In 2019, Ken Griffin, Founder & CEO of Citadel, was looking for some of the best risk-takers on Wall Street. He landed on Rich Falk-Wallace, then a top analyst at Viking, who went on to become a Portfolio Manager at Citadel’s Surveyor Capital.
So what comes next after becoming a PM at Citadel at 29?
For the past five years, Rich has been building Arcana, a financial technology platform designed to help the world’s top hedge funds and asset managers make smarter decisions, faster. His philosophy is heavily influenced by Steve Jobs: obsess over the details and build products that genuinely delight customers.
In this episode, Rich breaks down the secular growth of beta-zero products, the rapid expansion of separately managed accounts (SMAs), the rise of alpha capture, and how human investment signals can complement quantitative systems. We also discuss portfolio construction, product-market fit, and how Arcana is integrating AI across its platform while staying focused on the customer.
“How did you convince Stanley Druckenmiller to be your seed investor?”
“The problem of portfolio construction is way closer to solved than that last mile of, ‘What’s a good idea?’”
“The allocation of dollars in public markets is headed towards beta one or beta zero products.”
“SMA-type products are growing massively in every direction. And that comes from allocators of every kind — sovereign wealth funds, endowments…”
Topics: Arcana, Citadel, Surveyor Capital, Viking, Hedge Funds, Financial Technology, Separately Managed Accounts, Beta Zero, Alpha Capture, Portfolio Construction, Investment Research, Artificial Intelligence, APIs, MCPs, Product-Market Fit
*Not Investment Advice
[00:00:27] Rich’s journey from distressed credit and public equities into financial technology.
[00:02:20] Why timing, experience, and energy pushed him to make the entrepreneurial leap.
[00:04:07] Why domain expertise helps — but nobody has a “right to win.”
[00:08:43] What it takes to earn backing and why product obsession matters.
[00:11:07] Arcana’s “platform maximalist” approach to software, APIs, MCPs, Excel, and LLMs.
[00:14:35] “If you think something is easy, it’s because you’re the buyer.”
[00:17:11] Why founders need to forget how hard something is and focus on the customer experience.
[00:19:56] Learning to love the incremental process of building.
[00:22:38] Finding product-market fit and the shift toward beta-one and beta-zero products.
[00:26:52] Why separately managed accounts are growing explosively.
[00:28:11] What an SMA is and how it differs from a commingled fund.
[00:31:03] How Arcana helps allocators analyze risk, performance, attribution, and repeatability.
[00:34:20] Mock portfolios, analyst tracking, and creating better feedback loops for investment talent.
[00:40:58] Alpha capture and turning human conviction signals into systematic portfolios.
[00:45:45] How Arcana uses AI internally to build software.
[00:47:32] Measuring the ROI of AI and token spending.
[00:49:58] MCPs, on-platform AI, and giving different investors different ways to access the same insights.
[00:54:51] Is Arcana a software company or a data company? Why Rich sees it as both.
[00:59:17] Rich’s philosophy of delighting customers and continually improving the product.
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Fiscal.AI: Delivering Modern Financial Data Infrastructure
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Doug Garber on LinkedIn for daily market color:
https://www.linkedin.com/in/doug-garber-42aa508
Rich Falk-Wallace Links:
Rich Falk-Wallace on LinkedIn:
https://www.linkedin.com/in/rich-falk-wallace/
Arcana:
https://www.arcana.io/
