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Weapons of Mass Destruction, rising to head the State Department’s Offi ce of WMD Terrorism until 2007. GLG quickly made them wealthy by doing for wisdom and expertise what Airbnb, Uber, WeWork, Amazon, iTunes, Netfl ix and Tinder have done for homes, cars, offi ces, books, music, fi lms and romantic partners: making them commodities available on demand for short-term consumption with no lasting commitment. Gerson, who has written books on neoconservatism and Judaism and has shared business interests with his friend Jared Kushner, is a signifi cant philanthropist in Israel and the US. In September 2021 he and his wife Erica, a rabbi, gave a record $18 million to Christian medical missions in Africa. Gerson explained his support for Christian missionaries as a matter of following the appropriate expertise; it’s the missionaries who run the best hospitals in Africa, while his wife noted that ‘there are no Jewish missionaries’. ‘We were looking to fund whoever can save lives in the most effective way,’ she said. In 2008 Lehrman bought a Fifth Avenue
apartment from Seagrams heir Edgar Bronfman Jr. for $21 million, selling it in 2016 for $32 million. In recent years GLG has had sweeping changes at the top, appointing former Ebay, Google and McKinsey strategist Paul Todd as chief executive in 2018. The recent prospectus observes that ‘since 2019 he has brought in an almost entirely new leadership team, including new leaders for each region’. The fi rm now operates from 22 cities in 12 countries, with its biggest offi ce in Austin, Texas. GLG’s prospectus also notes that, having concentrated in the past on organic growth, the fi rm is now ready for M&A opportunities for the fi rst time and plans to pursue deals ‘that would potentially bring broadened technology and product offerings [and] expanded geographic footprint’ among other benefi ts. A spokesman for GLG said the fi rm could not discuss its plans or any other matters in the lead-up to its IPO. Max Friberg, chief executive of rival expert
network Inex One, tells Spear’s he used information in the prospectus about the trigger price of share options paid out to a recently departed executive to calculate
that GLG’s leaders were valuing the fi rm at about $1.4 billion in 2020. He estimates that expert networks overall have grown at an average of 18 per cent a year since 2015, taking the industry’s total annual revenues to $1.9 billion. The GLG prospectus says that money raised through the IPO will be used to pay down the fi rm’s debts, which stood at $959.9 million on 30 June 2021, and ‘for general corporate purposes’. Most of GLG’s rivals are growing more quickly than the industry leader, notes Friberg, whose company positioned itself as a specialist in the Nordics before pivoting to become an aggregator of expert networks. He is convinced that better connections between networks and clients will make GLG vulnerable over time, especially as the useful ‘shelf life’ of any expert is limited because over time people lose touch with current developments in a subject area. Also, smaller networks are using LinkedIn’s enormous database of 750 million-plus constantly updated profi les to help them identify new experts on demand. Brian Wallins, a research manager covering digital talent platforms and the gig economy for the California-based Staffi ng Industry Analysts (SIA), believes the potential of network aggregators is limited while the industry is still dominated by GLG and a few other big players. GLG’s prospectus says its revenues are 2.3 times those of its
biggest rival, AlphaSights, a fast-growing London-based operation with offi ces in New York, San Francisco, Hamburg and fi ve Asian cities. Wallins says such a large lead over its rivals is one of GLG’s biggest attractions for potential investors in its IPO, along with its massive database of experts and the fact that ‘the global trend of demand for expert networks remains pretty strong’. ‘It’s a large pie that is still growing, so it’s not a zero-sum game when you see more upstarts nipping at their heels,’ he says. ‘There’s always going to be room for specialists to carve out their own little markets and I don’t think there’s anything GLG can do to fend off those smaller niche providers.’ Friberg says the industry structure is divided into several tiers, with GLG being trailed by three other ‘global leaders’: AlphaSights, Third Bridge (which was founded in the UK by former Bain & Co consultants and now has more than 1,000 employees) and Guidepoint (a New York- based fi rm that grew out of a business specialising in healthcare and claims to have 900,000 experts in 150 countries). The next tier contains ‘regional champions’ such as the Berlin-based Atheneum, and Coleman Research, which is strong among US buy-side investor clients. Dialectica, based in Athens and London, was named in March 2021 as the fastest-growing expert network in Europe, and in November it announced plans to almost double its
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