Ryan Eisenman, Co-Founder & CEO – Arch (EP.65)

[MUSIC] Investment Management Operations is brought to you by Carta. If you're an institutional LP, you've been there. The endless hours of performance tracking, jumping through investment portals, and reconciling data across different systems. But what if there was one connected platform where you could see across every investment in real time? Introducing LP portfolio analytics by Carta, the connected platform built for private capital that delivers cutting-edge data automation and portfolio intelligence. Carta transforms how LPC understand and act on their portfolio data using specialized AI to extract, standardize, and aggregate everything in real time. So your team can get back to doing the work that actually moves your portfolio forward. Learn more now at carda.com/lppa. That's carda.com/lppa. [MUSIC] I'm Scott McDonald and this is Investment Management Operations. This show explores the inner workings of some of the most innovative institutions in the industry. Through in-depth conversations with leaders across operations, compliance, legal, finance, and technology, you'll hear firsthand how key operating partners run their business in an ever changing and complex investment landscape. You can join our mailing list and access capital-allocated content at capitalallocators.com. [MUSIC] My guest on today's show is Ryan Eisenman. Ryan is the CEO and co-founder of ARCH, a tech platform redefining how limited partners and allocators manage their private investments and what he calls the Schwab for private markets. Ryan shares his journey in how he met his co-founders, really challenges in selling to family offices, and the product's evolution from automating K1s to serving as a seamless digital hub for every private investment in L.P. holds. We explore ARCH's rapid growth to over 500 clients, their client obsessed culture, why he sees being in office is a competitive advantage, and how they've expanded into capital-call fraud detection and enhance workflows. We wrap by discussing trends in private markets, their approach to organic versus inorganic growth, and why he believes the future private markets will look more like public market platforms with integrated user-friendly digital solutions. Please enjoy my conversation with Ryan Eisenman. [MUSIC] Ryan, I'm excited to talk about ARCH today. Tell me a little bit about yourself and how you got started in the industry. Scott, excited to be here, a long time podcast listener. We started ARCH in 2018, but before that, when I was 12, I received Coca-Cola shares as a gift from my grandparents, and then we lost the stock certificate. So then my experience of being an investor in Coca-Cola was old school. I got paper checks for dividend checks, a paper 1099, and had no way to actually see what these shares were worth in any given day. And then Flash 4, 10 years, working at a wealth management firm, seeing how alternatives are being managed, and I realized, holy cow, alternatives are being managed today in the same way that public market stocks used to be managed, but you have this brokerage account. So there needs to be an e-trade or Schwab, a fidelity for private markets. So I pitched that idea to have Intercapolis. He was like, yes, I have 100 plus K1s. I have no idea what my commitments are, my unfunded commitments. I have to chase down all these K1s every year. Being an investor in private markets is really painful. There has to be a better way. And oh, by the way, you should meet Jason and Joel, they're really strong engineers. Maybe the three of you would want to start a company together. So that kicked off our founding journey. Matt Jason, Trigg and Joel Stein, the two other arch co-founders. We raised a small amount of Intercapolis in 2018. And then we were in business helping make private markets a one click experience. Was this an accident the way to evolve? Most things are random walks, but it feels like a random walk? I feel like it was almost destiny or sorts. We found this problem. The more and more I thought about this problem, there needs to be a solution. So I started talking to more people about the problem. And then in doing so, if you put your intentions out into the world and tell people what you want to do, then ultimately people were like, "Wait, that's a big problem. I want to help you solve this problem." So that's where this investor really leaned in and became one of our first clients, capital source and introduced the three arch co-founders to each other. And your other co-founders are more technical in nature? Yes, they both went to MIT, study computer science and math. We're doing AI before AI was cool. So we're great people to work on this business with. I'm always interested in this facet of it because I think how did you guys know that it was actually something you guys are willing to lock arms on for the long term? I think there's a lot of naivety that goes into starting companies. We took this outsider perspective into the industry, so we got to think from first principles and figure out what should exist. We didn't think it'd be as hard as it would be to sell software to family offices and sell software to institutional investors. And we just thought this thing just needed to exist. It took a long time to get it off the ground three years later in 2021. We just passed our first billion in assets. We are a MIT team of five. We hired another engineer and someone on the outside. And then we were starting to actually at that point repeatedly sell to new clients, but it took three years to get there. Because selling software to family offices is not easy. There wasn't this halo and excitement around the alt world as there is, I think, today. So we were probably a little bit early when we first started. But we spent a lot of time validating the idea, working with each other, seeing if there was a good working relationship before we decided to all three found the company together and work together. That's very cool. Having three co-founders, you have an odd number of decision-making. How does decision-making work at Arch from that level? Well, we all think about the world in different ways. So I'm customer obsessed. We love