Braden Dennis (Fiscal AI CEO/Co-Founder): How One Frustrated Investor Democratized Wall Street's Data, Empowered Investors, and Leveled the Playing Field

So real quick, you shared with me one of the biggest differences between you and a lot of competitors that are trying to take business from the incumbents. You own the data. Explain it to us. Why it's so crucial, so important, and why it gives you a huge advantage? Yeah, I think on the surface that kind of goes overlooked a little bit, unless you're in the weeds or close to us on this stuff. Historically, us included, many have not actually been able to take material market share. And mostly because they are licensing that data and don't own the content. And so if you own the content like we do, like this data layer, like if you pull up all US financial statements, for instance, we're pulling our own API, which many other companies also license from us directly. But we're pulling our own data content that we own. Yes, it's data in the public domain, but we've put together the data set and own all that IP. It allows us to do things that you would not be able to do if you just licensed the content. For example, we used to get so many analysts come to us and go, I love the UI, I love the UX. This is way better faster cheaper. You don't have the ability to audit the number where it came from my compliance team says I need this to subscribe. And I need to, if I'm going to put on my buy side, or I need to put my neck out on this, like I need to be able to click through to the filing. And so before we own our own data content, there's no technology that could solve that problem. There's nothing we could code up to solve that problem. Now that we own the data layer, we have that capability and that just fundamentally changes our business and as well as the experience that the customers now have come to expect that you would never really, really think about unless you're in it on like how IP works and how you license data and the competitive nature. And so in this chapter three that we've talked about that data layer ownership that we have is foundational to our business and what we're doing in the future. And in many cases, like the fact that your data is available so much sooner than anybody else is as far as I know, you know, better than I do. That's because we do it ourselves and we fixed all the problems of the way people used to do it. Nobody has it yet. It's yours. It came through you, which leads me to a second follow up question. And I asked you why is that feasible today? Why now? Why is it possible for you to do it? And you have the answer. Yeah, it's possible now without kind of giving away some some IP that my CTO would kill me for telling people on podcasts. Historically, if this is done manually with people, the example I can give is like you're at an, they say, okay, Joe, you're taking the income statement. This company just supported Sally's taking the cash flow. I got the balance sheet like let's divide and conquer and push this out. And we got, by the way, we have 200 other companies that just reported it's a earning season. Right. You can kind of see how that leads to slowness, inaccuracies, short cuts being made, especially with some of the smaller companies. That leads to all that now, what if with AI, I have a reasoning layer on what we're doing when we're extracting the data and properly doing the standardizations into the different industry templates. Those things were not really possible 10 years ago, for example, or even just a few years ago. And so there was no business being created with the pitch, the seed, seed round pitch going. All right. I'm going to disrupt one of these companies. I just need a billion dollars so I can hire 10,000 people, right? That's not getting funded. And that's why the data modes were so strong. That is just fundamentally changing now with technology. So I don't know how to predict the future to do well. But I do know for some scenarios that that area of work is just no longer going to exist. Those two are really powerful. The fact that you own the data, you're not licensing it. And then AI, new tools became available for you to take this massive leap. I'm thinking of an old school investment firm where indeed one person was taking an income statement, one person was taking the cash flow statement, the balance sheet. And everybody was digging in and trying to put it in a spreadsheet and work their way through it. It doesn't have to be done this way. We'll save it for another conversation. But I think the world of investing is changing at the fastest pace that I've ever seen. Not the core principles, but how we get there and how far we can be about research. Those of us that know what kind of questions to ask and those of us that want to do the work. Welcome to Talking Billions. We talk about big ideas, big inspirations, big topics. We take on the hardest topic of all money, how to make it, save it, keep it. But our conversations lead us to an even bigger question, what it means to live a rich life beyond money. My guests share their practices, principles, and evergreen wisdom. I'm your host, Bogumel Baranowski, author, TEDx Speaker, and investment advisor to wealth creators with patient capital and an infinite investment horizon. I work with families and individuals who aspire to grow wealth over lifetime and generations through disciplined, thoughtful investments in durable quality businesses, while giving money, meaning. Join me on this quest to unearth and share the wisdom of the ages. Let me share with you the podcast program to disclosure statement. Blue Infinite Ascapital LSC is a registered investment advisor and the opinions expressed by the firm's employees and podcast guests on this show are their own and do not reflect the opinions of Blue Infinite Ascapital. All the statements and opinions expressed are based upon information considered reliable, although it should not be relied upon as such. Any statements or opinions are subject to change without notice. The information presented is for educational purposes only and does not intend to make an offer or solicitation for the sale or purchase of any specific securities, investments, or investment strategies. Investments involve risk and unless otherwise stated are not guaranteed. The information expressed does not take into account your specific situation or objectives and is not intended as recommendations appropriate for any individual. Listeners are encouraged to seek advice from a qualified tax, legal, or investment advisor to determine whether any information presented may be suitable for their specific situation. Pass performance is not indicative of future performance. None of what you are about to hear is investment advice. My guest today is Braden Dennis. He's the founder and CEO of Fiscal AI, an AI-powered financial research platform that's democratizing institutional great data and analytics for investors worldwide, having scaled from a site project to a venture-backed company, serving over 150,000 users and competing directly with giants like Bloomberg and Faxit. Braden, how are you? So nice to see you. I am great and it is great to see you as well. Well, you know very well that I love your tool. I've been using it for a while. You and I connect it and you guys became a sponsor of the show, which I'm grateful for. And I love the alignment that people have been asking me for a long time. What do you use? And now I can openly say that's what I use. That's what I love. I wish you guys were there 20 years ago when I started in the business. Does he only think I want to say? He is. We'll dive right into it. When I was making notes ahead of this call, I was thinking of Ben Graham, the father of value investing. He participated in 1955 in a Senate hearing and he was asked about how does it really work the market itself, you know the prices, the values. And he told about the story of the market mystery that's resolved eventually by value recognition. And what you do, what you provide, you give a tool to more very intelligent people out there to do their thinking, to do their analysis for that to happen. What Ben Graham described for the