Our Team 7investing
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Our Team

Our Team

Our 7investing lead advisors come from a variety of professional backgrounds and we see the market in different ways. Our diverse set of viewpoints helps us present subscribers with a “full buffet” of stock recommendations every month. We run the gamut across all industries and sectors ─ including artificial intelligence, cloud computing, healthcare, and financial technology.

A full list of the recommendations, commentary updates, articles, and video interviews from each of our advisors can be seen by clicking on their name below.

Simon Erickson, MBA

View Simon’s Recommendations, Articles, and Videos

Simon Erickson is the founder and CEO of 7investing. He is one of the stock market’s most forward-looking investors, focused on identifying disruptive innovation and finding developing trends before others may even be aware of them.

He does this by traveling often to industry conferences and by speaking directly with business, scientific, and academic leaders ─ to learn firsthand about the cutting-edge technologies impacting the business world.

That included a conversation in 2014 with a Harvard postdoc about a new scientific breakthrough called “CRISPR”. And then a trip in 2015 to NVIDIA’s Silicon Valley headquarters to learn about a new field of “deep learning.”

But he also personally dives in to these developing trends. He’s been plugged-in to immersive virtual reality, rode in the beta-version of Waymo’s self-driving car, bought his first Bitcoin for just $247, and took a pharmacogenomic DNA test to explain how he’d react to prescription drugs.

Simon previously worked for seven years at The Motley Fool, where he most recently served as the lead advisor of Motley Fool Explorer. In this role, Simon ran an investment newsletter that profiled innovative trends, personally directed more than $1 million of funds into a real-money investment account, and managed a team of 22 people. Explorer was recognized as one of TMF’s fastest-growing and highest customer retention newsletters.

Simon has also been active in the financial media, offering his opinion of Facebook’s 10-year plan to CNN, discussing Alphabet’s “other bets” to CNBC, and sharing his thoughts about innovation and investing to podcasts and newspapers across America. He has a BS in Chemical Engineering from the University of Texas at Austin and an MBA in Entrepreneurship from Rice University in Houston. In his spare time, he enjoys traveling, listening to rock music, and spending time with his wife, daughter, and son. He has now watched Frozen approximately 43 million times.

Simon brings a passion of digging into developing trends to uncover opportunities for 7investing. He believes personalized medicine and machine learning inference are two fields that will be extremely profitable for investors.

Anirban Mahanti, PhD

View Anirban’s Recommendations, Articles, and Videos

Anirban Mahanti is a lead advisor for 7investing. Before 7investing, Anirban spent 5-plus years at The Motley Fool’s Australian subsidiary in various roles, including as the Director of Research and the founding lead advisor of the market-beating small-cap ASX stock-picking newsletter Extreme Opportunities.

Anirban is an Information Technology expert by training. Before transitioning to becoming a full-time investor in 2015, Anirban held various roles at NICTA (now known as Data61 following the organization’s merger with CSIRO), a leading Australian Information Communications Technology research center. Before NICTA, Anirban was an Assistant Professor at the University of Calgary in Canada and then at the Indian Institute of Technology Delhi.

In his research career, Anirban has invented new technologies, co-authored over 70 peer-reviewed research papers, supervised post-doctoral fellows, Ph.D. and MSc students, and consulted for the industry. Anirban’s technical expertise is at the intersection of computer networking, data science, and machine learning.

Given Anirban’s background, it should be no surprise that his favorite investing ideas are at the bleeding edge of innovation, especially in the enterprise software space. He’s a firm believer in following top-flight research, which often is years ahead in identifying where the puck will be in the future. For context, Anirban’s doctoral dissertation was on scalable video streaming systems, back in 2003, well before the first large-scale streaming systems went online. His team was also one of the first to publish a study on Youtube traffic characteristics back in 2006. And he was applying machine learning (ML) and artificial intelligence (AI) to computer networking problems (SPAM detection, network traffic identification) in 2005, about a decade before ML and AI caught the fancy of mainstream media.

Anirban received a Ph.D. and MSc in Computer Science from the University of Saskatchewan, Canada, and a BE in Computer Science and Engineering from Birla Institute of Technology, India. He lives in Sydney, Australia, with his wife and daughter, although he considers himself a global citizen with living and work experience spanning continents.

Dana Abramovitz, PhD

View Dana’s Recommendations, Articles, and Videos

Dana Abramovitz is a lead advisor for 7investing.  She joins the team by way of South by Southwest, where she managed the Health & MedTech track of programming and was responsible for listening for the most important conversations happening around health care, identifying those leading the conversations, and giving those thought leaders a platform from which to speak.

Dana’s interest in health spans all aspects of the industry – from fitness and wellness to hospital systems and policy and everywhere in between. She loves to geek out on personalized medicine and drug delivery and is happy to share her opinion on health equity and social determinants of health.  After her first year in the pharmacy program at Purdue University she changed her major to pharmaceutical sciences so she could go to graduate school to study biochemistry.  She received her PhD in biochemistry and molecular biophysics from Columbia University and did her post-doc at The Scripps Research Institute.