customers. Want to make customers happy. It's been a lot of time with customers and in product. One of my co-founders thinks a lot about security, scalability. How does this work at scale? And then the other one is really focused on how do we find the shortest mouse trap or the fastest way to a solution. So when we get into decision-making together, we each push products forward and initiates forward in ways that creates a better hole. And sometimes two out of three of us will end up going one direction. But companies are a lot about making 51% bets. So we just have to move fast and be like, okay, well, let's launch this product. Even though one person might not be as excited about it, but we'll all work together on the direction that the company is most excited about. And then maybe to back up and just at a high level, tell me about what Arch is really where it started as a core product and where we're going. Arch is the digital solution for any LP of any size to manage all their private market investments. And we think of private markets as private equity, hedge funds, real estate, venture, credit funds, anything that is alternative that isn't a stock or a bond. Today, if you're an LP, you log into dozens or hundreds of different portals. You have to pull all the K1s, you get them to the tax accounting, you have to complete capital calls on time, you need to potentially put data into a reporting system, do what's sometimes called all its data management. And that's a painful process. It's people throwing bodies at a problem that go into these really clunky portals that are not made for real humans to go into to search for a document and a piece of information and then to check that document into some static file folder where it can't be used again. Arch solves that problem by going into every portal, every platform collecting every document from all the funds that you're invested in and all the private market investments. We digitize them, we send data via API to downstream platforms, think the Kaesas, the BipSync, the backstops, the Adaparts of the world. We summarize information with AI, we give you a way to track all your investments in real time. But we make simple things like collecting your K1s and completing your capital calls easy while also providing a fraud detection and identity layer on top of it. And you started it in the K1s space specifically? Yeah, for the first four to six months, all we did was collect K1s. So that was our first tax season and then we expanded into collecting every document in mid-2018. And we leaned pretty heavily from a marketing perspective into K1s because we think it's this really unique document that is uniquely painful. So the first marketing thing we ever did was we made hats, hats, say, arch on the front and then got K1s on the back. And it's the thing we give to our clients and friends and then usually get a tax at least once a week of. I saw an arch hat in the airport in Denver or in Alaska and all these random places. So that's just a fun side thing to be do. It's such an overlooked pain point. The number of even when I was at a fun, RK1 was double-sided and knee high. Super painful. And when you talk to clients, what are the main pain points for prospects who are then coming to arch and saying, hey, can you help me solve for this? Yeah, this pain point takes a lot of different shapes. We characterize it broadly as the portal problem where if I'm an allocator and I'm invested in 300 different funds, I have dozens and dozens of different portals that each have their own username and login that I need to go into to get my documents. So I get an email saying, you have a new capital call. Well, okay, then I need a login to the portal and get the capital call. Then there's all this downstream workflow that needs to happen. So I need to read the capital call, no, okay, in 10 days, I need to wire $200,000. Then there's a lot of worry about, is this capital call legitimate? Are these the right instructions or did someone upload fraudulent instructions? And I need to send it to a bank or put it in a payment system. So there's all these discrete steps that need to happen and that's just where the capital call and then you need to take the data and put it into your GL or your reporting system. So we automate basically that whole intent process including making sure that the capital call instructions are correct where we'll verify that these instructions match the prior instructions for a fund and also match similar instructions for similar investors. So we're able to provide this automation layer but also fraud detection layer on top of otherwise painful process and then make that information easily exportable into any downstream system. and then. At what point did you actually take that data and then realize you're sitting at the intersection of all these different places, of data, portfolio management systems, CRM, what was the aha moment, and then where did you go from there? - Our customers are continuing the askings for more things. So there have been a couple points along the way where people are like, "Hey, I get all these quarterly reports "and investor letters and I don't have time to read them." Is there a way that you can make it easy for me to access what's in them? And there's great generative AI tools that we can apply to this data set, which will be like, "Yeah, we can send you an automatic email "every morning or once a week "that just summarizes all the investor letters." So then you can easily see what Blackstone and Carlyle and Sequoia Capital and all these managers are saying and doing and stay on top of your investments. So it's things like that. Oh, and then you want to search for things where SVB is going under what's happening with tariffs, how much stripe do I have in my portfolio? There's these really clear questions that people want to ask. We can give you easy ways to, in a natural language way, answer that question. You can search for mentions of a keyword in all your documents. So it's no longer an aesthetic file folder. All this information is usable. You can see the S-A-Y data of any of your funds. You can see how much exposure you have to a certain name. So it's continually going deeper in the data to give people inside said they truly can't generate otherwise or that are really hard to generate. - And back to that security piece in the capital call, that's such an important part of a lot of operations for allocators in number of different seats. But just how did you think about the workflow of that? 