value to be recognized. I'll leave it at that. We'll come back to it. But I just wanted to include it. The more people are capable, knowledgeable and have the right tools. I think the markets can work just a lot better. I want to start with the early days. Childhood upbringing, take me back. What was it like? How do you think that that time shapes you? Yeah, I grew up in a pretty middle class upbringing in outside of Toronto, Ontario, Canada, pretty normal kid playing sports, playing too many video games, you know, the classic. And I'm 30 now. And I just knew as a kid, very from very young age that I was a math kid. Like, yeah, I was, you know, decently athletic and enjoyed sports. But I really knew that it was mostly math that I was, I was good at. And so I kind of just carried that through to an engineering degree, knowing that that would serve probably a career with the most optionality, I would say. You can kind of do anything when you have some of those core skills, many of them go work in finance, some of them stay in engineering, like, let's go on, you have a lot of optionality. But I would say how I got into investing in my upbringing was. I have a really good job. really big family. And I noticed the people in my family, extended family that were doing the best were not the ones that made the most money. And I noticed that at a young age, and that really shaped me to really understand money like personal finance, but then also how to grow it as well too. And the folks that were aggressively, you know, investing were reaping the rewards and acquiring assets. I think that that's so important now. And it is a big part of my mission outside of, you know, the tool is, how do we get people my age younger, older understanding that you can benefit from this system. Much, much better if you own assets. And nowadays, the barrier to entry to owning assets and participating in capitalism is easier than ever. And I think it's really, really important that people understand that that's really important. And you feel like the system's cheating you if you don't own assets. I get it. And so it's like, how do we get more people to participate in that system? Because capitalism is not a zero sum game. It's not because I made money and because I invested, that means I inherently stole it or took it from someone else that that is not how the economy works. And that is not how value creation works. That's not how entrepreneurship and creating jobs work. So about this long-winded answer, but that's that's kind of shaped how I view the world and a big driver of why I wanted to build the tool in the first place. Now, I love the sound of that. I have so many thoughts real quick, math kit. I loved math as a kid because I felt that it's, it's just fair. If the answer is four, and I'll get to the answer, no matter my age or, you know, however, I'm perceived by a teacher, anything else doesn't matter. The answer is four. I got it right. I got an A, the other subjects as much as I enjoyed them, I could never predict the grade. I couldn't. You know, I wrote a beautiful essay that I was in love with. And I thought it was the best essay I ever wrote. And I got to be minus. I never knew why be minus. So anyways, I can relate to that. The feedback loop is not nearly, yeah, I know it makes sense as a as a as a young kid, the feedback loop on something that is numerically correct versus abstract opinion has completely different incentives on how you want to study or better understand the rules of the game. The market offers an incredible feedback loop and we'll come back to it. But I wanted to mention something that you highlighted that sense of becoming an owner. And when I picked up my first book about investing, Peter then went up on Wall Street. There was a lot in that book. But one thing that really hit me in the face was that I can become an owner of a business. A couple of shares with very little money. And I'll be on the same boat as the people that founded this business as the largest shareholders. And it just hit me and they never left me. I get this question a lot. And I'm hosting those office hours on talking billions or people sending questions. And they ask me, what's a good time to invest? Is this a good time? Is this a bad time? Because of this headline or that headline. And I tell them what you just said, if I'm hearing you correctly, investing or ownership of assets, it's a lifelong pursuit. It really pays. You get the intellectual satisfaction that I do. You get financially compensated for it, even if you just do it with your own money. And then you're a part of something. You're part of, you know, building the world into a better place, serving more people with better services and goods. And you play a small role in it with a handful of shares. I want to ask you about this moment of frustration. Not many people say, I will quit my job and build a tool. But you did that. You, you found something that stood in the way and you thought, here I go, I'm going to fix it. Tell me about that. What was the moment like you took the leap in? Here we are. Well, you know, I hummed and haught on the leap for what felt like quite a while. And it's all I could think about. It's all that was in on my mind in the shower, walking to work, downtime sitting on the public transit. Like that, that's all I could really think about was not if, but when? And I had gotten it to a point, if we're being totally honest about history here, as I had kind of already gotten to it, to a point on weekends and evenings where I wasn't having to take a completely leap into the unknown, I had already kind of built something on the side. And I think that that's a great way for anyone who wants to get into entrepreneurship to do so, because you learn a lot of the skills without having to take the risk. But it's a lot of time. It's a lot of things that like a lot of people just won't do. And I think that that's actually a really key part about entrepreneurship is you always think, aw, someone's going to have that idea. Or I'm going to be competing with all these smart people. The reality is, like, there's just not that many people willing to do the work on some of this stuff. Right. And so if you are you're already kind of filtered out, you know, you're a podcaster. I've started a podcast long ago about finance and stocks and investing, like 10-ish years ago now. And it's taken many different shapes and forms. But when people say, oh, aren't there so many podcasts? Like why do a podcast is already so many podcasts? I say one, it is a tiny fraction of active shows compared to active YouTube channels, one, two, most podcasts, if we go to the stat is now, but like back in 2019, 95% of podcasts did not hit episode 21. So that means you're in the top 5% if you just get to episode 21, right? And so that's that's a really, I like that stuff because it helps you think about, like removing all the fear and just doing it. It's like the Mr. Beast philosophy. Mr. Beast, please tell me how to make the best YouTube video. He goes, I will give you free consulting and help you make videos after you've made 100. No one comes back to him because after they've done 100, they've already learned everything they need to know and they don't need him anymore. And so taking the leap is obviously important, but at the same time, you can kind of start to work on some of the problems before having to take massive risks in your own personal life. You have to keep showing up and you have to keep showing up on days when you just don't feel like it and we're human. There will be a day we don't feel like it. But things are scheduled yesterday. I didn't feel like it. I'll tell you that. Like it happens, right? Like it's all the time. But if you show up just the action, just the fact that you show up for me at least the enthusiasm comes back and I can feel it. And even before we start recording, I feel like a kid in a candy store being able to talk to you about Fiscalen. I've used so many tools and I'll ask you more about it. But you created something special. It didn't happen all at once. And I kind of want to set the stage for the audience and we'll talk more about the features and everything