Latest / The Dutch Investors / #31 | Interview w/ Braden Dennis the founder and CEO of Fiscal.ai on entrepreneurship, investing and software

Transcript

#31 | Interview w/ Braden Dennis the founder and CEO of Fiscal.ai on entrepreneurship, investing and software · The Dutch Investors

• 0:00
  SPEAKER_00: Welcome back to a brand new episode by the Dutch Investors.
• 0:04
  SPEAKER_00: Today we have something truly special lined up.
• 0:08
  SPEAKER_00: We are joined by Braden Dennis, the founder and CEO of FinChat.io, a platform that has already become familiar to many investors out there.
• 0:17
  SPEAKER_00: In today's episode, we dive into some fascinating topics.
• 0:21
  SPEAKER_00: We talk about how you can force your luck, we talk about serial acquires, the entrepreneurial journey, and of course, the tough but rewarding world of investing.
• 0:32
  SPEAKER_00: Braden also shares his insights on both the hard and soft aspects of investing, as well as the risks of starting your own business.
• 0:41
  SPEAKER_00: As a founder and CEO, he explains the tough choices you face between growth and profitability, something that every entrepreneur and company will relate to.
• 0:52
  SPEAKER_00: We hope you'll enjoy this conversation as much as we did.
• 0:55
  SPEAKER_00: There is definitely some golden nuggets packed into the episode, and we can't wait for you to hear them.
• 1:01
  SPEAKER_00: Before we jump in, a quick note we had some technical issues during our recording, so the audio from Brayden isn't as crisp as we would have liked.
• 1:11
  SPEAKER_00: But let that not deter you because it was a great episode.
• 1:16
  SPEAKER_00: Enjoy.
• 1:29
  SPEAKER_00: Alright, Braden.
• 2:00
  SPEAKER_00: And let's kick things off with something simple.
• 2:04
  SPEAKER_00: You've built this really useful platform in FinChat, and we'll discuss and talk about it a lot more later.
• 2:12
  SPEAKER_00: But can you perhaps briefly introduce yourself to uh the audience?
• 2:16
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, definitely.
• 2:17
  SPEAKER_02: So my name is Brayden Dennis, co-founder and CEO of FinChat.
• 2:22
  SPEAKER_02: FinChat is uh right now, as of recording, around a 25-person company out of Toronto, Canada.
• 2:29
  SPEAKER_02: The genesis for the idea was there's got to be something between Yahoo Finance and Bloomberg Terminal, right?
• 2:38
  SPEAKER_02: And so trying to bridge that gap for the serious fundamental investor, you know, whether that's um a professional analyst or um a wealth advisor, but also that same tooling for someone who's managing their own money, an individual managing their own money, and they're taking this stuff very seriously.
• 3:01
  SPEAKER_02: They're not trying to buy stocks depending on astrology signs or which way the wind is blowing that week.
• 3:08
  SPEAKER_02: It's based it's rooted based on a thesis they build and a tool where they can continue to monitor and build conviction in those ideas over time.
• 3:17
  SPEAKER_02: So that's that's the platform right now.
• 3:20
  SPEAKER_02: It really took off a lot when we introduced a lot of AI tools and kind of renamed it FinChat because of that, you know, building off the the branding of Chat GPT basically.
• 3:32
  SPEAKER_02: But at the end of the day, it's a full, full research terminal, soup to nuts for stocks.
• 3:39
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, and it's uh it's a lot more useful and beautiful than the Bloomberg terminal.
• 3:43
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, that people still use that software is nuts to me, but uh yeah.
• 3:48
  SPEAKER_02: Well, there's a lot of features that are inside of a Bloomberg that are really key for the workflow of a professional if they are needing to communicate with traders on the Wall Street floor and other portfolio managers, people moving a lot of volume, it's like a chat, like instant messaging chat that people can communicate with.
• 4:11
  SPEAKER_02: So you can almost think of it as like a network effect business with the pipes.
• 4:15
  SPEAKER_02: However, if most of if what you're doing is research numbers and gathering first-party source content, like investor relations content, viewing filings, none of that stuff's relevant to you, and so you don't need to go fork out 25 grand a year.
• 4:30
  SPEAKER_00: Absolutely.
• 4:31
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, I I agree here.
• 4:33
  SPEAKER_00: So, how did your journey in investing in tech begin?
• 4:38
  SPEAKER_02: Well, I'm an engineer by training, but but not software.
• 4:42
  SPEAKER_02: I'm actually a chemical engineer, and I started hacking away at early versions of the product.
• 4:50
  SPEAKER_02: I'm on a weekly podcast called The Canadian Investor.
• 4:52
  SPEAKER_02: So I was already kind of self-taught finance, interviewing other investors, trying to learn as much as I can.
• 4:59
  SPEAKER_02: And uh, you know, that podcast's been going for like six years now.
• 5:02
  SPEAKER_02: So a couple years into the pod, I was like, I gotta build something that's between those two products that I can use for myself.
• 5:09
  SPEAKER_02: Not really expecting anyone to really care, let alone pay.
• 5:15
  SPEAKER_02: And I s I still remember a gr uh wonderful man out of British Columbia, Canada was the first guy ever to pay because I had like a paid tier.
• 5:29
  SPEAKER_02: And I remember when I got that email, and I was like, it's like I want to like call my mom, like, oh my god, like I made a dollar on the internet.
• 5:36
  SPEAKER_02: This is pretty cool, and I've been chasing that rush ever since.
• 5:41
  SPEAKER_02: Ever since.
• 5:42
  SPEAKER_02: So, yeah, it's been a fun ride.
• 5:45
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, it's a great feeling, huh?
• 5:47
  SPEAKER_00: Sure is.
• 5:48
  SPEAKER_00: You said the Canadian investor, I mean, the coincidence.
• 5:52
  SPEAKER_00: That's uh that's pretty funny.
• 5:54
  SPEAKER_00: Uh, perhaps every country has uh has people like us, uh, who knows?
• 5:58
  SPEAKER_00: So let's get into the entrepreneurial side of uh of uh of your story, um, especially around building FinChat.
• 6:07
  SPEAKER_00: Take us back to the beginning.
• 6:09
  SPEAKER_00: What were the early days like?
• 6:11
  SPEAKER_00: Um, I'm curious to hear what it's like to go from an idea to actually building like the real product.
• 6:20
  SPEAKER_02: Well, this is changing a lot, even right now, too, in terms of you know what that go-to-market looks like, and it's kind of always changing.
• 6:29
  SPEAKER_02: There's always like the new meta, but at the end of the day, it comes down to fundamentals, right?
• 6:34
  SPEAKER_02: Like you have to build something that people want to use, um, and that people it either needs to be so so good that people like want to use it, or you're solving a key niche problem.
• 6:49
  SPEAKER_02: And I I say niche because you gotta focus a lot of problems have already been solved.
• 6:54
  SPEAKER_02: So you gotta you gotta focus niche and then land and expand.
• 6:57
  SPEAKER_02: Fall focus focus on one key niche problem that you can understand, resonate with, fix, give, give the cure to the customer on what it's gonna look like, and then hopefully do that as many times over as you can.
• 7:13
  SPEAKER_02: I think at the beginning, it's really about focus of what single thing does it do well.
• 7:22
  SPEAKER_02: And I did not do that approach well when we started.
• 7:26
  SPEAKER_02: I thought like it's just gonna be for anyone and everyone.
• 7:29
  SPEAKER_02: I look back on that as like a more mature product builder and product roadmap guy.
• 7:37
  SPEAKER_02: That was a mistake.
• 7:39
  SPEAKER_02: I think that you should really focus on one certain persona and one problem, ship it out in the world, and then grind.
• 7:49
  SPEAKER_02: Because build it and they will come was an old adage of Silicon Valley in like the the 06, 07, 08 days when products would explode like wildfire, and you know, companies like Facebook could could happen.
• 8:05
  SPEAKER_02: Uh, there was this proliferation of the internet, proliferation of mobile devices.
• 8:10
  SPEAKER_02: That doesn't happen anymore in the same way, and so build it and they will come was an old adage of Silicon Valley that I I couldn't think of as more incorrect today for most entrepreneurs.
• 8:25
  SPEAKER_02: Build it great, and then tell every single person constantly, incessantly, and obsessively that you can, and they will come.
• 8:35
  SPEAKER_02: So I think don't don't forget that like market and sell the crap out of it in the meantime, uh, after you build it.
• 8:44
  SPEAKER_02: Why did that change, do you think?
• 8:46
  SPEAKER_02: I think that there was just so few people building in what we'll call Web 2.0 at the beginning in those days.
• 8:56
  SPEAKER_02: It was like it was such a open white space, blue ocean for for ideas and for things, right?
• 9:05
  SPEAKER_02: Like in hindsight, like of course Airbnb was gonna become a thing, of course, Uber was gonna become a thing.
• 9:12
  SPEAKER_02: Those entrepreneurs did excellent, and I still think Brian Chesky from Airbnb is one of the one of the great entrepreneurs of that generation, but it would have got built, you know what I mean?
• 9:23
  SPEAKER_02: That idea would have happened.
• 9:26
  SPEAKER_02: Um and so there's a lot of those kind of like really obvious economy type platform businesses that were built in that time that were so obvious, and the the person who had the right timing was gonna win.
• 9:39
  SPEAKER_02: Now it's a little bit harder.
• 9:41
  SPEAKER_02: So, what that means is you just gotta go first principles and solve a pro one problem really, really well and learn as much as you can.
