult and refer to portfolio companies to help them succeed
With the internet, new tools created new ways to connect with and learn from experts. This dawned the first “expert network” from GLG: a managed marketplace first offered in 1998 where investors could connect with vetted subject-matter experts — former execs, buyers, engineers — on-demand and legally. Today, over 100 expert networks are reported to exist.
The ‘expert research’ process, as firms use it today, is a mix of talking 1-1 with experts, reading transcripts from past conversations, or broader surveys.
Where expert research is particularly valuable
Expert research is especially valuable to answer questions that are highly nuanced and subjective - questions where hard data alone can’t tell the whole story. These tend to be questions whose leading indicators are qualitative, rather than quantitative.
Examples include
- understanding what other hidden factors went into a company’s management deciding to enter a new market
- the qualitative factors that drove decision maker at a company to choose a particular vendor
- learning the industry and regulatory output from insiders with ‘boots on the ground’ knowledge
This information often fills in gaps where information does not exist (ie early-stage, private markets).
This proves especially valuable for high-beta companies/markets (those that can be significantly swung by a single regulatory change, new customer, etc) as expert research provides timely access to these valuable insights, and crucially is often not publicly available elsewhere.
The role of expert research in a world of LLMs
Large Language Models (LLMs) have transformed how we access and synthesize information, making it faster and cheaper to get up to speed on almost any topic. But every tool created by LLMs - including OpenAI’s deep research - is only trained on and given access to public data. This massively constrains what they can know!
The future is one with LLMs supplemented with expert insights and other private data sources. Eventually, it seems likely that data partnerships will be formed to let LLMs utilize private data during training and at inference.
Before LLMs, private knowledge was already the secret sauce for many, particularly the world’s top investors. With LLMs commoditizing access to public information and analysis on top of it, private knowledge becomes the primary resource to give investors and builders an edge.