Hedge fund and tech questions that are rarely asked

COWEN: Given all the data that search companies and some of the other major tech companies have, why aren’t they bundled with hedge funds?

SCHMIDT: What do you mean by bundled?

COWEN: Well, literally in the same company. You’d have a tech company and a hedge fund, and there would be a synergy because the hedge fund would use the data generated by the tech company for investment. So the hedge fund would have that data first. We don’t see that in the market.

And:

COWEN: The major tech companies have done very well, of course, but if we imagine some world in the future where some tech companies are at or near insolvency, and if we think maybe they have a fiduciary responsibility to sell off the information they hold on people, is that a regulatory problem we will need to address?

Obviously, a successful tech company is not going to do that. They would wreck their franchise.

SCHMIDT: Yeah, so the problem that you’re posing is, we have a company that has a great deal of useful information that’s also bankrupt.

COWEN: Right.

Those were my questions to Eric Schmidt.