Global equity investors may be underexposed to tomorrow’s growth
Joe Ziller
Global equity investors may need to rethink how they access the world’s fastest-growing industries, with traditional market indices underrepresenting many of the structural growth themes expected to drive the global economy over the coming decade.
Speaking at an investor briefing this week, Joe Ziller, Founder and Chief Investment Officer of Ziller Funds Management, said investors risk relying too heavily on backward-looking market benchmarks at a time when artificial intelligence, private capital and founder-led innovation are reshaping the composition of global equity markets.
“Investors have traditionally looked to listed markets to identify tomorrow’s winners,” Mr Ziller said.
“Increasingly, many of tomorrow’s most important businesses are reaching enormous scale before they ever list. That has significant implications for how investors think about long-term portfolio construction.”
At the briefing, Ziller highlighted analysis showing that structural growth themes—including artificial intelligence, digital infrastructure, fintech, cybersecurity and space technology—are expected to account for around 56 per cent of global GDP growth over the next decade, despite representing only around 32 per cent of today’s global equity index.
Mr Ziller said the gap reflected a broader structural shift in how globally significant businesses are now being created and scaled.
“The economics of company building are changing,” he said.
“For decades, founders were constrained by access to capital, the need for significant physical infrastructure and the challenge of scaling large workforces. Those barriers are falling simultaneously.”
He said the growth of deep private capital markets was allowing businesses to remain private for longer, while software-based business models required substantially less capital than previous generations of industrial companies.
At the same time, advances in artificial intelligence were enabling businesses to generate significantly greater output with fewer employees. Ziller also noted that AI-native companies are generating around US$3.5 million in revenue per employee—approximately six times that of traditional software businesses[1].
“The result is that exceptional founders can build globally significant businesses faster than at any point in history,” Mr Ziller said.
“That means investors need to think not only about today’s market leaders, but about the businesses likely to shape markets over the next decade.”
Mr Ziller said founder-led companies had historically delivered strong long-term investment outcomes, with Ziller’s research showing founder-led businesses had outperformed broader global equity markets by around 3.3 per cent per annum over the past 20 years[2].
“Historically, founder-led investing has been associated with entrepreneurial culture, long-term thinking and strong capital allocation,” he said.
“What’s changing is that many of the businesses driving the world’s most important structural growth themes continue to be founder-led, and their influence on global equity markets is increasing.”
Mr Ziller said this placed greater importance on understanding the quality of founders, business economics and long-term capital allocation rather than simply following benchmark indices.
“Taking an active view in this share of the market has never been more important,” he said.
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Notes:
[1] AI Is Quietly Reshaping What It Means To Scale A Company,” Forbes Business Council, councils.forbes.com, accessed August 2026
[2] Past performance is not a reliable indicator of future performance.
