Intellectual Frontiers
Cover of Chasing Native Alpha

Intellectual Frontiers Press Fieldbooks

Chasing Native Alpha

How Executives Find and Fund What Sets Their Company Apart

When everyone can build, the advantage goes to the companies that know what is worth building.

When every competitor can reach for capable models, coding agents, cloud infrastructure, and increasingly similar technology, producing more software is no longer a sufficient strategy.

What's newAsk for a review copy

Forthcoming. The book is in review.

AI made building cheap, so what you choose to build now decides your advantage.

The scarce resources become judgment, context, trust, customer intimacy, domain knowledge, coordination, and the ability to recognize what actually matters.

Chasing Native Alpha gives every member of the C-suite a practical method for finding the distinctive advantages already in their companies, customers, people, products, data, relationships, and operating history. It shows how to identify false alpha: proprietary systems, accumulated complexity, impressive activity, and historical strengths that no longer produce differentiated outcomes. Then it gives the CEO, CFO, COO, CTO and CIO, CMO, Chief Revenue Officer, CHRO, and Chief Product Officer each their own chapter.

When technology was scarce, the companies that could build had the advantage. Now the advantage goes to the companies that know what is worth building.

The age of abundant technology will reward organizations that know what is worth building.

What you will be able to do

  • distinguish genuine advantage from competent execution;
  • find where customer and employee strengths create disproportionate value;
  • decide what should stay proprietary and what should become a commodity you buy;
  • recognize where AI erodes an old advantage or amplifies a scarce one;
  • place people where their judgment changes the outcome;
  • stop the work, features, and programs that dilute the company;
  • move talent, capital, and attention toward evidence of real alpha; and
  • apply the method from your own seat on the executive team.

The premise

When every competitor can reach for capable models, coding agents, cloud infrastructure, and increasingly similar technology, producing more software is no longer a sufficient strategy.

On the Show