Understanding Hyperscalers: Masters in Business with Ankur Crawford

**Ankur Crawford** (0:02)
Bloomberg Audio Studios, Podcasts, Radio News.

**Barry Ritholtz** (0:08)
This week on the podcast, another extra special guest, Dr. Ankur Crawford, is co-head, a portfolio manager of large cap strategies at Alger. She's got a fascinating background. She was an engineer at Intel, won a number of patents, and was the awardee of the Intel PhD Fellowship. She's been recognized as one of the top women in asset management. If you're interested at all into the details of how artificial intelligence, semiconductors, and software works, as I am, you're going to find this to be a fascinating conversation. With no further ado, my conversation with Alger's Ankur Crawford.
Ankur Crawford, welcome to Bloomberg.

**Ankur Crawford** (1:03)
Thank you for having me, Barry.

**Barry Ritholtz** (1:05)
So let's start with your background, which is really kind of fascinating. Bachelor's degree in Mechanical Engineering and Material Science and Engineering. That's a double BS from UC Berkeley.
And then a Master's and a PhD in Material Science and Engineering at Stanford. What was the original career plan?

**Ankur Crawford** (1:27)
I didn't have one, to be honest.
I think when I made the decision to become a mechanical engineer, I was kind of following my brother's footsteps, who was a mechanical engineer and became an orthopedic surgeon. And I realized if I didn't know what I wanted to do, I wanted to keep my options open.

**Barry Ritholtz** (1:46)
So he becomes an orthopedic surgeon with a mechanical engineering degree. Is he designing replacement joints and things like that?

**Ankur Crawford** (1:55)
He does. He does actually bring that aspect of his engineering background into different device configurations and he works a lot with the device companies as well.
But there's also, as a kid, I loved figuring out how things work, whether it was like a car or a calculator, and I would always be fidgeting to understand how things work. I loved building. So mechanical engineering felt like, I'm just a curious person, so I like to satiate that need to know how things work.

**Barry Ritholtz** (2:34)
I read somewhere that you originally wanted to be an astronaut, is this correct?

**Ankur Crawford** (2:38)
I did. So I grew up till I was five. We lived in Florida, close to Cape Canaveral.
And we would go watch the space shuttle take off. And I was so fascinated by space, because it was almost ethereal, you know, this thing goes up into the sky. And for me, the astronauts were celebrities. So you know, for a long time, I did want to be an astronaut.

**Barry Ritholtz** (3:08)
So I have Florida somewhere in between, you're born in Kansas, is this correct?

**Ankur Crawford** (3:13)
Yes, yes.

**Barry Ritholtz** (3:13)
Kansas, but you end up in the Middle East?

**Ankur Crawford** (3:16)
Yes.

**Barry Ritholtz** (3:17)
And then you're sent to a convent boarding school in the Himalayas, is this possibly right? Yes.

**Ankur Crawford** (3:24)
That has to be an AI hallucination, right? No, that is all correct.

**Barry Ritholtz** (3:28)
And then you end up in Buffalo, New York?

**Ankur Crawford** (3:31)
You got it.

**Barry Ritholtz** (3:31)
All right, so that's real human research, not chat. I'm curious, that is a broad global life experience. How does that shape your views on either international investing or just the concept of risk and reward?

**Ankur Crawford** (3:49)
Yeah, I think it more so shapes the way I think about, you know, the cultural differences when I look at companies, when I look at management teams.
I understand very well that there are certain cultural differences that are simply endemic to businesses and to management teams. And, you know, just because a management team isn't necessarily always bullish, or they're always telling you that the negative aspect of their company doesn't necessarily mean that there's something wrong. And so, you know, I think that that has been like an example of this, there's this company called Nebius, where the CEO is a Russian CEO who is incredibly humble and he will never tell you what's right. He will always point out to you all the things that are wrong. And a lot of investors are like, you know, I don't, that doesn't sound good. And I'm kind of looking at the opportunity because that's just his culture, right? It's his culture not to be boastful. So just living in all these different countries and having exposure as a kid to many different different religions, it just gives a really unique perspective on any problem that you look at because it helps take kind of the blinders off.

**Barry Ritholtz** (5:13)
It's fascinating. I never really thought about how does a societal cultural set of norms make its way to management, you think about the Japanese culture is the sort of bravado and very aggressive forecast we tend to see in the United States. You would never see anything like that in Japan. How do you calibrate what is cultural diffidence and what is just, hey, there's a problem here and they're telling us this is an issue?