else. But three distinct errors for a product. Tell me about that. I think it will get us a better idea of where you came from, where you headed. Yeah, there's three distinct errors in the company and the product. And we're in chapter three right now. And I like chapter three. It's an area we can really build a big business in is this era. The first one was, can I build Yahoo Finance on steroids? Non-adrital experience, good data, not being limited, not feeling so retail, but still so accessible. And so that was kind of the goal building Yahoo Finance on steroids. The second one was like that. Chat GBT LLM API came out and we're like, oh, let's hook this up into an AI product. And that went viral overnight. It went crazy. Everyone's like, oh my god, look what these guys built. We got like 60,000 people sign up in the first 48 hours. I got venture investors calling on my door saying like, what are you? We're going to take this thing to the moon. Like, you know, it was, it was really really a hot time because we're not only the first application of that technology in finance, but we are also one of the first applications of that technology period like in any vertical. And so that is when the company was called Dinschat. That's chapter two. Chapter two, we found that a lot of the core problems in this market were actually not necessarily on the way to manipulate data, retrieve synthesize summaries and all that stuff. And we saw that that was probably going to commoditize to zero as the LLMS became better and bigger and cheaper and faster. And so what we started to kind of do behind the scenes is rebuild the airplane engine as it was flying in terms of our entire data infrastructure. And then it hit us. Oh man, these five big multi-billion dollar incumbents are the arms dealer in this industry. With massive, massive work forces that file Amazon 10k comes in. All right data factory like let's start parsing through this and you know put all these data points together delivered in the data feed on the terminal all this stuff. And by the way we were consumers of it too as well through their data feed. So we just realized that they're kind of the arms dealers and taking most of the unit economics of the entire industry. Financial data is a $46 billion a year business. So we said, huh, can we do this better faster cheaper with technology on the data layer side? Yeah. So we basically said this thing that's working, this AI chat experience that's working and customers are in the contract ready to sign up and we canceled all of it. We had like contracts that we're like about to sign that we're going to take the business to multi-millions of ARR from like say one million. And we said no to all of it in like just in a long term vision of there's a much bigger prize of solving the data layer here. And so we've gone aggressive into into that and that brings us into chapter three which is basically like, can I build AI native faxat? Better faster cheaper across the board. And the answer is proving out to be yes. So real quick, you shared with me one of the biggest differences between you and a lot of competitors that are trying to take business from the incumbents, you own the data. Explain it to us. Why it's so crucial, so important and why it gives you a huge advantage. Yeah, I think on the surface that kind of goes overlooked a little bit unless where you're in the weeds are close to us on this stuff. But historically us included many of the what I'll call air quotes right now for people who listening, I am doing air quotes, Bloomberg killer products have not actually been able to take material market share away or compete with the faxats of the world. And so if you own the content like we do like this data layer, we like if you pull up all US financials for statements, for instance, we're pulling our own API, which many other companies also license from us directly. This is way better, faster cheaper than fax it. But you don't have the ability to audit the number where it came from my compliance team says I need this to subscribe. And I need to, if I'm going to put on my buy side or I need to put my neck out on this, I need to be able to click through to the filing. Now that we own the data layer, we have that capability. And that just fundamentally changes our business. And as well as the experience that the customers now have come to expect that you would never really, really think about unless you're in it on like how IP works and how you license data and the competitive nature and the, you know, insesuous nature of what we do here versus working with the incumbents and trying to displace them at the same time as a very difficult task. And so in this chapter three that we've talked about, that data layer ownership that we have is foundational to our business and what we're doing in the future. And in many cases, like the fact that your data is available so much sooner than anybody else is as far as I know, you know better than I do. Just because we do it ourselves and we fixed all the problems of the way people used to do it. Yeah. Nobody has it yet. It's yours. Why now? Yeah. It's possible now without kind of giving away some, some IP that my CTO would kill me. For telling people on podcasts. But historically, if this is done manually with people, the example I can give is like you're out of your work at FACSET and they say, okay, Joe, you're taking the income statement. I got the balance sheet. Like let's divide and conquer and push this out. And we got, by the way, we have 200 other companies that just reported it. That's the earning season, right? You can kind of see how that leads to slowness inaccuracies, short cuts being made, especially with some of the smaller companies. That leads to all that. Now what if with AI, I have a reasoning layer on what we're doing when we're extracting the data and properly doing the standardizations into the different industry templates. And so there was no business being created with the pitch, the seed, seed round pitch going, all right, I'm going to disrupt one of these companies. That's not getting funded and that's why the data modes were so strong. So I don't know how to predict the future too-too-well, but I do know for some scenarios that that area of work is just no longer going to exist. And that AI new tools became available for you to take this massive leap. I'm thinking of an old school investment firm where, indeed, one person was taking an income statement, one person was taking the cash flow statement, the balance sheet. We'll save it for another conversation, but I think the world of investing is changing at the fastest pace that I've ever seen. Those of us that know what kind of questions to ask and those of us that want to do the work, I'll leave it at that. The way I look at it, people say the information is public. And I saw those numbers, 96 terabytes of data stored, 2.4 million SEC filings. The numbers, and I don't know if it's the whole thing or it's been processed, whatever the numbers are, they're just staggering. So a human being cannot process it, just cannot. And when I look at your product, I'm thinking that you allow us to have access to the information, see what really matters and interpret and analyze it. Talk to me about that. You take all that data. What is it that you do differently? Because there's a lot. And on calls with you before, you guys show me things. I know you do things differently than anybody else that I've experienced before. You make it better, easier and more accessible. Yeah. Well, I'll tell you a kind of a key example. It's tangible for a lot of our clients and people who are in the investment universe or even other fintechs that want to consume our content and use it on their platforms. They hear the Robin Hood of Country X1 and Z. So those end users as well. Typically with a data provider, you're waiting, let's say, on average two days, sometimes longer for small caps for the data to be cleaned, standardized, consolidated, and then, like, through all the QA processes out the door into all the places that people consume it. Those three key areas people consume it are on a terminal in an Excel add-in type product or on