• 9:48
  SPEAKER_02: Because you're probably gonna have to pivot at some point.
• 9:50
  SPEAKER_02: So just try to learn as much as you can.
• 9:52
  SPEAKER_02: But man, you gotta you gotta go for it at some point.
• 9:55
  SPEAKER_02: There's gotta be some leap.
• 9:56
  SPEAKER_02: There's people probably listening uh to the pod right now that you know they sit at their desk job and they think, When am I gonna, you know, when am I gonna take that risk?
• 10:05
  SPEAKER_02: And at some point, man, you just gotta rip off the band-aid and do it.
• 10:10
  SPEAKER_02: Because what's the worst thing that can happen?
• 10:11
  SPEAKER_02: You go get another job.
• 10:14
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, it's it it can be scary, right?
• 10:17
  SPEAKER_00: So uh, like you said, you gotta take that chance sometimes.
• 10:21
  SPEAKER_00: Save your money.
• 10:23
  SPEAKER_02: Say like this is the kind of the unsexy stuff, but save your freaking money so that you actually can take risk, right?
• 10:29
  SPEAKER_02: There's a lot of inherent return.
• 10:31
  SPEAKER_02: I mean, this is an investing show, there's a lot of inherent return in being extremely fiscally responsible for some X period of time to give you the shot at a big risk, you know.
• 10:48
  SPEAKER_02: Like when I was saving like a maniac, and like my friends thought I was crazy before I started because I knew I was gonna leave my job.
• 10:57
  SPEAKER_02: There was, I mean, think of the ROI on that on that delayed gratification, right?
• 11:03
  SPEAKER_02: It gave me the chance to give it a shot.
• 11:06
  SPEAKER_02: And when things weren't working, to keep going, you know, some some leeway to keep going.
• 11:11
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, yeah, definitely.
• 11:14
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, FinChat is uh is uh a unique product.
• 11:18
  SPEAKER_00: Uh we use it, I wouldn't say daily, but almost every day.
• 11:22
  SPEAKER_00: Um, and it's we've got to get that up the daily.
• 11:25
  SPEAKER_00: Well, I mean, I can't speak for the rest of my team, right?
• 11:28
  SPEAKER_00: So uh it's if it's just me, uh it's semi-daily, if that's a word.
• 11:34
  SPEAKER_00: Um, but it's clearly built by investors, uh, for investors, if I can uh say it like that.
• 11:42
  SPEAKER_00: So the idea came from like Bloomberg, you said, and uh Yahoo Finance kind of.
• 11:48
  SPEAKER_00: Uh is it what is it trying to solve for your users?
• 11:52
  SPEAKER_02: I couldn't find a way to have like a real platform for fundamental research that one wasn't covered in ads, had more than history of like three years, and the data was right, right?
• 12:07
  SPEAKER_02: Like there's the difficult one, yeah.
• 12:10
  SPEAKER_02: The these institutional tools and institutional data providers that um that are mostly directionally correct, and then there's everything else where it's really hard to make your mainstay tool.
• 12:26
  SPEAKER_02: And so I was finding myself just going straight to the filings, right?
• 12:31
  SPEAKER_02: Going straight to the filings, going on investor relations websites.
• 12:34
  SPEAKER_02: I'm like, okay, let me just solve the problem of I don't have to do that anymore.
• 12:38
  SPEAKER_02: So, like, let's bring in all the filings just to one place, let's bring in all the investor relations content to one place, let's have a way where I can have the segmented level results and the KPIs in one place.
• 12:52
  SPEAKER_02: No one has that stuff because we do it ourselves.
• 12:54
  SPEAKER_02: The data is it's really tricky to parse out, and we do it all manually by hand, and it's it's grueling work, but it's it provides a tremendous amount of value for for our customers.
• 13:07
  SPEAKER_02: And one insight that I had was in the the glory days of financial Twitter 2020, 2021, Substack was growing, everyone was putting all their research either for free or behind a paywall, everyone was becoming like a DIY subscription analyst during COVID, like with their free time.
• 13:30
  SPEAKER_02: Um I noticed that people would take screenshots from other platforms who are maybe our competitors now, the IO finances of the world, whatever.
• 13:39
  SPEAKER_02: And then they would make a graph in Excel for the gap KPI, the non-gap KPIs.
• 13:46
  SPEAKER_02: Easy example is like Netflix reports earnings.
• 13:50
  SPEAKER_02: They'd post all these other metrics, traditional financial ratios and metrics, all like screenshotted from the platform.
• 13:58
  SPEAKER_02: And then they would have their Excel where they manually made Netflix's subscriber growth over time.
• 14:05
  SPEAKER_02: Or like the net change in uh, you know, what they're charging in each region for each customer.
• 14:11
  SPEAKER_02: Or like another example is like Spotify, you know, number of premium versus ad-supported users.
• 14:18
  SPEAKER_02: So the list goes on how many, you know, what CapEx is, what Amazon Web Services revenue makes up of the whole Amazon pie.
• 14:28
  SPEAKER_02: These types of numbers were doing being done manually, and that was when a light bulb moment went off for for me.
• 14:34
  SPEAKER_02: And I was like, okay, there's an actual real problem here.
• 14:38
  SPEAKER_02: That that takes far too long.
• 14:40
  SPEAKER_02: It shouldn't take two hours to put together, you know, uh beautiful little line chart of a core key metric for a business.
• 14:47
  SPEAKER_02: Uh that should be really, really fast.
• 14:49
  SPEAKER_02: So we we we went to go solve that problem as well.
• 14:53
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, that's that's pretty nuts that even with all the automations, technology, and AI available, you still have to do manual things uh like putting in the KPIs.
• 15:03
  SPEAKER_00: Are you working on automating this?
• 15:06
  SPEAKER_00: And um just uh a follow-up question: how do you decide what the KPIs are uh if the companies aren't specifically sharing it?
• 15:15
  SPEAKER_02: The companies do share them, so we don't do any estimates or third-party research or you know aggregate other metrics and try to put square pegs and round holes.
• 15:29
  SPEAKER_02: These are company reported metrics on their filings, investor day presentations, press releases, like Airbnb, for instance.
• 15:39
  SPEAKER_02: They're you know, they put out their quarterly results, and Chesky talks about the four key metrics that's at the very top of their press release every time, which is number of nights stayed, grossed bookings, um you know, I forget what the other four are, but you know what I mean.
• 15:57
  SPEAKER_00: Revenue per room, whatever, yeah.
• 15:59
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, yeah, exactly.
• 16:00
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, um, average yeah, average price per night booked or something is like one of the key things.
• 16:07
  SPEAKER_02: And um so so we don't have to reinvent the wheel with most companies.
• 16:14
  SPEAKER_02: Now there are companies like Berkshire Hathaway with Warren Buffett, and they don't really report a whole lot much outside of their um they report some stuff on the insurance business side, but they report the same segmented level results for the different businesses, you know, whether it's the railroad, the insurance business versus whatever else.
• 16:35
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, and they've kept those segments the exact same for decades.
• 16:41
  SPEAKER_02: And that's a really, really beautiful thing.
• 16:43
  SPEAKER_02: Very few companies do that.
• 16:45
  SPEAKER_02: And um, one day we want to like like we need to algorithmically trade on our data because when a company reports their earnings there that with a bunch of changes, they're about to report us absolute dud.
• 16:57
  SPEAKER_02: No worse perpetrator of this than Disney over the last five years, and you know how that's gone with that stock.
• 17:04
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 17:05
  SPEAKER_00: So what does a typical workday for you look like?
• 17:09
  SPEAKER_02: Um, well, today it was a lot of meetings, and then really right now we're in growth mode, so it's building the right team, getting the right people in in the in place.
• 17:24
  SPEAKER_02: Um my my three roles are HR, sales, and uh and marketing.
• 17:32
  SPEAKER_02: So growth and HR.
• 17:35
  SPEAKER_02: And my co-founders are technical, so I don't have to write the product anymore.
• 17:40
  SPEAKER_02: But I still own the roadmap and I still do in product design.
• 17:43
  SPEAKER_02: I'm still very obsessed with it.
• 17:45
  SPEAKER_02: I don't know if I'll ever give that up.
• 17:47
  SPEAKER_02: Someone actually asked me that yesterday.
• 17:48
  SPEAKER_02: Like, you're spending a lot of time on product, and I'm like, yeah, that's not gonna change.
• 17:52
  SPEAKER_02: Like, I'm very, very obsessed with how it should feel and look.
• 17:58
  SPEAKER_02: And I I think look, I mean, there's a disconnect with a lot of product builders where sales will be in a silo and product will be in a silo.
• 18:08
  SPEAKER_02: And if you don't have someone really in the weeds on both, there's gonna be a disconnect between what your customers want and what you're building, and that's never a good idea.
• 18:18
  SPEAKER_02: So spending a lot of time on that.
• 18:21
  SPEAKER_00: I see.
• 18:22
  SPEAKER_00: Every founder talks about how exciting the early days, the late nights, the perhaps crappy experiments, the adrenaline, launching something new.
• 18:35
  SPEAKER_00: But let's be honest, it's also tough and scary.
• 18:38
  SPEAKER_00: What was the hardest part for you when you started your own business?
• 18:42
  SPEAKER_00: Was there a specific moment that really tested you?
• 18:47
  SPEAKER_02: The first we're on year three now.
• 18:50
  SPEAKER_02: The first two years, I was really, really bad at the the ups and downs that come with it.
• 19:02
  SPEAKER_02: Like I was really high when highs were high, and really low when lows were low.