She left academia to work for Ingenuity Systems, which was acquired by QIAGEN, and started her own video game company whose product was acquired by UbiSoft.  After a decade in industry she received her Masters in Management from Stanford University Graduate School of Business, where she focused on health care investment and new ventures.  After business school and prior to working at South by Southwest, she worked at Strand Life Sciences, a genomics and personalized medicine company based in Bangalore.

Dana is currently loving how mRNA, which she studied in grad school, is in the limelight and can potentially be used to combat other diseases in the near future.

In addition to analyzing health care companies, Dana is a Bar Method studio owner and instructor and is on the founding team of the Texas Global Health Security Innovation Ecosystem.  She lives in Houston.

Krzysztof Piekarski, PhD

View Krzysztof’s Recommendations, Articles, and Videos

Krzysztof is a lead advisor for 7investing. He learned the ins and outs of investing on the Motley Fool discussion boards over 25 years, since he was a teenager, and where he met Simon’s smiling acquaintance. He’s also a platypus with an interdisciplinary, holistic approach to both life and investing, grounded in systems thinking and complexity theory, two fancy phrases that mean everything is interconnected and that alas, linear, causal thinking is woefully inadequate at making sense of it all.

He therefore looks for businesses that have the capacity to give their customers  both some kind of joy and value over a long, long period of time, by being innovative, humanistic, data-wise, and AI/ML-oriented whenever possible. From his perspective, the holy grail of investing is finding companies that bring more value to the world than they take for themselves, and he’s been especially good at finding these very early.

Krzysztof now owns more books than he’ll ever read —with approximately 18 new ones arriving every day. Being crafty, he’s turned this book problem (clinically called Bookwormitis) into a career as a professor of Rhetoric at the University of Texas. His dissertation was titled Buddhism in the Work of David Foster Wallace—if the Diamond Sutra and Infinite Jest are also your thing, let’s talk. His favorite class to teach is called the Non-Argumentative Rhetoric of Zen, so picking a fight with him won’t work, unless you insult Bruce Springsteen.

When not analyzing SaaS and futuristic tech companies, Krzysztof writes a newsletter and runs a community called Character By Design (CxD) focusing on all things related to character cultivation, like patience, equanimity, ethics, meditation, wisdom and disciplined focus.

Much of his own character has been developed over the years as a runner and, these days, by getting whooped regularly by the “gentle art” of jiu-jitsu. He is also a long-time Zen practitioner and Zen mentor. Krzysztof has also trained in Hakomi body-centered mindfulness therapy, and Internal Family Systems therapy, which he uses to understand and transform the core beliefs at the root of our daily habits, including those around money, greed, fear, and all kinds of cognitive biases we face as investors.

Krzysztof tempers all this virtue with his unapologetic love for peaty Scotch whiskey.

Krzysztof was born in Warsaw, Poland learned English on the hard streets of Brooklyn, still speaks Polish with his momma and pops, and has a BA from Williams College in English with a biology minor, and a PhD in Literature from the University of Texas. He currently lives in Austin, Tx with his partner and anthropologist, Circe, and their four-legged furry but dazzlingly handsome son Bunk, named, obviously, after detective Bunk from The Wire. Krzysztof’s spirit animal is a platypus on most days, but a prowling tiger when he’s feeling especially feisty.

Luke Hallard

View Luke’s Recommendations, Articles, and Videos

Luke Hallard is a lead advisor for 7investing. He primarily invests in technology and innovation, with a current bias towards AI, fintech, and health-tech. Luke invests in US equities, but he also has a handful of angel investments, with two successful exits to date.

Although Luke’s portfolio spans many industries, a key factor his personal investments have in common is that they all seek to make the world a better, less complex place. Luke invests with his head, but his heart occasionally exercises the power of veto!

Prior to joining 7investing, Luke spent 25 years as a Programme Director leading organisational change at HSBC Bank. His knowledge of conduct, financial crime risk, data privacy, sanctions screening, anti-money laundering, and payments transparency is happily fading into a hazy memory of bureaucracy and complexity.

Luke holds trustee and grant panel roles with multiple UK charities in the social welfare sector. He’s married to Katrina, and they live in London with their Siberian cat, Sushi.

Luke has a passion for health and physical fitness. He’s a keen trail runner, and dedicates his winters to skiing and snowboarding. Luke is also a motorcycling enthusiast and regularly tours Europe by bike, although his favourite stretches of roads are in Japan. He’s embarrassingly slow on the racetrack despite living fifteen minutes from an internationally renowned motor racing circuit, and spent his younger years volunteering as an observer with the Institute of Advanced Motorcyclists.