The Andaris Vision
A letter from Andaris founder and Managing Director Mike Kubzansky
Mike founded Andaris after more than eight years as CEO of Omidyar Network, where he refocused the organization on AI. He saw early that AI would be a profoundly transformative technology, one that would require an intentional effort from all sectors of society to ensure that humanity gets the best from this powerful set of tools, and that investors have a meaningful role to play, through their holdings, their voice, their policies, and their stewardship. In one such effort, he led early consortia to invest in leading early AI companies like Anthropic, Groq, and Sakana as a way to demonstrate and build responsible AI practices, and bring new long-term investors into the conversation. Read Mike’s full bio here.
Investors, and asset owners in particular, are extraordinarily well-placed to help steer AI toward a positive future for people and portfolios. At Andaris, we’re building a community to help you do just that.
AI is set to permeate all of society, which means over the long term, investors only win when everyone wins – and the same is true of losing. We’re excited about AI’s potential, and we’re also clear-eyed about the immense work it will take to ensure AI delivers the promised benefits while avoiding the downsides.
If you run a pension fund, an endowment, a foundation, a family office, a private credit fund, or a venture firm, you don’t need us to tell you what’s at stake, because you’re already holding the risk – through the index, through the companies you hold, and the infrastructure that’s being built with your capital. Your portfolios are exposed to the whole economy, your horizons are longer than most, and many of you must answer to people who aren’t in the room: beneficiaries, pension holders, trustees, a family’s next-gen leaders, a philanthropic or university mission, your partners.
Your portfolio returns are tied not only to an individual holding’s alpha, but to how well we manage risks for the whole economy. And the capital outlays on your balance sheet only pay off if AI earns the trust required for consumers, companies, and communities to adopt it at scale and drive productivity.
As investors, you know better than anyone that commonsense guardrails aren’t an impediment to AI’s profitability, they’re the catalyst. Responsible AI is profitable AI, and the most profitable AI will be responsible AI.
The good news is, alongside the risk, investors also hold important tools to help manage it.
As investors, you know better than anyone that commonsense guardrails aren’t an impediment to AI’s profitability, they’re the catalyst. Responsible AI is profitable AI, and the most profitable AI will be responsible AI.
Your voice carries weight with peers, policymakers and portfolio companies.
You are stewards of your holdings. Asking the right questions, choosing thoughtful managers, and setting smart investment policies ensures those holdings are taking the right steps to mitigate risk.
And, of course, where you decide to direct your capital matters. When it comes to AI, smart money is thinking beyond the technology itself, to the entire ecosystem of incentives and institutions that will grow up around it – things like ratings agencies, insurance and liability to price AI risk, or the independent verification organizations that will emerge as investable entities in the broader system. Investors who help build the social trust architecture around AI will help unlock durable value for shareholders and society.
We have seen this in prior technological revolutions. Building a trust architecture – both via policy and private practice and incentives – always plays a central role in giving consumers the confidence to get behind the wheel and adopt the risky technology of the day. For instance, over time, auto insurance companies became powerful drivers behind clarifying and managing liability, and encouraging the adoption of new innovations like seat belts and airbags that not only saved lives, but boosted consumer confidence and profits in the auto sector over the long run, while still spurring key innovations like self-driving cars, electric and hybrid engines, and GPS navigation.
When it comes to AI, smart money is thinking beyond the technology itself, to the entire ecosystem of incentives and institutions that will grow up around it.
While industry leaders and policymakers contemplate AI guardrails, investors don’t need to wait. They can act right now to manage risk, maximize opportunity, and help shape an AI future that provides durable value for the portfolios you manage and the people we all serve.
But leveraging the full range of these tools effectively takes time and resources to sift through the deluge of information coming your way and surface the most relevant insights and it takes expertise to put those insights into action. That’s where Andaris comes in.
We are a community for investors, by investors. We’re informed by deep experience that includes everything from investing early into Anthropic to supporting civil society groups and others to address issues from AI governance to its effect on work and workers. We built Andaris as a space to make sense of AI, and the full range of financial materiality considerations it raises, together – on both the horizons we report on and the horizons we invest for. In other words, we’re in this with you.
At our core, we’re optimists about the promise of AI to make the world a better place for everyone and the role investors can play in delivering on that promise. And we’re here to help you navigate that role with confidence. We hope you’ll join us.