• 19:09
  SPEAKER_02: And I think that that's just really hard to get better at, other than with experience, to just be cautiously optimistic all the time, you know.
• 19:22
  SPEAKER_02: That only the paranoid survives, so you're always looking over your shoulder.
• 19:26
  SPEAKER_02: But assume things are gonna work because they've they've been working.
• 19:30
  SPEAKER_02: I one of uh who's not an investor, but a VC I know here from Toronto.
• 19:34
  SPEAKER_02: I I I was at a I was at a like a hockey game with him a couple weeks back.
• 19:40
  SPEAKER_02: He's like, Did you hire that person that that we talked about last time we met?
• 19:44
  SPEAKER_02: And I'm like, No, I haven't yet.
• 19:45
  SPEAKER_02: Just waiting for this to close, waiting for waiting for our fundraise to close before we spend the money, blah blah blah.
• 19:51
  SPEAKER_02: I mean he's like, why are you building the company based on if this then that versus it's so early stage to build the company on the assumption that things are gonna work, and you if they don't, you pivot, but build the company on the the path that things are working and they continue to work.
• 20:12
  SPEAKER_02: Because if they don't, either you pivot, or two, it's so small that like who cares, you know, like there's not like a huge risk to do to fail, right?
• 20:23
  SPEAKER_02: And I was like, damn, that's actually really, really true.
• 20:27
  SPEAKER_02: So I'm still trying to get better at that, and just like there's no signal to telling me that things aren't working and only things that keep growing, like we grew 300% last year, right?
• 20:39
  SPEAKER_02: So 4x on like basically on the top line, and um we just raised a pretty big sizable series A, and so the things are all good.
• 20:50
  SPEAKER_02: So just continue to build towards like the assumption that things are gonna work.
• 20:54
  SPEAKER_02: Because if they're not, then you change course.
• 20:57
  SPEAKER_02: But be prepared to win, right?
• 21:00
  SPEAKER_02: It's like um opportunities come, and if you're always kind of retroactively trying to take the opportun take that opportunity that's presented instead of being ready to present it, then you're not ready for ready for luck to happen to you.
• 21:19
  SPEAKER_02: Like it's luck that that opportunity came across our desk and and we're happy and grateful.
• 21:26
  SPEAKER_02: But it's not unlucky if you're not ready to take care of to take advantage of it.
• 21:30
  SPEAKER_02: You know what I mean?
• 21:31
  SPEAKER_02: Like that's when you like luck and preparation come in like come into execution.
• 21:36
  SPEAKER_02: So you gotta be you gotta be ready.
• 21:37
  SPEAKER_02: So I'm I'm this is me like coaching myself and talking myself into doing some hard things here on the podcast.
• 21:45
  SPEAKER_00: Luck must be forced, right?
• 21:47
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, you gotta I believe there's a saying where if you put in uh enough time you you you you increase your chances of luck, you know what I'm saying?
• 21:57
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, I totally know what you're saying, and there's there's Four types of luck.
• 22:01
  SPEAKER_02: And um there's a a really great is I think it's a polygram essay about the four types of luck.
• 22:07
  SPEAKER_02: It's really, really good.
• 22:08
  SPEAKER_02: And oh the I I could be mistaking it for Polygram of someone else, but but if you Google the four four types of luck, it's just really cool.
• 22:16
  SPEAKER_02: The way I think about luck is like a fisherman, okay.
• 22:23
  SPEAKER_02: If you are just throwing your line, you throw a cast of just one line, one piece of bait into the river, and you hope you catch a fish.
• 22:36
  SPEAKER_02: Okay, is that how commercial fishermen work on big ships?
• 22:43
  SPEAKER_02: No, they laid down as kind of yeah, as cruel as this is, they laid down massive net structures between multiple boats and basically just capture entire areas of the ocean.
• 22:58
  SPEAKER_02: Uh it sounds pretty kind of disgusting.
• 23:00
  SPEAKER_02: And you know, take whatever you want about how we treat animals, it's it's not great.
• 23:05
  SPEAKER_02: But the the fit the the the the fisherman who throws their line over the bridge with one piece of bait and one line, they're hoping to get lucky, right?
• 23:16
  SPEAKER_02: The person who's bringing that net to the party is going to have success.
• 23:22
  SPEAKER_02: So what they've done is they've increased their surface area, literally, for luck to strike them.
• 23:28
  SPEAKER_02: So when you're doing the right things in the business and always uh working towards you know things coming across your plate, you're doing the right things all the time, you're increasing that surface area.
• 23:39
  SPEAKER_02: You're becoming a fisherman with a net instead of a like one little fishing rod.
• 23:44
  SPEAKER_02: That's how I think of luck.
• 23:45
  SPEAKER_02: It's all like a surface.
• 23:48
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, and yeah, exactly.
• 23:49
  SPEAKER_00: And the same goes for investing, right?
• 23:51
  SPEAKER_00: Um where the more companies you are able to look at and analyze, the the higher the chances are you're finding your golden uh golden fish to say.
• 24:03
  SPEAKER_00: Uh yeah.
• 24:05
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, and I mean you really only most amazing investing track records have extreme power laws.
• 24:14
  SPEAKER_02: Both in venture, private equity, and in public equities.
• 24:18
  SPEAKER_02: You have like extreme power law of to make a career, there really only has to be one or two really, really good ideas that you had a lot of conviction in, and and when the market tried to sway you, you you held strong.
• 24:33
  SPEAKER_02: That's been the track records.
• 24:35
  SPEAKER_02: Like the best schwab self-directed accounts have been people who forgot the password.
• 24:42
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, the coffee can, right?
• 24:44
  SPEAKER_00: Well, since you're uh you're now a founder and a CEO, how has that changed your view on um what makes a great company?
• 24:54
  SPEAKER_00: Whether it's in terms of culture, um leadership, um perhaps even how you invest your own money?
• 25:03
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, it's a great question.
• 25:04
  SPEAKER_02: I think I've been more keen on quality over time of the actual business, like fundamentally, like you know, how defensible they are, kind of some seven power stuff if you're familiar with with seven powers.
• 25:19
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
• 25:20
  SPEAKER_02: Um so definitely more keen on like own the best, own the best in breed, I would say, since over the last few years.
• 25:30
  SPEAKER_02: But other otherwise, like looking at some of these companies management team-wise, I've basically sold anything or faded anything with a capital allocation strategy from the 10,000-foot view, just just knowing how I would do it, I can't make sense of what they're doing.
• 25:51
  SPEAKER_02: I'm not even in their business, I'm not in the weeds, I'm not the expert.
• 25:56
  SPEAKER_02: I might not even be good at that industry, and I'm like, what are you doing?
• 26:01
  SPEAKER_02: I'll give you an example.
• 26:04
  SPEAKER_02: I used to own this Canadian utility that was a popular growth at a reasonable price stock.
• 26:14
  SPEAKER_02: Okay.
• 26:14
  SPEAKER_02: Uh it was a renewable energy business.
• 26:17
  SPEAKER_02: It wasn't like a hype renewable energy business, but it was certainly catching a bid on that hype uh of that business.
• 26:24
  SPEAKER_02: And they were acquiring, building all kinds of electricity infrastructure across North America.
• 26:34
  SPEAKER_02: The stock, I I had the stock from about$12 to$30-ish.
• 26:41
  SPEAKER_02: It was around$25 when I sold the stock, when they issued this huge, huge credit facility to do more acquisitions and more you know, build out of their power generation fleet using credit and corporate bonds that made no sense.
• 27:05
  SPEAKER_02: First of all, they got it like debt was like free at the time back then.
• 27:11
  SPEAKER_02: Like we were talking about like ZERP, ZERP of all ZERPs.
• 27:14
  SPEAKER_02: And there were these things called green bonds that every single utility in North America was using.
• 27:20
  SPEAKER_02: What a green bond was was if you're a bank and I'm a utility and I'm using it to go build solar, wind, whatever, your bank, you have a mandate to have some sort of like ESG mandate in your in your your your portfolio.
• 27:36
  SPEAKER_02: I will help you by issuing green bonds to you, or you can track how much carbon is being removed from your investments.
• 27:44
  SPEAKER_02: Okay.
• 27:45
  SPEAKER_02: This was a very big trend.
• 27:47
  SPEAKER_02: And it was great for the utilities because you could offer like one and a half percent on long duration debt.
• 27:57
  SPEAKER_02: Like unbelievable, right?
• 27:58
  SPEAKER_02: And the banks would do it because you're they're getting you're they're getting what they want and being able to check the ESG box, and you're getting what you want because you're getting cheap debt.
• 28:07
  SPEAKER_02: Everyone was doing them.
• 28:09
  SPEAKER_02: They were issuing debt at like six percent.
• 28:13
  SPEAKER_02: I was like, what are you guys doing?
• 28:15
  SPEAKER_02: Like, like, I shouldn't have to be the CFO, right?
• 28:22
  SPEAKER_02: Like, I shouldn't have to think what is going on.
• 28:25
  SPEAKER_02: You know what happened over the next year?
• 28:26
  SPEAKER_02: The stock went to like six bucks.
• 28:29
  SPEAKER_00: Did you ever figure out why they did that?
• 28:32
  SPEAKER_02: No, no, and don't care.
• 28:34
  SPEAKER_02: I don't know.
• 28:35
  SPEAKER_02: Um it made no sense.
• 28:37
  SPEAKER_02: Everyone, like they could have easily issued at like sub 2%.