a. data feed API. And we play in those areas. But why should I wait two days for public information that the market has already gotten for this to be available, especially if I'm doing this in my daily workflow as a professional analyst. And so for example, in that case, what takes them two days, we do in two minutes. So that one Amazon does report their numbers at the close today. They're not actually reporting today, but hypothetical that you're going to get it at, you know, 402 PM, not four O's 2 PM in three days from now, right? And so that's kind of a key differentiation in terms of the actual infrastructure of this data that is yes in the public domain, but how you actually bake the cookie matters in terms of how it tastes. And so that's really how, where the differences lies, really in that infrastructure layer. If anything, I imagine there will be even more information, more public disclosure, more documents coming in the future. And if anything, I noticed that there are fewer people in the industry, but also, you know, maybe privately investing that are capable of processing the data just with what we have between our ears. We need help and we need tools and we need that superpower. What you offer is so much better than anything I've seen even on a professional level, you know, 10 or 20 years ago. And the coolest thing is that you make it available not just to professionals, but to everyday investors. And I want to highlight that because a lot of my investors are people that invest quite a bit of their own money with some guidance or no guidance, but you will be amazed at quality of research they do for their own benefit with tools like yours. It's just mind blowing because it makes me think again of Ben Graham and improving that value price discovery of the market. I want to ask you about AI. You kind of have a different approach than maybe some people thought that we will have towards AI. AI is helping you do some of the things you just mentioned, but you do it in a way that maybe you run less of a risk or maybe no risk, no immediate, no immediate risk of commoditizing what you offer. Can you talk about how AI is helping you do a better job? Yeah, well, you know, I think broadly, I like the Navalq, which is paperwork isn't work, leaving for the robots. Yeah. We're in this, we're in this phase right now where it is now consensus that a lot of busy work in terms of like including the paperwork type of work is going to get automated. And so that's now consensus in the economy and people are definitely talking a lot about that happening. And you know, I believe that it's going to happen, but it's also a good thing. It's also a good thing. But it always feels bad in the short term with any sort of major technological revolution. You know, there's been nine since the 1800s. There's been lots of good write-ups on all what those are. And you know, the major step changes, you know, internet being a big one rail being a bit with the railroads being a big one back in the day. You know, manufacturing being a big one. So AI is this next big one that changes how people work. And it's largely a good thing even though there'll be a change in the way and the things that people do because all the data that we bring in that you've seen on our product, historically, this has been aggregated manually. That is not the kind of work that I envision humans using our creative brains to do. And so it's coming. We all know that it's coming and we know that all this stuff is going to get whether you agree with me or not on like, you know, how humans should work, it's coming. And we and that is very much so consensus that this stuff will all be automated. And so we've really leaned into that in terms of in our industry. Can we serve investors better with technology in terms of these data pipelines? And you know, we think yes. And a lot of people think yes. But there's still the huge value of decision making. And the investment management industry hasn't changed that much in terms of managing capital since this technology has come out because we know that letting GPT manage your portfolio hasn't really been linked to good returns. And active trading doesn't necessarily lead to great returns. And so that comes back to the human element of owning great businesses will give you the tools to be able to analyze what those are and hold them for a long time and participate in those assets compounding. That's the goal, man. So if we can help as many people think rationally about the fundamentals of a company as they hold them or prospective investments that they want to buy, that's exactly what we want to do. We don't provide any sort of scoring. We've steered clear of all of those features that our customers have asked us for, by the way. It's so important to listen to users. It's also so important to know when to ignore their recommendations. Because I don't want to build a scoring system that tells you if a stock is good or bad or valued undervalued, I'm just here to present you all the information that you want because humans are really good at synthesizing that and making good decisions. You know what I highlighted here in my notes that the technology doesn't allow you to outsource judgment and a lot to it in a second, right? Because it's not a place whether your platform or any other where you go in and it tells you exactly what to buy. I hope the audience knows that's not what we're talking about. You know as your own analyst portfolio manager, your private investor, you know what you're looking for. And this platform allows you to get there sooner or better in a more thorough way, however you want to describe it. I almost see it as a zoom out zoom in. You know, using your platform, I look at it, I look at 20 years of financials and I see there's something funny happening in the last two, three years. I can zoom in, pick up a transcript and even listen to the audio and find a fine little remark that's making the margins go somewhere else or a comment or something. So I can zoom out to see what I'm looking for and zoom in to get all the way to the last document I want to look at and see. They said something at a conference. When did they say it? I find a document on fiscal and I go in deep. At the end of the day, I have been doing it for 20 years, managing money for people, almost the family, long-term patient capital. And I realized that there's no shortage of great ideas. I've met a lot of very capable investors that had great ideas. There's a shortage of the ability to hold them long enough and it's not just patience. It's the conviction. And I think having the thorough research and access and KPIs and we'll talk more about it in a second that your platform offers in moments of hesitation. I can get the ounce, additional ounce of conviction that allows me to hold on to the shares. And I can't quantify the impact, but I know that they impact this very significant. Tell me about how you get the data we were talking about. You get it sooner. You analyze it sooner. You make it cleaner sooner. You develop your own custom KPIs, segment analysis. Tell us more about it and we'll show what it looks like in a few minutes. But tell us more about what you develop to allow the users to interact with the data in a more thoughtful way. The company specific KPIs has become a little bit synonymous with what we do and a differentiation factor because we've been doing it since day one, even in chapter one of the story. And the reason is because when we're building, let's say Yahoo Finance on steroids, I thought it was crazy that I would go on to let's say sub stack article. If someone writing some really, really thoughtful investment research, they could be just an individual at home or it's like an anonymous hedge fund analyst that is just writing on sub stack. Who knows? But it's thoughtful, thoughtful research. And what I would see is I would see screenshots of the typical financials. And then I would notice that they would usually in Excel manually be pulling some of these KPIs because no one had kind of done it for them. And so I noticed that and I thought it was just crazy that the core fundamentals of the company were not accurately