'Cause in old school sense, you'd have, oh, I get a capital call, I'll then call and do a while call back. But now you've got deep fake going on. There's a lot of changes going on in security. Now that you guys are in system, how much workflow analysis did you do to actually come out with the product? - It's much easier to apply solutions at scale. We hear people that are trying to build their own solutions for capital call workflows or own solutions for identity verification. But we're able to do this with a lot of scale. So today we have over 500 clients that have about $290 billion in assets on the platform. And it's hundreds of thousands of investments. So we can see when we receive a capital call, does this instruction match your prior instructions or other people in the fund? Did they also receive the same capital call notice at the same time? So we're able to bring this big data approach to the information that's coming through to make sure that every LP is getting the right information at the right time and to be able to turn it into usable information and insights. - Very cool. And then going back to the origin story, you had five people you've grown dramatically since then. What's your head count today? - Today we're a little over 190. We're all in the office in New York City at 18th and Park if you're in New York, come visit us. And of our 500 clients, 163 of them as of today are new this year. So most of the growth of arch has been in the last two years in particular. Prior to that, we were a pretty small company. - And then what was the intention on that? If you look at a lot of organizations, they are dispersed but you guys are intentionally in one location and I'd love to hear just your backstory on that. - We can innovate much faster, we can solve problems faster, we can just do a lot more by building an in-person company. It's the harder decision, there's a lot of momentum and bringing people out of the office but we're finding it's actually really appreciated by a lot of the people that we're hiring who maybe they're young talent and they spent much of their college years or high school years during COVID. So they're looking for a place where they can find a community and people to work on problems together. When we huddle around things we wanna build, we can get all the right people in the right room and there's just so much more progress when we're in a room together problem solving and we can host clients in our office, we do a lot of that. So it's definitely been a big decision for us and an impactful decision to build an in-person company in this space. - You recently just raised your series, but we had love to hear just a little bit on the background, the rationale on that front. - So we raised just over 50 million led by Oak, HCFT with Minlow Ventures, Craft Ventures, Quiet Capital, and a lot of our other early backers coming in, including some institutions we haven't yet announced. We to date had raised about 25 million of capital. So this is a major step up in the amount of capital our business has to deploy. We're trying to build a long-term company that's around for decades. So we've been really conservative on capital deployment. We just hired our first marketing person, we don't do that much on the marketing side. We really just focus on product and building a great product and having that be our channel for acquiring new customers along with a great operations team. But this gives us a lot of ability to really think long-term and what we can bring to our clients and how we can continue to be on the forefront of innovation within private markets. - And then on that front, you have a handful of really well-regarded names and adding value is such an important piece of it. What in your mind made for a great partner for Arch? - We love clients that want more and want more from their providers and they want to be thought partners. So we just built this client advisory board to bring more formally clients into our office over more formal, conference style deep dive into product in the future of Arch. We informally pick our clients brains all the time. We spend a lot of time with our large institutional clients. They're banking clients with our family office clients to understand what do each of these segments need. And there's a lot of overlap between a top 25 endowment and a top 25 family office. But there's also differences in the types of solutions they want. So think about the asset class or the client-specific product, but really lean into here's where we are today, here's where we're going and we love our clients help shaping our future products. - And with the raise, how does it change your mindset on really product development? And maybe there's an element, is it organic growth, is it inorganic growth? You now have a little bit more optionality around that. I just curious what you're thinking about that. - We just brought five new product managers onto the team. So now we can do some really great research on new areas that we're developing and how to become a stronger inton platform for managing all the pain points and all the data around owning an alternative investment. So it's where we're going in long term, what's our North Star? We think that there needs to be a Schwab for private markets. Schwab serves retail, it serves institutions, you log in, you see all your investments in one place, and you're already KYC and you can one click by Apple shares and Tesla shares and Google shares. It's a great experience, especially compared to what public markets used to be. And private markets, you have all these existing pain points. If you talk to a little bit about wiring, sub docs, super painful, KYC and AML, even if you're a blue chip institution, you still have to go through these painful processes every time you invest in a new fund. There's still a lot of additional data that people are looking for