• 28:41
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, but the I mean, there's gotta be a reason, right?
• 28:45
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, why why go four times as expensive?
• 28:49
  SPEAKER_00: There must have been maybe they didn't even know green bonds were possible.
• 28:52
  SPEAKER_02: You'd be surprised, you know, like so many of these decisions, big companies, small companies, are just done by a handful of people in a sp in a room, right?
• 29:00
  SPEAKER_02: So the way to think about returns is in one year it's almost all driven by multiple compression or expansion.
• 29:13
  SPEAKER_02: Return returns of a stock in one year are all driven by you know the multiple going from 20 to 15 or 20 to 25.
• 29:21
  SPEAKER_02: There's some sort of story around the multiple contracting or you know, uh expanding.
• 29:28
  SPEAKER_02: Five years, the fundamentals really start to matter, you know, beating revenue expectations year after year, continue to compound the business, whatever, whatever, whatever will drive that kind of EPS number up over a long period of time, or free cash flow per share.
• 29:46
  SPEAKER_02: Ten years is written by culture and management.
• 29:51
  SPEAKER_02: No greater example than Costco.
• 29:54
  SPEAKER_02: Costco has had the best management team with the most astute plan and the most ideal culture for the three-legged stool, actually, the four-legged stool to thrive.
• 30:10
  SPEAKER_02: Suppliers are taken well care of, customers are getting the lowest possible price, employees are getting paid three to four times higher where they would work somewhere else, and as a result, the fourth stool is shareholders' win.
• 30:26
  SPEAKER_02: Right?
• 30:26
  SPEAKER_02: If you have a kind of imbalance of what I'll call customers, employees, and shareholders, then it can work in the short term, but the if that's not equal over the long term, you don't really win the one uh one of those typics, one of those legs of the stool will suffer.
• 30:50
  SPEAKER_02: And as an investor, I don't want it to be the shareholders, right?
• 30:54
  SPEAKER_02: Like that's just the reality.
• 30:57
  SPEAKER_00: I hear you, yeah.
• 30:58
  SPEAKER_00: That that makes sense, right?
• 31:01
  SPEAKER_00: I mean I imagine there's like a constant push and pull um as a founder.
• 31:07
  SPEAKER_00: Um there's the pressure to scale quickly, um, move fast, reinvest aggressively, maybe, but on the other hand, there's this desire to build something intentional, uh thoughtful, uh taking your time, um, and of course, profitable, perhaps even.
• 31:29
  SPEAKER_00: How do you personally navigate this balancing act?
• 31:34
  SPEAKER_00: How do you decide where to place your focus, uh, what to prioritize, and what to say no to?
• 31:42
  SPEAKER_02: The only irreversible mistake a founder can make is mistakes in their cap table, aka ownership structures.
• 31:53
  SPEAKER_02: Giving away a bunch of the company to investors when they shouldn't have advisors, bad co-founder splits, stuff like that can be cannot be undone.
• 32:07
  SPEAKER_02: Every other mistake can be undone.
• 32:09
  SPEAKER_02: That one, that one typically is very, very hard to undo.
• 32:13
  SPEAKER_02: So the reason I'm bringing up Captable to your question is what do you want to optimize for?
• 32:18
  SPEAKER_02: If you are an indie hacker and own 100% of the business, it's all bootstrapped, you start it with a few thousand bucks in your bank account, and you're got it up to 10 grand a month off off sailing off to the races, you built yourself a nice little living and it's profitable and no one to answer to, and no huge team.
• 32:37
  SPEAKER_02: You know, that might check a lot of boxes for someone.
• 32:41
  SPEAKER_02: But if you go that route, after raising 10 million bucks from a venture investor, they'll hate your guts.
• 32:49
  SPEAKER_02: That would be a colossal success for the first person and a colossal failure for the second person, depending on what they did with their cap table.
• 33:00
  SPEAKER_02: So it really just depends on what you're optimizing the company for.
• 33:05
  SPEAKER_02: If it's just being optimized for a few people to make themselves a nice little bit of change and get um a good core group of customers that are really happy with what you've built and make make some nice money for yourself, then then perfect, you know.
• 33:23
  SPEAKER_02: But if you have uh three venture rounds and um a bunch of investors that you've promised you're gonna grow like hell, and you take your foot off the gas, no one's happy.
• 33:36
  SPEAKER_02: You're your your employees are pissed, your investors are pissed, you should be, you should be as well.
• 33:43
  SPEAKER_02: And so you've then you've done all of the right things, but for the wrong outcome, right?
• 33:49
  SPEAKER_02: So I think you just have to match up like what you what you want.
• 33:53
  SPEAKER_02: We're going down the venture track, so it's it's pedal to the metal.
• 33:57
  SPEAKER_02: I have a fiduciary duty to serve my investors, my employees, my co-founders, myself.
• 34:03
  SPEAKER_02: Um, but if we didn't raise any money and I just bootstrapped this thing, then shoot, yeah, I could do whatever I want, right?
• 34:09
  SPEAKER_02: Um, so you gotta mash those up.
• 34:12
  SPEAKER_00: Just to expand on that a little bit, where do you see FinChat heading over the next let's say five to ten years?
• 34:20
  SPEAKER_02: Over that time frame, what I will say is we want professionals and retail to know the platform, like just from an awareness perspective.
• 34:38
  SPEAKER_02: Like that would be a really loosey-goosey uh five-year plan.
• 34:43
  SPEAKER_02: But you know, you'd just be shocked at how many people have never heard of it.
• 34:46
  SPEAKER_02: Um, in small circles, they're like obsessed with it, right?
• 34:50
  SPEAKER_02: And so we we have to not live in our bubble and remember like you go to a conference and like one of ten thousand people have ever heard of it, right?
• 34:57
  SPEAKER_02: So, like we wanna we wanna make a huge dent in that.
• 35:00
  SPEAKER_02: Maybe it's several hundred of the ten thousand people.
• 35:04
  SPEAKER_02: Um, so that's kind of a North Star loosey-goosey goal that's very hard to quantify, but that that that drives me every morning.
• 35:12
  SPEAKER_02: It's just like just get everyone to know about it.
• 35:16
  SPEAKER_02: Um, so that would be one goal.
• 35:19
  SPEAKER_02: And then what we're launching this summer around data and around what our customers are gonna be able to do with the data.
• 35:33
  SPEAKER_02: The I'm trying to be uh a little bit discreet in what we're what we're bringing to market without giving too much away, but um, what I'll say is we want to automate the process of a lot of people's busy work.
• 35:53
  SPEAKER_02: So our vision is you have a you know a poster of Warren Buffett behind you, okay?
• 35:59
  SPEAKER_02: Buffett has built the vision of how I picture FinChat serving the purpose for big firms, small firms, and individuals.
• 36:12
  SPEAKER_02: Buffett built the system, which is he has the undisputed greatest of all time title.
• 36:20
  SPEAKER_02: Can we both agree on that?
• 36:22
  SPEAKER_00: Absolutely.
• 36:23
  SPEAKER_00: Uh and um and Charlie Munger right behind me.
• 36:26
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, you're headed on Charlie there.
• 36:28
  SPEAKER_02: So the two of them, okay, right?
• 36:31
  SPEAKER_02: Um, rest in peace to the late great Charlie.
• 36:34
  SPEAKER_02: Um they don't have a computer in their office, right?
• 36:40
  SPEAKER_02: Crazy, right?
• 36:42
  SPEAKER_02: So everyone's got these fancy tools, and the guys who don't even have a computer in their office smoked everybody, right?
• 36:53
  SPEAKER_02: Fantastic business people, but also fantastic public equity investors.
• 36:58
  SPEAKER_02: And so what does that mean?
• 37:01
  SPEAKER_02: Is that they have built the system around Berkshire Hathaway and them to be in that position to just think.
• 37:10
  SPEAKER_02: Just think.
• 37:10
  SPEAKER_02: Because Warren Buffett's uh superpower is in being able to make a few key decisions extremely well.
• 37:20
  SPEAKER_02: Jeff Bezos has talked about this a lot too.
• 37:22
  SPEAKER_02: It's like I don't want to have three decisions in a day, or more than three decisions I have to make in a day.
• 37:27
  SPEAKER_02: Like that's a that's a colossal failure.
• 37:29
  SPEAKER_02: That's too many, too many decisions, important decisions to make in one day.
• 37:32
  SPEAKER_02: So so Buffett has built a system around him where he just sits in his office and just thinks.
• 37:39
  SPEAKER_02: Right?
• 37:40
  SPEAKER_02: And so all of the busy work, all the back office stuff, all the operations, he has stripped out all of it to deliver him just what he needs to make really good decisions and just read financial statements, just think, and not have to do that, he doesn't have to go data aggregate and build Excel models and all that stuff, right?
• 38:02
  SPEAKER_02: Like we have a vision that looks more like the analyst being able to do what they're really good at, and AI allows allows for that where humans are going to be able to do the judgment work, the relationship building, building their business, building their assets, do the things that they're really good at, and AI can strip out a lot of the other stuff.
• 38:29
  SPEAKER_02: I like the Naval quote where he just says, let's leave the paperwork to the robots.
• 38:34
  SPEAKER_02: You know, AI is obviously gonna disrupt a lot of jobs, there's no denying that.
• 38:40
  SPEAKER_02: This is a little self-serving, but I'm I don't think people are gonna miss the paperwork.
• 38:46
  SPEAKER_00: Personally, uh I'll I'll have to agree there.
• 38:50
  SPEAKER_00: I think most most won't.