being tracked anywhere for people to get up to speed on something. And I'll give you an example. I invest, I said to myself, Uber is a Zerp phenomenon, venture back subsidized, terrible unit economics business. I said to myself when it was public for about two years. And then I was looking at the KPIs on fiscal about, call it, she's years have been a shareholder. And the total trips were skyrocketing. Like total trips on the platform quarter after quarter that were happening while take rates were being flexed. So take rates doubled while the trips tripled. That's a rare kind of KPI you see from a business to be able to double their pricing power and usage triple. That's not there's something there right and then I'm like oh wow this company is actually about to get really profitable. And so this was right before now everyone knows this is a very profitable company. But back then the consensus on this treat was that Uber's never going to make a dollar. That's not that long ago by the way this is just a handful of years ago. And so that was an example where the data is really simple for anyone to understand. You don't have to be an investment analyst to kind of look at like really understand those core business metrics. And it helps you hold on to the story too I think is really important too because if I think you know that's a key metric and if they get disrupted by some autonomous vehicle threat. I'm going to see it there. That's where you're really going to see things get dicey or even worse they stop reporting or stop disclosing the number. We flag right on the platform that they've discontinued that number. So if that were to happen I would be very much so looking for the exit before every other people are right. If they are not disclosing that metric. So these are just kind of examples of you don't have to be a genius you don't have to be dumpster diving into balance sheets and you know look at the stress special situations to just understand some of these really core business metrics. So many thoughts come to mind. I mean first of all any stock we mentioned here no recommendation to your own research but it's an incredible case study that you just presented and I love the fact that in the headline numbers whether it was revenue or whatever margins you might not see the whole story and especially you're not seeing what I mentioned earlier. Something is changing something is turning for better or for worse. You know when I would have interns I would they would tell me this is good this is bad and I would say well look in a more dynamic way what's getting better what's getting worse because that's that's the interesting thing how much worse can it get how much better could it get and it puts you in a whole different mindset and the KPIs you talk about and we'll show in a minute I think open our eyes give us the power to see beyond the headline I want to ask you about the users I'm a professional I manage money for people and I've met a lot of well you would call them retail investors but they're very very capable individuals a lot of them listening to this show tell me is there a difference in how people interact with your platform I know there's so many different ways that you can do it but how do you see it from your experience I know you have calls with people you ask them questions you're really watching how they interact with it. Yeah in terms of like the different cohorts and folks that use it since the platform is so fundamental focused and is completely useless if you're looking to draw some technical analysis on a chart and make some sort of prediction on price movement like a lot of those tools will provide users or I think how many retail investors have been disillusioned into thinking that a lot of that stuff that I call it astrology more than more than investing to be honest but we don't provide any of that so the folks that are coming whether they are a sophisticated professional investor managing billions of dollars work on a team by themselves whatever maybe and an individual who's managing their own portfolio they're looking at the same things they want to deeply understand the dynamics of the businesses that they're investing in or thinking about investing in and so it's pretty awesome that I can have a product that is the exact same build for people who are like worlds apart in terms of what they use it for because at the end of the day they're trying to achieve the same thing and the use case is identical and so I say to people we have lots of different ways to interact with our company and lots of different ways of ingesting the information but at its core we are a financial data and financial information business if you want to whip that into Excel no problem you want to use that on our terminal and so you can get nice graphs do it awesome you want to pull it into a data feed dump and get like our database on tap to do whatever you want with it perfect and so there's a lot of different ways that us as a business can kind of position the company to monetize that and build something heavy and sustainable but at the end of the day it's the same product just with a lot of different ways you can kind of slice and dice it. This is incredible and I think it's okay if I share for the benefit of the audience you and I spoke on a few times and you were kind to invite me to a small group calls with power users and I have to tell you that you are incredibly receptive to in terms of feedback what people share with you and what you do with it and how you interact with it I have used software for many years and I have to tell you that a lot of companies are not as open to changing how things are done this is the way it works use it you actually take feedback in an incredible way all the way to like the smallest grain of how the software works how something pops up on the chart and and I think it's incredible because it allows you to stay in motion and improve I want to highlight one more thing that I want to forget about you know time is precious and as a stock analyst business you know stock owner however you want to define us here you have to choose your battles and I'll mention that you know when I started in this business I was the one bringing all the software to the firmware I was and people are not very open to it at times and I was even told what can you do with this that you that I could do when I was your age with a legal pad and I said nothing but I can do it with a fraction of the time the tools that you offer now can I can do with a fraction of the time what I was doing with software 20 years ago the software that was available anyways I have a lot of respect for the innovation that came since and I'm super excited about what's next I want to ask you once kind of a self-reflection question before we jump in and show the platform once you use certain tools it has the experience has an impact on how you operate as an investor you are an investor how do you think that using fiscal on your own for your own benefit has changed how you interact with no data information maybe even change what kind of an investor you are I will say that you know it has forced me running this business to turn over a lot of stones that I wouldn't have normally turned over and be open to new ideas but you know what it's also done is it's also simplified my process a lot in terms of there's just a few key things that I really really want to track and focus and we've made features that people have that similar approach where they say okay these are the eight things I care for every company I want to create that as a template as a starting point for each each name and and I'm the same way because you can you can kind of drown in all day I love that I have the ability to pull all the data but in that Uber example I also want to just pull up a view and be narrowly focused on what I think matters so it's forced me a lot as an investor to really isolate what I think is important and what I should track and block out a lot of noise that you'll see in headlines like for instance I have been a long-term shareholder of visa and mastercard I've owned them both for a long time I think they're probably two of the most