that they don't have good access to today. So we think we're just getting started from a number of angles on the product side and on the sales side, from where we can have an impact on clients in the future and how we can bring more solutions to bear, including things that might help with like, diligent, sync funds and keeping track of processing when you're making investments. We leave a product on that side, they're calling investment research to help our institutional clients make better investment decisions and track processes and use AI in their investment research process. Very cool. So starting from the data set and then also, so you have cash movements. All these things are so important for the institutional market, but also the investment process. Am I hearing you correctly? So you're actually identifying, you have a platform where you actually start with, manager selection, diligence, how do you come up with a consistent process from identification, investment committee approval to closing and everything in between? Yeah, could we hear from a lot of our clients that they're struggling with? How do I effectively use AI in my organization? And you could take LPAs and PBMs and DDCUs and throw it into chat DBT and say, hey, can you summarize this or pull this thing out or make a report? And it's pretty good for that, but it is not necessarily secure to use a third party instance and not in enterprise instance of some of these solutions. And you might have repeatable processes that you always want to run on a real estate fund or a venture fund. So we can give you a tool that will run through a specialized model that you can instruct as well around how do I want to diligence a real estate fund? What metrics do I want to pull out? How do I want to display that information? How do I want to create reports for that? And then what are the non-AI workflows of things that need to happen? OK, someone needs to sign off on legal compliance, do this DDCU task, set up the funds, all the different processes that go into essentially the assembly line of investing in a fund, need to be tracked in a lot of times, even for major institutions that's happening in a spreadsheet today. So we can bring purpose-built software for that process to clients, sometimes, for the first time ever. That's really cool. So it's almost like you just have this research tool, data information. And then what about the integration in the market when I'm hearing is that there's just so much conversation about organizations integrating with one another. How do you think about that? You got a vertical play. Some people are doing more horizontal trying to be a one-stop shop. Where do you land on this? I think markets go in cycles of favoring all in one versus best in class. I think we're headed towards best in class, but the number of tools that are out there today, people want solutions that are great at what they do, and integrate with the other solutions that they use that are great at what they do. So we think of ourselves as a connective tissue between all the portals and platforms where this information sits today, and the downstream tools that people already use in order to store this information, document this information, understand this information. So we invested early on in a full open API that's really well documented. Even some of our single family offices are building to it. So you don't have to be a tech company to build our API. But if you are a tech company, you make it really easy to build to our API. So we've had archway and MSCI and Mastero and a bunch of other firms built our API in the past couple quarters. We now send data to BIP sync and Dropbox and ShareFile and these other solutions that you use to support what do I need in my RMS, what do I need in my GL, what do I need in my reporting system so that we can work in an interoperable way with the tools that you already have today. - That's right. really cool. And then I was just reading something about your relationship with Archweb. I'd love to hear a little bit more about that as well. We're excited about the partnership with Archweb. It's a company we've long admired. They have a huge footprint within the institutional family office space and also in the private banking space. And when they went independent and were pod out this last year, one of their first priorities was developing a strong relationship with Arch. And it was one of our big priorities as well. So they've been an awesome team to work with. They seem to have a lot of energy around where they're going right now. So I think we're going to see big things from them in the coming quarters. What should take on this AI push? There's a lot of organizations who are saying they're doing AI, there's a lot of back channel chattering and saying, yeah, it's not really AI. What's your sense of where we are today with AI? AI has been happening since the early 2010s, 2012s where when you're typing into Google and you're looking for something and you type the wrong word and it says, did you mean this? That's Google's early machine learning telling you, hey, did you mean to type in this thing instead of that thing? So I think there are a lot of great optimization solutions with AI. And the current push around AI has benefits and fallbacks. There's that recent report that said that 95% of Fortune 500 investments in AI are actually negative ROI today. But on the flip side, rethinking your tech stack and rethinking how you're using technology in your organizations has a major impact. So you could be a firm that's like, okay, I need to think about how my leveraging AI today and how my future proofing my organization and maybe you're getting 10% AI but 90% new solution and most of the ROI might come from the new solution. I think there are some amazing applications of AI within this world. So our clients love these AI summaries, for example, or love the ability to see the fees and carry that they're paying on funds or investing in, automatically pulled out of documents. But you need AI working with other solutions. So we've heard of people just trying to take AI only approaches that generally doesn't work. But I think stuffly integrated within broader platforms makes