• 38:52
  SPEAKER_00: Perhaps there will be somebody that loves it, but it loves the paperwork, right?
• 38:56
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 38:59
  SPEAKER_02: You know, there's never been a time where humans have had massive technological disruption and had less work.
• 39:08
  SPEAKER_02: They've always met them the increased productivity with more productivity and with more work.
• 39:14
  SPEAKER_02: Employment's all time, like employment's so low.
• 39:18
  SPEAKER_02: Um that's gonna happen here, is my prediction as well.
• 39:22
  SPEAKER_00: Too it's so let me let me let me ask a follow-up question on what you just said.
• 39:29
  SPEAKER_00: Um before I ask, let me just say that we love the platform and we use it a lot.
• 39:35
  SPEAKER_00: So uh just not to bass you or anything, but we often talk about the three main edges.
• 39:42
  SPEAKER_00: You just mentioned Buffett and uh and Munger.
• 39:45
  SPEAKER_00: Um, they had their own edge.
• 39:48
  SPEAKER_00: There are three um the analytical edge, the informational edge, and the psychological edge.
• 39:55
  SPEAKER_00: And honestly, in today's world, I feel like the first two are slipping away with AI, advanced screeners, endless data.
• 40:04
  SPEAKER_00: Um the analytical and informational edges are harder than ever to hold on to.
• 40:11
  SPEAKER_00: Um, you're not going to outgoogle the market right.
• 40:14
  SPEAKER_00: So, for most of us, I think the psychological edge, how we behave, how we filter out the noise, how we stay grounded is where the real advantage lies.
• 40:24
  SPEAKER_00: Um, the soft stuff instead of hard data.
• 40:28
  SPEAKER_00: Given that, do you believe Finchet actually gives investors any kind of edge today?
• 40:36
  SPEAKER_00: And if so, how does FinChat give investors that edge?
• 40:42
  SPEAKER_02: No, I I no we we don't give any investors any inherent edge other than we make their process a lot easier.
• 40:53
  SPEAKER_02: Like if you're gonna need if you're if if you're gonna need to do your process to to find the financial statements, quickly be able to get all the KPIs, maybe build out a model or not, um, track things over time in your dashboard, see how the valuations have changed, see what's kind of in in your strike zone for running your portfolio.
• 41:15
  SPEAKER_02: We want to be that operating system.
• 41:18
  SPEAKER_02: And to give you that temperament edge, give you just the data, right?
• 41:24
  SPEAKER_02: Like we purposely don't, you'll notice this on the platform.
• 41:29
  SPEAKER_02: It is intentional that when you go on there, you don't see a big red thing saying that the markets are down and that futures are down, and then blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
• 41:39
  SPEAKER_02: You know, tariffs are coming, blah, blah.
• 41:41
  SPEAKER_02: It's it's very intentional.
• 41:43
  SPEAKER_02: There's even a business owner mode where you can remove all stock prices and everything.
• 41:47
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, we tried it.
• 41:48
  SPEAKER_02: It's pretty cool.
• 41:49
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, it's it's it's a fun little thing, right?
• 41:52
  SPEAKER_02: And so we are an unbiased, unopinionated information company.
• 42:01
  SPEAKER_02: We encourage our users to use the tool uh in in such a way that they think that they see fit.
• 42:10
  SPEAKER_02: You know, everyone has a different way to invest.
• 42:13
  SPEAKER_02: I'm kind of like a quality growth at reasonable price guy.
• 42:16
  SPEAKER_02: One of my co-founders is like a very deep value guy, and and and he's done well.
• 42:21
  SPEAKER_02: And you know, I know I know I know lots of ways to to win, uh, but one thing I do know is that keeping your emotions in check and thinking long term typically wins.
• 42:29
  SPEAKER_02: And so we're trying to build the platform around orienting that process.
• 42:34
  SPEAKER_00: Purely out of curiosity, do you see any um like uh people leaving the platform uh when there's you know a lot of uh noise going around, all the terrace?
• 42:46
  SPEAKER_02: Do you see more people, uh less people using the platform or I would say volatility generally, both on the upside and the downside, is good for our business.
• 43:00
  SPEAKER_02: Um, a lot of action just generally is good for our business and user counts and those kinds of things.
• 43:07
  SPEAKER_02: So I would say it's good.
• 43:09
  SPEAKER_02: What we haven't had, uh, and that I think would be very bad for our business, is not a bear market, not a not a long bull market, but periods where the market just kind of does nothing.
• 43:22
  SPEAKER_02: And there's been lots of them through history.
• 43:26
  SPEAKER_02: Like, you know, it almost feels worse.
• 43:29
  SPEAKER_02: You know, you can just keep buying when it's a bear market, you know.
• 43:31
  SPEAKER_02: You just you're like, oh, I'm getting this business, it's at a great price, I'm gonna hold this for the next 30 years.
• 43:36
  SPEAKER_02: But when stocks do nothing for like a decade, and it's happened before, that's tough, that would be really difficult for the business and for almost every financial data platform.
• 43:47
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 43:48
  SPEAKER_00: It's kind of becoming boring.
• 43:49
  SPEAKER_00: Investors want action, right?
• 43:51
  SPEAKER_00: Correct.
• 43:52
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, whether that's a good thing.
• 43:54
  SPEAKER_00: Uh we'll have to see.
• 43:55
  SPEAKER_00: I I don't think so, but um that's just how the way the way the world works.
• 44:00
  SPEAKER_00: Is there is there like a feature or function in FinChat you use or you think is a bit under the radar, maybe something most users don't even notice, perhaps we don't even know of?
• 44:14
  SPEAKER_02: I will say uh this is one of the newer, newer but highly, highly requested things that are on the platform, which is building custom metrics.
• 44:25
  SPEAKER_02: And it's particularly handy on an individual company level.
• 44:29
  SPEAKER_02: And I've kind of got it mapped out and saved for now for a bunch of the companies I look at and own.
• 44:33
  SPEAKER_02: One one quick example is like Amazon reports AWS revenue and they report AWS operating income.
• 44:45
  SPEAKER_02: They don't inherently report those two numbers divided by each other for an operating margin, right?
• 44:53
  SPEAKER_02: Of course, they they do report it because you have exactly the inputs you need, but they don't have a line item that says that calls that out.
• 45:01
  SPEAKER_02: Or they don't have a line item that says like how much money they're making from the subscriptions, the ads, or how much that is made up now of the of the profit.
• 45:09
  SPEAKER_02: Of course, anyone on a spreadsheet can kind of crunch some numbers and do that.
• 45:14
  SPEAKER_02: But again, that's that's kind of where we're jumping into the process with custom metrics.
• 45:18
  SPEAKER_02: We'll give you the operating income, we'll give you the revenue, and you you're now just able to divide line this by that line, and it saves and it's always up to date.
• 45:26
  SPEAKER_02: So you can look at AWS operating margin, you're like, oh my god.
• 45:31
  SPEAKER_02: Give you another example.
• 45:32
  SPEAKER_02: Ubers like take rates.
• 45:34
  SPEAKER_02: The reason I I thought Uber was the worst business on planet earth when they went public.
• 45:38
  SPEAKER_02: I was like, this thing is like incredibly like I couldn't think of worse unit economics.
• 45:45
  SPEAKER_02: A year and a half ago, I re-looked at the business and everything had changed.
• 45:52
  SPEAKER_02: They had taken take rates.
• 45:54
  SPEAKER_02: So again, that that KPI that I had looked at from FinChat, they took take rates from like 10% to 30% in three or four quarters, while the ridership and the mobility in the delivery business business more than doubled.
• 46:14
  SPEAKER_02: So picture that.
• 46:15
  SPEAKER_02: That's pretty great, great business, right?
• 46:17
  SPEAKER_02: You go to your customers in the ecosystem, and you effectively raise your take of the profit from 10% to 30%, and the volume moving on your platform more than doubles.
• 46:32
  SPEAKER_02: Right?
• 46:32
  SPEAKER_02: Like it'd be like if I raised if exactly if I raise the price on FinChat by three times, and all of a sudden two and a half times more people started coming in the door to pay that price tomorrow.
• 46:45
  SPEAKER_02: Like, there's just not many companies that can do that or will do that, have the you know, the gonads do that or the moat to do that.
• 46:53
  SPEAKER_02: So that's when that's when I was like, I need to own the stock.
• 46:56
  SPEAKER_02: And I was very glad that I I had that kind of insight.
• 46:59
  SPEAKER_02: You're not gonna see that on an income statement.
• 47:01
  SPEAKER_02: I mean, you will see the profits go way up as you did, but like you're not gonna see the underlying why, and you need the why to continue to know why you own it.
• 47:12
  SPEAKER_00: I see.
• 47:13
  SPEAKER_00: So they save I see what you're saying.
• 47:15
  SPEAKER_00: Uh this like this hidden potential with um, for example, Salesforce was something we noticed as well, where they spent so much money on sales and marketing and um like certain costs they could just cut if they wanted to, and it's showing, right?
• 47:37
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, yeah, yeah.
• 47:40
  SPEAKER_00: I I some businesses just surprise me uh every every single time.
• 47:45
  SPEAKER_00: It's it's nuts.
• 47:46
  SPEAKER_00: Um, so let's talk about AI for a second, if you're down, because it feels like we're in this weird moment.
• 47:53
  SPEAKER_00: On one hand, it's moving unbelievably fast, um, it's unlocking all these new powerful capabilities, um, new startups every single day, it feels like.