brilliant businesses ever created of course this is investment vice I've been a shareholder a long time just recently there had a lot of negative news about a potential recap on interest rates massively hurt the banks that administer those cars and would hurt the end consumers that can't get that information and so you see a lot of price action in Mr. Market all the time and a lot of headlines especially in today's market and so for me to really zoom out and go look I am tracking total transaction volume at the 27 I think combined 30 trillion scale across those two companies I have a dashboard where it's payments which stacks up total transaction volume for visa mx and mastercard and I really track that as my dashboard on the on the industry as well as like total cards in force across those three companies and if that is playing out those margins and pay a reasonable price which I think they are I think it's going to work out right like I think that that long term is going to really work out just because of how great these businesses are from a unit economic perspective. So there's going to be noise, there's going to be volatility, there's going to be headlines, there's going to be all this stuff that happens. And if anything is threatening those two metrics for these three companies, then I'll pay attention, right? Something structurally that's going to change the game for those businesses. But until then, I'm just, I'm holding them for, you know, decades potentially, right? So I think, Dancer question is, is finding the simplicity in the data as well too, is really what makes you a long-term patient investor? No, I love that. I'm being able to see those numbers, whatever numbers you're paying attention to for a particular business in an easy, accessible way over a long period of time and not within, you know, and we're tracking, we're all tracking the score every quarter, right? So it's just the, the right amount of frequency to stay on top of the story every three months without being spoon-fed at every single day so that you have decision paralysis. So I think it's a beautiful system. Let's see it. How about you? Share the screen and show us how it looks and how you interact with it. I think this audience would love to see it. And for those of us listening only, let's be as descriptive as we can with what we're doing. So people can go home and check it out once they safely get home. Absolutely. So I'll pull it up here and yeah, for those listening and on audio only, I'll be as descriptive as I can and you have this video posted on YouTube and Spotify and stuff as well, right? Hey, we'll be everywhere. A lot of listeners, but a lot of people that listen and then watch. Yeah, wherever you guys are consuming, yeah, whatever you find a moment to be with us today. So I will say to these people's minds on the top right of the platform once you're signed in. We have a help center, but we also have specific feature demos for the demo that for the feature that you are on specifically that'll come up as well as like at any time you can look at a full demo of every single thing inside the platform, but the key thing that I really wanted portray today outside of portfolio management and dashboard and tracking of positions that you own is really looking in a specific business. I was just talking about visa. So let's use that on this overview page. You're going to get all the kind of top level ratios and metrics descriptions of the businesses, what's happening from a news perspective on a trailing month basis and kind of a bullseye bear say overview. So this kind of a really nice speed to place to just get up to speed on what's happening. The second tab is the financials tab and this is the guts of where most time is spent on the platform to pull up all three statements, all the ratios, all the KPIs, the adjusted metrics, any custom metrics that you want to build as well as forward estimates for the last 20 years. I can also bring that out that data out quarterly. The reason people like it and the reason you see it on so many places like Twitter and Substack is because of how visual it is. If I click on a number inside of here, boom, it builds you the exact data visualization. So here's total top line revenue quarterly for visa over time. Let's overlay that with deluded EPS for example. So you can see kind of a long term trajectory of the company. And if I even do that annually, you can see I have estimates for that's why this orange line wasn't there. But now on all historicals, you get a really nice view of this data over time. Now I want to pull up the segments in the KPIs because we talked about it a lot. We're going to give you each revenue segment by geography, by line item as well as I was talking about total transaction volume. So this is that business that rolls up on these two line items. Get your total transaction volume. So get a sense of the scale of some of these companies that are outside of a traditional financial statement. 16.7 trillion dollars of transaction volume just really gives you a sense of scale. And now I say, okay, this is what the business is reporting as a core KPI. How has that related now to revenue? For example, and let's toggle it on a separate access so I can see them side by side. Starts sees things that really matter inside of the company, right? So I'll pause there if you have any thoughts or ideas here. To me, there are a couple of things that are very powerful. One, the minute you show up on fiscal, you can see a lot of the numbers, the charts, the information, kind of a quick start on a company you own, on a company you just heard about, you know, nothing about it's just one place, one stop. Leave me here for a few minutes and I'll know something about the business, right? For me, that's the first experience. Second layer that you just described and the listeners that are not watching can see it at home. You get all the financials for many, many years, 20 years, you said, and then quarterly. So you can look up. And on top of it, I think the way our minds work and you and I love numbers, to put those numbers into a chart and actually see what's happening, especially the relationships, correlations that you showed, are really speak volumes and you can see that something is happening, whether it's like that particular KPI or the revenue or the margins, there's a story there, right? There's a dip, there's a quick recovery, there's a story. And it allows you to zoom in and see what's going on. Yeah, I just pulled up as you're saying that like some of the kind of travel names, whether it's like a cruise line or I just pulled up Southwest, the airline. It's kind of, it's interesting visually you pull up Airbnb, look at bookings or something. It's interesting to really, like it's one thing to know, okay, there was a huge dip in 2020 and then the recovery started. It's one thing to see it in a table, but then also to visualize the level it drops and then the level it quickly recovers and builds off that base. I'm, that's how I really recognize things and remember data points is visually. Walk us through the tabs that are available. What else people can find here? I love the part that you're just opening up, the transcripts from both conferences, earnings and anything else and you can listen to it, which by the way, I think it's a secret weapon for anybody listening. The way to words can be written and actually pronounced and said with a human voice, the voice itself tells a story, but I'll let you walk us through it. I'll add them in a minute, what my thoughts about it. Yeah, this tab, which we broadly call investor relations, which has a very similar look as filings is an important place to just kind of understand what we call all the unstructured content. That's a fancy word for saying everything that you'd find on a PDF or written transcribed from a transcript of their earnings call into one kind of nice PDF viewer, but on the right we also have a panel to do some kind of generic AI one shot summaries on, but also custom summaries. So if I'm looking at Southwest here and I want to write a custom prompt specific to that piece of content, this is really handy because I know that