this something that can have a big ROI for spend in new technology. And also curious that when you say AI only, what do you mean by that? There's a lot of cloud code ask solutions that are pretty easy to pop up where you could create a prototype in a couple weeks that looks pretty good. It looks to solve a lot of problems and is 95% accurate. But in a lot of places, 95% accurate, not good. So you have to be very thoughtful in where AI is really good at producing accurate information and then where you need more API-driven approaches or other approaches to get the right information into the right system. What do you think is the biggest misconception in the market today about AI? I think there's a lot of talk about agents and agentic workflows. And I see that as a really buzz wordy approach. And we tested a lot of these really hot agentic tools and I found that the accuracy of them is worse than traditional tools. Granted, there are potentially trillions of dollars going into AI today. What we'll have in six months or 12 months will be radically different than what we have today. So there could be more agentic workflows that are really actually useful. But we haven't found them to be that productive at least as far as November of 2025. What's really interesting because you've got a lot of people who think that this stuff is just going to run and generate itself and then it's going to review something and then just send it off. And if you had an order management system, it's somehow going to do a trade on its own without human intervention. I feel like we're a little future forward on that today. Yeah. But being able to communicate in a natural language way and create a trade that you could look at and review might be useful. Maybe you want to do some complex option strategy on the public market side, but you can't do that today or maybe you want to complete some difficult document and do it with information. So I think there are a lot of good applications of AI that we will see. We still have the review information at the end of the day, but I think getting from the zero to the one, if it is really important. So I'd love to talk a little bit about sales cycle and the institutional space. I think it's having been an LP and knowing how that works and just curious what your experience is and maybe would love to hear a success story on how the process runs and timelines and decision points. The number one most important thing is who's referring you to a platform. And we can talk about features and functionality and how great and automated we are until we're blue in the face. But the number one reason why someone buys arch is because someone they trust recommended arch to them or they did a reference call and then they learn things about like how much our team cares and how fast we respond to support tickets and things like that that really shape their buying process and their experience. So that's what we find is the most impactful thing is having clients or raving fans. We're meeting with one of the five biggest family offices this week. They're like archers consistently the only pieces offer that we don't hear complaints about and that our team loves and being able to take that sound bite and share that with a prospective client and then put them on the phone with that client and be like this is a firm that people look up to they love arch for these reasons that I think cuts the buying process in half. Sometimes that's enough where someone gets a recommendation from someone in their small group of trusted friends and then they come in bound with an intent to purchase ready to make a decision and just need to know a few pieces of how it integrates with their current tech stack. So they're increasingly seen buying processes get much shorter with the right referrals recommendations. Yeah, I mean referrals are still roll the day. It's still amazing that it's the main market validation. One, they know your name and two people say good things about you in the market from other people. So the client referral piece is still so strong. When we did our series B, Matt and Oak are lead investor. They were raising their fund at the same time. So they're talking to all these institutional all piece about arch and other solutions in the market and he was like, yeah, this is when we knew we wanted to invest. People that were using other solutions were like, yeah, we use this solution. It's okay. And then people that were using arch were like, we love arch and went out of their way to tell Matt how much they loved it. And then when you mentioned they were thinking about investing, they were like, yeah, you should absolutely invest. We believe in this company. So our customers are our marketing team. They're our biggest advocate. We're super grateful for any of our customers are listening. We are really grateful for you sharing this with people in your networks. So thank you for doing that. And why do you think that's the case that the feedback you hear is positive on that front compared to other solutions. I just curious up what are you guys doing differently? We just really care. We're not looking for a quick exit. We want to be in this market for decades. We have a founding team that's deeply involved in the business. The people that be higher really care and are friendly. People have come to our office and been like, I don't know what's happening here, but people are just smiling at arch. And we want to make our clients lives better. And we care about our clients and see the long game here of we want to be around for a very long time. So small examples of this is we have in app chat for support of if you're a new user and you're trying to figure out how do I add an investment to our tour? How do I do this thing? Or I have a question. We respond in nine seconds here on chat with a real human, solving your problems. And the team created that got really competitive with themselves. The support team to lower that time. And our SLA is under 30 seconds, but they're like no, no, no, no, no, we're going to measure herself a month over a month and try to get as low as possible. And it's pretty hard to get lower than nine seconds, but I think they're trying. And then how do you