• 48:07
  SPEAKER_00: But on the other hand, there's this growing sense of fatigue or unease, even for uh for many people, whether that's concerns about uh reliability, uh hallucinations, regulations, whatever it may be.
• 48:22
  SPEAKER_00: From your perspective, as someone who's building with AI, I would assume every day.
• 48:30
  SPEAKER_00: What's your take on where we are right now?
• 48:33
  SPEAKER_00: And um, has your perspective on AI changed over the last year, maybe?
• 48:38
  SPEAKER_02: It has changed probably just like everybody.
• 48:42
  SPEAKER_02: It no the speed no longer surprises me in terms of like the the rate of change because you know that that became apparent in the first six months of large language models becoming like all consumer applications in Chat GPT in November 2023.
• 49:00
  SPEAKER_02: It was like very obvious that, like, oh wow, there's like a step change every month or so, and and and that can that is could just continued, like that has not changed, probably will continue for quite some time.
• 49:11
  SPEAKER_02: We're in like a a Moore's Law type of world where instead of you know the number of transistors doubling every two years, whatever whatever Moore's Law is, into like every this happens every month, and so uh eventually, yes, you you get to some sort of asymptote where the techno it gets harder and harder for the technology to improve.
• 49:34
  SPEAKER_02: But I don't think that we're even close to that yet.
• 49:39
  SPEAKER_02: When it comes to the use case, there is still a lot of questions to be answered.
• 49:48
  SPEAKER_02: As an AI bull myself, still a lot of questions to be answered around CapEx build out in the hundreds of billions of dollars, with still like the most common use case that people are are drawn to is like making memes with Studio Ghibli.
• 50:12
  SPEAKER_02: You know, like there don't get me wrong, there's a lot of stuff happening in the economy, but in terms of like the regular consumer using the product, getting the benefits of the product, the average knowledge worker, yes, they're getting the benefits of maybe a chat GPT subscription or whatever, whatever other tool is, but we still have a long way to go to justify this capex.
• 50:35
  SPEAKER_02: And I think Gavin Baker of Atredi's Management said it best, which is how do you justify it?
• 50:42
  SPEAKER_02: And the justification is just quite easy on first principles thinking.
• 50:46
  SPEAKER_02: Like, if you can create digital god, how much does that cost?
• 50:52
  SPEAKER_02: Right?
• 50:52
  SPEAKER_02: Like, what is the number to spend when you're spinning off a hundred billion in free cash flow like these trillion dollar companies are?
• 51:01
  SPEAKER_02: What is what is the right number if you're the if you're Satya Nadella or you're you know Ruth Poor, I don't like whoever it is, like what is the number to spend?
• 51:12
  SPEAKER_02: And I think that you're seeing that right now.
• 51:14
  SPEAKER_02: It's just like as much as we can.
• 51:17
  SPEAKER_02: So there's a lot to prove still.
• 51:20
  SPEAKER_02: I don't know if that answers your question, if that's a satisfying answer.
• 51:23
  SPEAKER_02: It's very impressive with a lot to prove still.
• 51:27
  SPEAKER_00: And at the same time, we are seeing some like slowdown.
• 51:31
  SPEAKER_00: Uh, Microsoft is pulling back from um uh you know the immense hundreds of billions of dollars of spending, and they're slowing down a little bit just to see where the landscape is taking them.
• 51:44
  SPEAKER_00: So, yeah, how much are you going to pay for God?
• 51:48
  SPEAKER_00: That's a that's a great one.
• 51:49
  SPEAKER_00: I'll have to remember that one.
• 51:50
  SPEAKER_02: I didn't I didn't make it up.
• 51:52
  SPEAKER_02: That was Gavin Baker, so credit to him.
• 51:54
  SPEAKER_00: Gavin Baker, I'll I'll remember his name.
• 51:57
  SPEAKER_00: So let's say Finchet had unlimited computing power, um, a budget.
• 52:04
  SPEAKER_00: What's the first crazy experiment you'd run with uh FinChat?
• 52:09
  SPEAKER_02: It's happening right now.
• 52:11
  SPEAKER_02: Um we're gonna announce and be a little bit more open about it.
• 52:16
  SPEAKER_02: It I just said that there's a lot to prove with AI.
• 52:21
  SPEAKER_02: What we're bringing uh now, it's 16 months of RD, it's coming soon.
• 52:29
  SPEAKER_02: I don't know if it'll be frame breaking for you, but it'll be frame breaking for like the industry and some of the other fintechs and ecosystem players on what we're doing, and it's a hundred percent AI.
• 52:41
  SPEAKER_02: Um so I I I'm gonna be hopefully less cryptic about it in like a month and a half, but it's pretty secretive at the moment.
• 52:52
  SPEAKER_00: Uh, you'll have to get back on the show in uh in uh in a year or two from now and uh see uh what everything you said came to fruition.
• 53:01
  SPEAKER_02: I'm I'm quite quite confident in it.
• 53:04
  SPEAKER_02: Uh there's um a lot of use cases with this technology that is basically what would you do if you had what would you do if you had thousands of people in the cloud working uh on a certain task for you all the time?
• 53:27
  SPEAKER_02: What would you what would you do with that technology?
• 53:30
  SPEAKER_02: And that's kind of what agents are capable of doing, right?
• 53:35
  SPEAKER_02: That's that's exactly the promise of this of this technology.
• 53:39
  SPEAKER_02: So it's pretty disruptive from that perspective, and and we're very much so have a wonderful use case for that thesis.
• 53:47
  SPEAKER_02: A perfect use case for that thesis.
• 53:51
  SPEAKER_00: I can only uh speculate, but uh I won't I won't ask any more questions on it uh to put you in an uncomfortable spot.
• 53:58
  SPEAKER_00: So uh we'll see in a few months uh what's happening.
• 54:02
  SPEAKER_00: Very excited.
• 54:03
  SPEAKER_00: Um shifting gears a bit, you've spent quite the years studying great companies as an investor, sharing your insights uh publicly.
• 54:16
  SPEAKER_00: You just mentioned the Canadian podcast you're on uh on a weekly basis.
• 54:20
  SPEAKER_00: The Canadian investor, I'm sorry.
• 54:23
  SPEAKER_00: Yep.
• 54:23
  SPEAKER_00: So um I'm curious to zoom out um or rather zoom in on a few more personal takes.
• 54:31
  SPEAKER_00: What is the best investment outside of FinChat you've ever made?
• 54:35
  SPEAKER_00: Not necessarily in terms of returns or whatever, but in what it taught you.
• 54:41
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, that's an easy answer.
• 54:43
  SPEAKER_02: It's constellation software, ticker CSU on the Toronto Stock Exchange.
• 54:47
  SPEAKER_02: Uh yeah, we know it.
• 54:49
  SPEAKER_02: You know it, yeah.
• 54:50
  SPEAKER_02: This is a right place, right time one for me where, you know, being a Canadian exposed to TSX listings a little bit more than most.
• 55:01
  SPEAKER_02: And um I bought right and have sat tight for a long, long time, and it has been anywhere from exceptional.
• 55:14
  SPEAKER_02: It's been 40 to 60 percent of my portfolio ever since.
• 55:19
  SPEAKER_02: I just went deep mass concentration into it.
• 55:24
  SPEAKER_02: This comes down to the management team question, right?
• 55:26
  SPEAKER_02: Like, there's a lot of people who can replicate what Constellation does.
• 55:29
  SPEAKER_02: There's tons of copcats.
• 55:31
  SPEAKER_00: Mark Leonard is perhaps the best CEO besides Warren Buffett.
• 55:35
  SPEAKER_02: Correct.
• 55:36
  SPEAKER_02: Correct.
• 55:37
  SPEAKER_02: So I'm a bit of a sidecar investor from that perspective, right?
• 55:41
  SPEAKER_02: Like these these guys are charging you no management fee to run the what is essentially private equity strategy.
• 55:50
  SPEAKER_02: Whether it's Buffett or and Buffett and Munger or you know Mark Leonard or a lot of these types of strategies.
• 56:00
  SPEAKER_02: They're charging no management fee.
• 56:03
  SPEAKER_02: It's a no-brainer, in my opinion.
• 56:05
  SPEAKER_02: It's like it's like a very it's very, very lucrative what they've done.
• 56:10
  SPEAKER_02: And the results just kind of speak for themselves.
• 56:13
  SPEAKER_02: And there's a lot, there's always a question of oh, can they you know it's like that they can't keep getting away with this meme.
• 56:19
  SPEAKER_02: I have no reason to believe that they can't keep getting away with this.
• 56:22
  SPEAKER_02: So I'm still about 50% of my portfolio in constellation software.
• 56:27
  SPEAKER_02: So you can imagine how how well that's been for me through the years.
• 56:32
  SPEAKER_02: It's fantastic.
• 56:33
  SPEAKER_02: So, what did it taught you?
• 56:35
  SPEAKER_00: What did it what did it learn?
• 56:38
  SPEAKER_02: I learned two things.
• 56:41
  SPEAKER_02: One about the the management team thing and incentive structures and cult corporate culture a lot around how do you decentralize incentives as much as possible.
• 56:56
  SPEAKER_02: The way that they have the operating group set up, the way that each employee has to like they don't get stock option grants, they have to, as a part of their contract, go buy shares on the open market versus a stock-based compensation product uh plan.
• 57:12
  SPEAKER_02: Very interesting how they've done that, and and really not many other case studies, even close to like it.