traditionally a lot of investment analysts have gone, okay, I found the transcript or I found the reporter, I found the slide deck, I'm going to download this and now bring this into some sort of LLM and that process is fine, but how about if I just have them side by side and I can query exactly this piece of content? Let's go into save you a ton of time and be specific about what we're looking at. I don't want to reach in the mind of the entire LLM, I want to reach into the mind of the LLM extraction of this, the specific document. And so I think that this is quite powerful. But there's one thing that I forgot to mention that we just recently brought into the financials. So for those who are listening or professional analysts, we'll know what I'm talking about. So I'll go back to visa. Every single number we trace back in the cell to where it came from in the filing and this isn't just for US companies, we have it all for Canada, UK and Europe too. And so this is really powerful where you're going to be able to see where the number came from. There's no such thing as a perfect data set in the world, but we're asymptotically have the kind of the most institutional one now. And trust is built over me showing you instead of me telling you. And so linking each filing and number from exactly where it came from is a huge step in terms of us kind of building up kind of professional workflow here as well too. This is so so important. And I'm thinking of working with a junior analyst and the junior analyst brings you the number. And part of you says, this looks off. Do you mind showing me the filing? How is it actually? And here you can click without a trip to the other office and find this. You can just click through it and see. Something funny is happening. It looks like the dead doubled or whatever it is. And you can look up the filing and see, "Ah, that's what happened." And then you can interpret. But the keyword here is "trusts." We want to trust the numbers. And the more tools we use, the more meat might feel removed from the original source. You take that distance away by us being able to click through and see exactly what the page looks like in the filing. Do your own reading, do your own research, and then decide, "You know, this number actually makes sense. I know why it doubled." And here you go. Yeah. And here's an example on Visa. So the September 25 quarter, the number, it almost looks fake. It is 40 billion. No. Like on the dot. It is not 40 billion, 362. It is 4,000. And you look at that number and it just looks fishy, right? The human brain's like, "Ah, this must be rounded or something." No, and you get the actual 10Q. And here it is. 40 billion as net revenue 4,000. So that's that kind of building trust element to what we're doing. Because you see this number and you're like, "Something looks funny with this, right?" And so that's another. Yeah, it's super rare. This is like a complete coincidence. So we have kind of lots in here that you can work through. But I think this is a really good start of what we're about, how we get the data, how it can be visualized, and kind of what we're working towards in the future. I mean, I don't know how long you've been using the platform, but I'm sure you probably notice every single week that this version in the top left changes. So we post in the top left, you can actually click on this button and see everything that we've pushed through. So we just pushed in last week all of these new changes. Right? And so. Real quick, before we move on to the next part, a couple of. There are many different tabs for people to go through. You have research estimates, new, so-onorship, industry, dividends. You can find a lot more and then you have the filings and the investor relations part. People can screen for stocks. People can narrow down their universe that they want to look at. So a couple of words about that, how powerful that is, that you have numbers that you trust, and then you can audit on your own. And based on those numbers, you can narrow down your universe to a list that you can manage, that you can actually look at if that's how you operate. I love stock screeners. I always have, even well before I built this, not because, "Oh, here's a list of things that I should invest in." But here's a list of things that I know I might be interested in. And it's really helpful to filter not what's in the screen, but filter out was maybe not a good use of my time. For example, just my investing style and the way that I like to own businesses and be in them for a long time is somewhere kind of in that growth that a reasonable price type area. So if the company has a steady history of growing that top line revenue, I'm very, very unlikely, and this is some special situation or a spin out situation, going to be a long-term shareholder of the company. And so I can just filter all that out, right? Or I don't really like, personally, I don't like junior mining. I think it's just so boom-boss, it's hard to make money, it kind of feels more like a lottery ticket unless you're in the industry. I want to exclude those industries, so I can do that with this button, so I can go in here and exclude metals and mining and now rerun the screener. So it's such a powerful tool to not just, oh, here's a bunch of stuff that could be in the strike zone, but not, but also just remove everything that you know is not going to fit your style and criteria. It's super helpful. And the more you interact with the numbers, the way it kind of your screening, my screening has improved because of this level of depth and thorough interaction with the numbers. It makes the screening experience so much better than very simple screens that maybe some of us grew up with and fine-tune it to the point where you have a really promising list of companies to look at and a fresh list every time and spend more time on fewer names that actually make sense. I highly recommend for this audience to check out the screening. Tell me about the charting part, the charts, there are many different ways that we can interact even outside of the original view with numbers. What do we have to know how to make the best use out of that section? I have a brilliant kind of one I've saved up, oh, I just pressed back. I have one that I've saved up here that I just call the travel aggregators that I pulled up. It was already up on my screen. So let's use this as an example. I have lots that are like trading platforms. I have that payments one that I was telling you about before, which just tracks transaction volume on Visa and Mastercard American Express. So this chart, this feature is where I'm going to now be able to cross compare against a bunch of different companies. I'm no longer just in that views of Visa view or the Southwest view. This is one where I like to keep track of gross bookings across Expedia, booking holdings and Airbnb. And see which ones have grown the fastest. Airbnb has been a company that's kind of starting to look pretty interesting for me. So I've been doing some more research. And this is one thing that I've really liked looking at is going, okay, our gross bookings across the aggregators, which ones growing the fastest off which base, off which take rate. And they disclose all of these numbers for investors. They disclose all of those metrics across all three of these main travel aggregators. And this gives me an idea of like, oh, I think Airbnb is growing the fastest. But what I actually realize is bookings growing the fastest off the COVID lows. I will that is not a thesis that I would have came in with. And if you were to ask 10 people off the street, which one do you think is growing faster, faster, the booking.com conglomerate or Airbnb. I have a feeling most people would say Airbnb. The data tells you otherwise. And so this is kind of a really nice place to understand narratives and real factual numerical data. This is so important and so powerful because as a practitioner, I find that I might own one company or maybe two companies from a particular industry. And time is precious. I can only that often look at the peers what the peers are saying and doing. So at some point, I think it happens to