hire people like that? We just do a lot of screening when we hire people. We've a lot of people inside of arch that have different perspectives on the hiring process. So some people are evaluating what's your technical capability for the job that you're being hired for. Or other folks are just looking at who are you as a person? What do you care about? Do you want to be here with us? Are you a builder? Are you focused on the long term? So ultimately want people who want to progress in their career will go out of their way to make a client's life gray. We'll go out of their way to ship a great feature and then find more people on our team that look like that and empower them in their careers here. It's interesting because you're trying to find people with the right mindset, but also trying to understand the market and then also be forward thinking. So it takes I think a unique set of attributes to actually find the right fit. When did you bring the recruiting team on or at least the first person to own that process? We brought someone in part time. This is probably about two years ago, maybe a little bit more. And then she was amazing. So then we extended her into a full time hire. And then most recently brought on ahead of people to oversee recruiting in HR. So we're continually investing in the people side of the business because ultimately in the day of people are everything here. It's like when you buy from our, you buy from a person, when you onboard, you're on board with person. When you have questions, you work with a person for your questions. Why do you think that is so underrated? I think it's hard sometimes to do both great technology and great operations and great people. And I think a lot of companies will sometimes cut corners and be like, okay, well, it's more expensive for us to serve clients in this white love way. So let's not invest there. We think it's a really cheap investment actually because it leads to a happier clients that are more likely to refer to new clients. And that are really sticky. Like we have 98.8% year-over-year client retention. So it's much more expensive to go find new clients and repair relationships from the broken. Much easier to just invest on the front end. And it's what we would love our healthcare system to look like. We'd love to have more preventative medicine rather than spending X% of all healthcare spending in the last five years of people's lives. But that's how we're trying to at least structure things here as much as possible. So you're a customer service. Let's turn to tech. What makes a great tech person today? I think it's really hard to build great technology teams when we are starting arch before I met Jason and Joel. I was like, okay, how do I find a great technical co-founder? How do I find a great engineer? I don't know how to evaluate a great engineer. How do I both find recruit evaluate higher offer a great engineer to come work with me on this product and this problem? And there's so much that goes into building a great technology team and technology culture and great engineers want to work with great engineers. So to have two really strong technical co-founders who can set up the initial architecture, but also be talent magnets and recruit great great folks to join our team has been a huge unlock for you. for us. So then we're able to go to really strong universities for technical talent and do on-campus recruiting because we're thinking really far in the future. So we just did three different super days for engineers and those were super energizing and really fun to meet the on-talent. And we can bring people over that are working at other companies that are excited to be at a company where they can really build and have a big impact. So we're blessed in that way of being able to be tech first and engineering first and then pair that with a strong operations team with that long-term orientation. And when you're recruiting for that is there are two tracks of people you're in competition with the big boys, the meadows and the Googles, etc. But they're also finding an opportunity to get on the ground floor at a CREB company can be very attractive for people. Is it easy to identify who's the right fit? Right now we're at this stage where there's still a lot of product for us to build, but we're pretty stable. So it's a really fun time for people to come into the company because they can have a large impact and work on really tangible things, but they don't have to worry about the company not being here or about not having good product direction. And if you're like a Google and you're recruiting engineers, they often like to think in terms of the impact. You might not ship a whole feature or even that much of it, but this one tiny button that you're going to spend months optimizing will be used by billions of people. I think that that's a good sales tactic, but we like to talk about, no, you're going to build things. You're going to build a new solution for fraud detection. You're going to change the world. So oftentimes that helps people self-select into, am I a builder? Do I want to change an industry? Okay, great. The arch is a great place for me to be. And there's so much happening in this intersection of finance and technology that I think it's a really exciting space to be in generally. And then let's talk a little bit about the feedback loop on building product, customer intervention or customer input. And maybe we talked a little bit about the customer advisor board. Tell me more about the active role that they play in actually helping product come to market with feedback. Well, even before we had a formal customer advisory board, we had a customer advisory board. All of our customers we treat as advisors, we want their feedback, we want their input, we want to know what's working really well and what isn't working well and what we can help address for them. So about a year ago, we decided to formalize this into a more in-person customer advisory board also partly because we thought our customers would enjoy spending time with each other and learning best practices from each other. So we had everyone in our office for a full day of meetings and was a lot of fun. We learned a lot