• 57:18
  SPEAKER_02: How they've decentralized the operating groups, have incentives around each company having their own sets of deals, very decentralized culture.
• 57:28
  SPEAKER_02: So that's been a cool learning experience for sure.
• 57:31
  SPEAKER_02: And then personally, how many times have I been told over the last I don't know, close to 10 years that they're gonna run out of targets in terms of stuff to buy and that it's too easy to replicate, there's no moat in what they're doing, blah blah blah blah blah.
• 57:52
  SPEAKER_02: Bro, I get like five to ten business development MA uh people from an operating group at Constellation Software hit me up about conversations about buying Finchet.
• 58:09
  SPEAKER_02: Their tentacles are so so deep in every single software company, every single software founder has been hit up by a constellation software operating group.
• 58:19
  SPEAKER_02: Like they are for real when it comes to execution.
• 58:23
  SPEAKER_02: I've seen it personally.
• 58:25
  SPEAKER_02: So it comes down to there's always going to be a bear case on every stock.
• 58:32
  SPEAKER_02: And if you don't know what that bear case is, you don't know the business, and you're not well positioned to own the company uh at all.
• 58:42
  SPEAKER_02: But if you have a countering opinion, stick to your freaking guns, man.
• 58:48
  SPEAKER_02: Like, you know, if you have your countering opinion, that's why you're picking individual equities.
• 58:53
  SPEAKER_02: If not, just own the index and have a great time that way, you know.
• 58:56
  SPEAKER_02: So so stick stick to your opinion and and and be willing to look stupid in the short term for your for your your convictions that you have over the long term.
• 59:06
  SPEAKER_00: Do you own Topicus as well?
• 59:08
  SPEAKER_02: Yep.
• 59:09
  SPEAKER_02: I got the Spinco shares from Lumen, Topicus.
• 59:12
  SPEAKER_02: I have purchased more Topicus, I've never purchased more of Lumen, but I've never sold uh a single share either.
• 59:18
  SPEAKER_02: So Topicus is probably on an individual basis, third or fourth largest position.
• 59:24
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, it's it's done great so far as well.
• 59:27
  SPEAKER_00: It's always been expensive as well and still kept growing.
• 59:30
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, well, that's uh that's close to home for you, isn't it?
• 59:33
  SPEAKER_02: Topicus.
• 59:34
  SPEAKER_00: Uh yep, yes, it yes, it is.
• 59:36
  SPEAKER_00: Yes.
• 59:37
  SPEAKER_00: We're pretty familiar with it.
• 59:38
  SPEAKER_00: And um you use some of the software products they um they bought back in the back in the day.
• 59:43
  SPEAKER_00: So pretty familiar with it as well.
• 59:46
  SPEAKER_00: Um have you ever checked out uh serial acquirer Technion A B?
• 59:51
  SPEAKER_00: The Swedish one.
• 59:53
  SPEAKER_02: Yes.
• 59:54
  SPEAKER_02: I checked them out, I listened to a couple conference calls.
• 59:57
  SPEAKER_02: I actually joined their um investor day, I think like last year.
• 1:00:02
  SPEAKER_02: And with a lot of serial acquires, they've been pretty exciting.
• 1:00:08
  SPEAKER_02: Um, and I've liked some of the management teams, but I've never gotten over the hump of like, do I like this more?
• 1:00:15
  SPEAKER_00: You know, I see what you're saying.
• 1:00:17
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, I don't think you'll like it more than Topicus or uh constellation software, but might be a third.
• 1:00:24
  SPEAKER_02: The smaller, uh another Canadian one, of course, another smaller acquirer, but not software that has been a monster for me is TerraVest, ticker TBK.
• 1:00:37
  SPEAKER_02: Oh, yeah, I've heard of it.
• 1:00:38
  SPEAKER_02: Uh is it the serial acquirer as well?
• 1:00:41
  SPEAKER_02: They are a serial acquirer of um like natural gas and propane tanks that you might have a facility, um boilers, HVAC units.
• 1:00:54
  SPEAKER_02: So they say their business revolves around steel.
• 1:00:58
  SPEAKER_02: So those types of businesses that are mom and pop, super fragmented in North America, that are manufactured with steel.
• 1:01:05
  SPEAKER_02: Uh so tanks is a big one.
• 1:01:06
  SPEAKER_02: They bought Highland tanks for 110 million last year, um, super creative type stuff.
• 1:01:12
  SPEAKER_02: They just bolted on another one uh two weeks ago here.
• 1:01:15
  SPEAKER_02: So pretty pretty cool what they've done.
• 1:01:18
  SPEAKER_00: Your portfolio must be so boring, all serial acquires.
• 1:01:22
  SPEAKER_02: It is well, I mean, if you I when I look at my portfolio, I actually consider Topkiss and Lumen just CSU family.
• 1:01:32
  SPEAKER_02: So I actually only own two separate theses of serial acquires.
• 1:01:38
  SPEAKER_02: So it's I see what you're saying.
• 1:01:40
  SPEAKER_02: Nothing too crazy, but yeah, technically it would be four of four different positions.
• 1:01:44
  SPEAKER_00: Alright.
• 1:01:45
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 1:01:47
  SPEAKER_00: Um, well, I'll I'll share some of our um Dutch companies after this analysis with you.
• 1:01:53
  SPEAKER_00: Perhaps there's any uh hidden gems for you over there.
• 1:01:56
  SPEAKER_00: Sounds good, man.
• 1:01:58
  SPEAKER_00: Alright.
• 1:01:59
  SPEAKER_00: Uh let's wrap this up.
• 1:02:00
  SPEAKER_00: Uh I think uh you'll have a lot more stuff to do today.
• 1:02:04
  SPEAKER_00: Um since you're quite familiar with um the world of software and SaaS, I'd love to get your take from an investor's perspective, but also as a founder, uh founder's perspective.
• 1:02:18
  SPEAKER_00: Uh, since many of our listeners are always looking for like the next SaaS company, like the Adobe's and uh whatever it may be.
• 1:02:29
  SPEAKER_00: Um Finchet is also a SaaS company.
• 1:02:32
  SPEAKER_00: So, what are some of the key metrics or KPIs you track personally for um SaaS companies?
• 1:02:40
  SPEAKER_00: Which metrics do you think really matter?
• 1:02:43
  SPEAKER_00: Uh, I mean, we know recurring revenue, um, a retention rate, right?
• 1:02:48
  SPEAKER_00: But what are some of the things you look for?
• 1:02:50
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, it those those definitely matter quite a lot.
• 1:02:54
  SPEAKER_02: Like, there's a reason that you draw to those ones right away, like MRR and net retention rates and dollar-based net retention rates.
• 1:03:01
  SPEAKER_02: Those are really important.
• 1:03:02
  SPEAKER_02: But also, like, what drives that number?
• 1:03:06
  SPEAKER_02: So for us, it's like we we orient the whole business around signups.
• 1:03:10
  SPEAKER_02: Like, we want we want so many people using the product for free.
• 1:03:13
  SPEAKER_02: Because you can't, you can use the product for free.
• 1:03:15
  SPEAKER_02: Um, you don't have to be on a paid subscription, and we want to make the free tier even better so we can just kind of grow even faster and faster.
• 1:03:21
  SPEAKER_02: So, our our North Star is like that KPI of signups.
• 1:03:25
  SPEAKER_02: So, if you're looking at what drives that MRR number, you always go a little bit further away from the sun.
• 1:03:31
  SPEAKER_02: For us, it's like signups, conversions, well, this, all this kind of stuff.
• 1:03:35
  SPEAKER_02: Um, B2B customers, that kind of stuff.
• 1:03:38
  SPEAKER_02: But if you're looking at something like Cloudflare, like they disclose how many customers are over 100k of ACB.
• 1:03:44
  SPEAKER_02: So, like how many big enterprises that they're that they're getting.
• 1:03:48
  SPEAKER_02: That's a really interesting number.
• 1:03:50
  SPEAKER_02: If you're looking at this is not software, but it's a recurring revenue business.
• 1:03:54
  SPEAKER_02: If you look at something like a two intuitive surgical, all I care about is that they're successfully installing more robotic surgery systems in hospitals every quarter, a little bit more than they did before.
• 1:04:07
  SPEAKER_02: Um, and that's basically the only KPI I really care about for the business.
• 1:04:11
  SPEAKER_02: Every everything else works if that number works.
• 1:04:13
  SPEAKER_02: You know what I mean?
• 1:04:14
  SPEAKER_02: So, really simplifying things is really key, I think, especially if you're looking at SaaS, because there's a reason that they're beautiful business models, they're fairly easy to understand.
• 1:04:24
  SPEAKER_02: Uh, they can be very, very profitable, they can be a lot of operating leverage if you don't act like a dummy in Zerbera.
• 1:04:30
  SPEAKER_02: And there's usually just one or two numbers that everything else works.
• 1:04:35
  SPEAKER_02: If if that number keeps going up and to the right, everything else works.
• 1:04:40
  SPEAKER_02: So find out what that number is.
• 1:04:42
  SPEAKER_02: And usually it's just one number, right?
• 1:04:45
  SPEAKER_02: Like, that's you know, for Netflix, it's just premium subscriber ads.
• 1:04:50
  SPEAKER_02: I don't care about anything else.
• 1:04:51
  SPEAKER_02: Like, what is it, what what else is there to care about?
• 1:04:54
  SPEAKER_02: Um if it's if it's Cloudflare, maybe it's you know number of a number of customers.