all of us that we rely on the take on what's going on in the industry from the one representative of the industry we have in the portfolio. But this tool very quickly allows you to cross check with what one company is telling you and how everybody else is doing. If one company is telling you and we're struggling to grow, we can't push our pricing. And you look at the other three peers, they clearly are growing volumes and their pricing went up and margins and improving. Maybe the company are paying attention to us facing some other challenges that the other ones are not. Anyways, it allows you to zoom out and see a bigger context of how everybody else is doing. And it's a great case study that you pointed out recovery from from COVID as I just I know historical case study of what happened and our perception and reality. You know, great check before we move on. I'm curious if you have any other feature you want to show or explain to this audience or maybe tease something that you're working on that will add a lot of value, but it's not ready if you can as much as you can share or maybe you know, a general idea of what else you're working on that will make this experience even better than it is today. The last thing I mentioned is our dashboard, which I skipped over just because it's very specific to the user. This is where you're going to come in. You're going to build a dashboard of certain watch lists. You can even add ownership breakdown and get the portfolio. It's really nice because you can put in all your ownership of all your positions and get an aggregated view over time of what that would look like if it was a specific business, for example, like here's what my portfolio weighted would look like for for one company. You can see what all the businesses are. From a watch less perspective, you're going to be able to build the columns that you want to track. I'm looking at forward EV to ebit. I can sort by that one. Then I can also get notifications panel on, okay, Taiwan semiconductor just posted this event. Let's look at what that is. Oh, it's their Q4. Awesome. Let's read about this and let's figure out what the company just reported. This is a home base for a very personalized investing experience is the dashboard. In terms of what's coming is all a lot of the work being done on what's coming relates back to that personalization layer that we just talked about as well as more data. More data that we can start grabbing from other geographies. There's kind of this. non-symmetrical experience if you're looking at a US company versus some microcap in Taiwan. And so really a lot of data engineering in the pipeline to make that experience uniform across all of these different companies. It's a massive universe of businesses around the world that we want to look at. And we don't want to just be focusing only on the US, Canada, UK, for example. We want to have a really robust experience for every market as well as every person that might want to use the platform no matter where they're located. Very exciting. I'm very inspired to see how you take feedback and how you want it to be a better tool, how you are using the tool yourself. So you're fully immersed in the experience and how I can only tell that it's going to get better and better and hopefully we can all become better and smarter investors as we're up against. And I think a shortage of active thinking participants in the market and it's a whole separate topic, but I'll leave it at that. Before we wrap it up, I have one last big question for you. How do you think about success, whether for your business, you personally am just very intrigued how you think about it? Yeah, I mean, there's been kind of this moving goal post of what I want out of the business. And I think it's helpful to have some gratitude and look, okay, yeah, I have 50 employees now and see how far we've come and all this stuff is certainly, I try to remind myself of those moments that I'm like kind of live in the dream of when I was thinking about making the leap we talked about earlier today, but I'm also just, I just don't have that personality trait and I'm very rarely looking at the rear view mirror and always forward. And so I have to kind of battle my own psychology when it comes to the moving goal post of success. I wish I was better at this honestly, but it's just not who I am. And I think recognizing that is probably better than trying to fight it. In terms of success, it's a constant battle of us being really content with where the product is and people just recognizing it and voting with their wallets too. Like I'm not like I'm, I've talked a lot about how we're doing all this stuff to empower the investor and that's true, but I also want to build a really sustainable, heavy business that is the next really big, powerful business inside of financial data. And you know, when our customers vote with their wallets on how things are going, then that brings us obviously a lot of monetary success so we can keep building what we're building, but also like I want to make sure my shareholders are really taking care of all my employees that every single full time employee has some equity in the business too. And so I think what success really looks like for me is that all of those people get really good outcomes and not just me, whatever that outcome may be. Well I love the sound of that and we went to full loop. We started with business ownership and your employees being owners in a business that's serving others to become better business owners. I think it doesn't get better aligned than that. But I love the sound of it and I feel like in the world that's very short-term focused, there's a lot of noise, a lot of distraction and people are asking me, you know, is this a good time to invest and seeing investing as something that you describe as business ownership, asset ownership over a lifetime. And yes, it will bring financial benefits if done right, but it's also intellectually stimulating to discover the things we even talked about today. How do these businesses work? How do they succeed? And you give us an access to public information but in a way where I can interact with numbers to the point that it was very hard to do it at all possible and not as frequently and not for as many companies at least at a level that I've been exposed to. So anyways, thank you so much for today. What a wonderful conversation. I highly recommend for this audience and there will be notes and links in the notes to this episode for people to explore. Try it, see it, the trial is free. You can see if you like it if it belongs in your process, but I think a lot of people will be really blown away and surprised how much is available and possible even for the smallest investor all the way to the largest one. And we just recently made the free plan. So throw away the trial. So say the trial ends, you're still on a free plan. We now give everyone 10 years of data. Incredible. It used to be just four or five, I forget what it was before, but we just made that to 10 because we figured we just want it to be well known that if you're using a free platform, there is absolutely no reason you shouldn't be using our free plan. Like of all the ones that exist there, no one is offering 10 years of historicals. There is not one of them doing it. And so that's what we're pretty proud of that as well too. I think Ben Graham would have been really impressed with what's available to us. He's nice compared to what was available when he was playing this game. Thank you so much for today, Braden. What a pleasure. First, I really, really appreciate this conversation and everything you're doing for all of us. So thank you. Thank you for having me. I hope people enjoyed the conversation. You were listening to Talking Billions. We take on the hardest subject of all money, but our conversations lead us to an even bigger question. What it means to live a rich life beyond money. If you enjoyed the show, please take a moment and follow, subscribe, rate and share on Friends and Family. We rely on Word of Mouth from the show. One click for you means the world to us. Thank you. Until next time, your host, Bookmill Baronoski. [Music]