‘I’m an example of what I’ve preached’: Dan Ives knows AI has a ‘PR problem’ but it led to his massive career change after 25 years on Wall Street

Dan Ives logs into the Zoom call in a loud, tropical shirt, the word “Margaritaville” splashed across the chest. He has spent the better part of 25 years as one of Wall Street’s most recognizable tech bulls — a go-to voice on everything from Apple to Nvidia, a prolific note-writer who repeated the phrase “fourth industrial revolution” and has been telling investors, through every dip and correction, that they’re still in the early innings. He has made a lot of people a lot of money by being consistently, loudly optimistic about technology stocks.

Now he is doing what he spent a decade and a half telling everyone else to do.

“Look, I’m an example of what I’ve preached over the years that AI will ultimately create more jobs than what it takes away,” he told me in an interview, several weeks after leaving Wedbush Securities to launch Yorkville Ives, what he calls a “modern merchant bank” with Yorkville Securities. “If it wasn’t for the AI revolution and it wasn’t for this period … I couldn’t do something like this.”

That’s the short version of what happened. The longer version, Ives told Fortune, is that after 25 years covering other people’s companies, he realized he had never actually built one himself — and he wanted to. “As an analyst I always talk about companies, whether good or bad, what they’ve done. But I’ve never built anything,” he said. He has helped institutional investors make money and CEOs shape narratives, he added, but he felt the itch. “I wanted to get off the treadmill and actually build something myself.”

What the treadmill looked like

The first question, though, is just what he is building, actually. Ives said he traces the merchant bank concept back to Thomas Weisel and the early Jefferies era of the 1990s — outfits that didn’t just publish research but put their own capital into transactions. “A lot of banks … they won’t put their own money [in], they don’t have the capital,” he said. “That to me is really the key in terms of the difference with a merchant bank versus a typical investment bank.”

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