• 1:05:00
  SPEAKER_02: If it's um CrowdStrike, maybe something similar, but then they also will disclose like how many customers are buying other bundles, like how many are they like landing and expanding like in a beachhead strategy?
• 1:05:12
  SPEAKER_02: It's like, okay, you buy this piece first, and then you know what happens when one customer has one module in five years.
• 1:05:21
  SPEAKER_02: What does that cohort look like?
• 1:05:22
  SPEAKER_02: Do they have 20 modules?
• 1:05:24
  SPEAKER_02: Do they have 10 modules?
• 1:05:25
  SPEAKER_02: Do they have 15 modules?
• 1:05:27
  SPEAKER_02: It begins how you can kind of map out what growth will look like.
• 1:05:30
  SPEAKER_00: Beautiful.
• 1:05:31
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, I think uh some great ones you just mentioned.
• 1:05:35
  SPEAKER_00: Before we wrap up this um this conversation, perhaps you could end with um uh with a book you could recommend to us uh to read, uh something that really inspired you or you really liked.
• 1:05:49
  SPEAKER_00: Um and maybe a company unfamiliar to many of us and um is worth taking a look at.
• 1:06:00
  SPEAKER_02: Sure.
• 1:06:00
  SPEAKER_02: Um, whenever I get this book recommend recommendation question, I'll tell you what I always do is just recommend like the lightest book or two that I've read because that's all I can ever think about in my brain.
• 1:06:13
  SPEAKER_02: I'll put you on the spot.
• 1:06:14
  SPEAKER_02: I'm sorry.
• 1:06:14
  SPEAKER_02: No, no, seriously, like I can't remember what book 10 and 11, 12 I was I read before that.
• 1:06:19
  SPEAKER_02: But the two books that I read recently that are both business books that I like quite a lot.
• 1:06:23
  SPEAKER_02: Um I got sitting right beside me here.
• 1:06:26
  SPEAKER_02: Um I'm just making notes on it or whatever.
• 1:06:28
  SPEAKER_02: It's called the The C The Great CEO with Within by Matt Mockery.
• 1:06:32
  SPEAKER_02: I recommend any entrepreneur that reads to Great CEO within at about 15 people.
• 1:06:40
  SPEAKER_02: It's not gonna be super useful before that because he's talking about things about scaling the organization.
• 1:06:45
  SPEAKER_02: So once you get to that scale, it's like Sequoia.
• 1:06:49
  SPEAKER_02: They give all their vet their founders this book, right?
• 1:06:51
  SPEAKER_02: When they invest, they think it's like the most key book for scaling.
• 1:06:55
  SPEAKER_02: And it's short, it's like you know, 150 pages.
• 1:06:59
  SPEAKER_02: Um, and then I just read uh Reed Hastings, the founder of Netflix book called No Rules Rules.
• 1:07:06
  SPEAKER_02: Oh yeah.
• 1:07:07
  SPEAKER_02: It's it's a great one.
• 1:07:08
  SPEAKER_02: You got it back there.
• 1:07:09
  SPEAKER_02: I liked I liked all of um there's a couple key chapters about hiring in there that were instrumental for me, and I read it at the perfect time, just when I needed to read it too.
• 1:07:22
  SPEAKER_02: So um that's a really good one as well.
• 1:07:24
  SPEAKER_00: It's a great one for um understanding culture and why it white matters so much.
• 1:07:29
  SPEAKER_00: Correct.
• 1:07:30
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 1:07:31
  SPEAKER_00: Well, great ones.
• 1:07:32
  SPEAKER_00: Uh and the company?
• 1:07:34
  SPEAKER_02: Uh oh, and the company.
• 1:07:36
  SPEAKER_02: Um something that people might not have heard about.
• 1:07:41
  SPEAKER_02: Um okay, I will bring on a another it's another TSX listed only one.
• 1:07:50
  SPEAKER_02: That's all the ones where I I feel like I have looked at stuff that people don't look at.
• 1:07:53
  SPEAKER_02: So it's TSX listed only, but it's a big company.
• 1:07:58
  SPEAKER_02: It's 30 billion roughly in market cap, but 36 billion in in enterprise value, only traded on the Toronto Stock Exchange under the ticker WSP.
• 1:08:08
  SPEAKER_02: WSP, the company is also named WSP, about as boring as you can possibly get.
• 1:08:16
  SPEAKER_02: I just remembered this is another serial acquirer.
• 1:08:19
  SPEAKER_02: You got me.
• 1:08:21
  SPEAKER_02: I see.
• 1:08:22
  SPEAKER_02: They they operate and tuck in and actually integrate.
• 1:08:27
  SPEAKER_02: So more kind of like a Brad Jacobs roll-up roll-up story.
• 1:08:30
  SPEAKER_02: So um Brad Jacobs, founder of XBO Logistics, he's created like five billion dollar companies at this point.
• 1:08:36
  SPEAKER_02: He's a he's a buy and integrate, whereas Mark Leonard's a buy and let run completely async.
• 1:08:44
  SPEAKER_02: WSP is a buy and integrate business, and what they do is they own, operate, and tuck in engineering firms, primarily services businesses that are doing transit, highways, bridges, ports, urban planning, manufacturing, sorry, uh maritime rail.
• 1:09:09
  SPEAKER_02: So the modern real world, all across the world.
• 1:09:12
  SPEAKER_02: They've acquired, I think, around 120 different engineering firms at this point.
• 1:09:16
  SPEAKER_02: Their backlog's now grown to about 15 billion in backlog of services work.
• 1:09:22
  SPEAKER_02: Services is, you know, pretty high margin, pretty nice businesses, but half the business is government contracts, half the business is published as uh private sector.
• 1:09:31
  SPEAKER_02: So nice kind of 50-50 split run by some smart people out of uh Quebec, Canada.
• 1:09:37
  SPEAKER_02: And um it's been a monster, you know, far, far exceeded my my expectations.
• 1:09:43
  SPEAKER_02: I think the stocks um, you know, let me just go here since IPO is caggered at around 18%.
• 1:09:49
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, I see.
• 1:09:51
  SPEAKER_00: Using FinChat, of course.
• 1:09:53
  SPEAKER_00: Um check it out.
• 1:09:55
  SPEAKER_02: Total return has caggered at 22% since IPO.
• 1:10:00
  SPEAKER_00: Crazy.
• 1:10:01
  SPEAKER_00: It's done that's done exceptional.
• 1:10:04
  SPEAKER_00: Yes.
• 1:10:05
  SPEAKER_02: Wow, pretty under the radar, even from dude.
• 1:10:07
  SPEAKER_02: I I know a lot of Canadian investors here just being in Toronto, and no one talks about this company.
• 1:10:13
  SPEAKER_02: No, no one no one I know talks about this company.
• 1:10:15
  SPEAKER_02: I don't know if I'm not hanging around the right circles, but like everyone knows even the smaller serial choirs.
• 1:10:21
  SPEAKER_02: No one talks about WSP, and there are so many targets when it comes to global engineering firms, like very fragmented.
• 1:10:31
  SPEAKER_02: You know how many firms are like a hundred people?
• 1:10:33
  SPEAKER_02: They've built this amazing business.
• 1:10:35
  SPEAKER_02: The founder wants to retire, it's there's no succession planning for the next generation, and you can buy it at like you know, three, three, four times operating income.
• 1:10:43
  SPEAKER_02: Pretty good.
• 1:10:45
  SPEAKER_00: Well, I'm going to check it out.
• 1:10:47
  SPEAKER_00: I'll put it on my uh watch list.
• 1:10:49
  SPEAKER_00: Um, perhaps it's worth an analysis uh in the future.
• 1:10:53
  SPEAKER_02: It's like Accenture, but for the physical world.
• 1:10:55
  SPEAKER_00: I see.
• 1:10:56
  SPEAKER_00: Well, uh, that's a wrap, Braden.
• 1:10:59
  SPEAKER_00: Thanks again, man, for uh coming on the show, uh sharing your story.
• 1:11:03
  SPEAKER_00: Um, and I would love to talk to you again uh sometime uh if you're ever down to do so.
• 1:11:08
  SPEAKER_02: Uh we can be able to be a little bit less cryptic about the product roadmap.
• 1:11:13
  SPEAKER_02: Usually we're very open about it, but this one is like we really don't want anyone.
• 1:11:17
  SPEAKER_02: Like, we don't want competitors to know about it.
• 1:11:19
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, it's pretty it's pretty crazy what's happening.
• 1:11:22
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, I understand.
• 1:11:24
  SPEAKER_00: Well, we can't wait to see why you take FinChat and to our uh listeners.
• 1:11:28
  SPEAKER_00: Check out Finchat.io.
• 1:11:31
  SPEAKER_00: It's um I'm not sponsored by them.
• 1:11:33
  SPEAKER_00: It's just it's the best website if you ever want to do fundamental research on a company, and uh that's not because Braden is here.
• 1:11:42
  SPEAKER_02: Well, thank you.
• 1:11:43
  SPEAKER_02: I appreciate you saying that.
• 1:11:44
  SPEAKER_02: And uh well, I appreciate you inviting me on the show.
• 1:11:48
  SPEAKER_02: Seriously, it's um it's been a pleasure, and I will be happy to kind of support what you guys are doing content creation-wise.
• 1:11:55
  SPEAKER_02: Thank you for the nice words about FinChat.
• 1:11:57
  SPEAKER_02: We'll continue to make it uh a better experience for you over time and hopefully add some value for your listeners.
• 1:12:03
  SPEAKER_02: Awesome, thank you so much, and uh, we'll see you next time.