and also allowed us to put our customers directly in front of our engineers and vice versa. So it wasn't just customers talking to salespeople or operations teams or product people, but get more customer energy in front of our whole company. So it was a great success, really useful all around. We learned a ton. So we're doubling down on that and when I continue to invest in a customer advisory board. And maybe this folds into where ALT is going long term, but what are they talking about? Where does that sync up with where you guys were thinking the product needs to go? You just brought in a whole bunch of new product managers. Where are we going? People are talking about their pain points outside of what we do today about different personas within their organization. So one of the most powerful places for us or one of the places that our clients are most excited to leverage arch is within their own sales process. So if you're a multifamily office, you're an RAA, you're an OCIO, arch isn't just a tool for your operations team to manage alternative investments. It's also a sales tool for you to bring on new clients that have dozens or hundreds of their own line items and are struggling with this workflow. So you can actually bring arch to them and then it becomes an easy way to say, Hey, by the way, in addition to everything else we do, we also make this part of your life that's painful, easy. And we give you a great client experience on your ALT where you didn't have that before. So that's something that we unlock through our customer advisory board of hearing people say, Oh, yeah, we like have taken screenshots of your platform, put it in our sales deck and we use this as a selling point for why you should come work with us as a firm. And that was a really exciting thing for us to know that we're not just impacting the back of the house, but also the front of the house and how they make decisions, but also how they drive around for them into their organizations. Yeah, it's interesting. You almost get this bespoke approach where in theory, you could actually have your own instance of your client experience as a client of an OCIO, see what your OCIO is see potentially. I mean, it's a lot of work, but there's definitely interest in knowing and seeing. Yeah, I trust you, but I want to see it myself. Well, that is just one quick permission away. And increasingly, we're seeing firms do that. One of our clients is one of the five biggest US banks. That's why they use us within their practice is because they want to really help their clients understand their portfolio so that the client can make a decision. So the advisor can help the client make a decision and it puts them in this more quarterback role within their clients for natural lives. And we're seeing the same thing on the OCIO side. Well, the OCIO needs to aggregate all these positions and this is a really costly function to have be manual or not be well run today. But also let's create a great client experience for our clients so that they can see their investments follow their investments, get the AI summaries, use arch and really useful and interesting ways to better inform the planning conversations that they have. This is a crazy industry. It's like one of the only markets where as a customer, you pay millions and millions of dollars to your asset manager and then you get a terrible customer interface and customers are used to going to the Ritz Carlton website or the Delta website or these places where it's high pay money and I have a great way to interact with this purchasing experience. And we think that the purchasing experience of today and the post trade experience today is just not going to cut it for where the market needs to go in the future. It is amazing because I think even on the client experience side, we spend so much time thinking about numbers that we under index the requirement for design and experience because we're all B to C at some level to have that rich experience that we should taking that in client reporting, data information, it's all mushing together. Yeah, because also when you're looking at a PDF of your portfolio and you see that investment was up or down, what do you want to do? You want to click into something? You want to see why is this up or down? What change? What's happening? And be able to pretty easily drill down and understand and that's what we can empower clients to do. We don't know that oh, my portfolio is up because the fund that I'm invested in just marked up their position in this company because it just went public or this thing just happened. So maybe that will inform some future decision with a lot more granularity. I went back and looked. The PDF was created in 1993. How far away are we to cracking that and not relying on that? That's a good question. I think PDFs will never truly go away, but we're starting to see more firms that are opening up to the idea of sending us direct digital data. And we think that that will just continue to accelerate, especially as we continue to be a scale provider in this space. And what are you excited about in the short term with Arch? I'm really excited about the team that we're building and how we work with clients and the clients that have come on board that are advocates for us. It is so much fun for us to spend time with clients to learn where they want us to go in the future and just to hear their experience working with us. And we have just so much more to do. We are just getting started here. We're bringing this builder's mindset. We want to be around for a really long time. So we would love anyone that's excited about this space, passionate about this space. We would love your input on what to build. If you want to come work here, we'd love to talk to you. We just want to be here for decades and are excited about the folks that want to help us along the way. And what are you excited about in the industry in general? There's so much activity going on. You got a lot of firms, a lot of interesting things coming to market, a lot of integrations happening. What do you fire it up about? There are a lot of great companies not coming into just financial technology writ large. We can solve a lot of these problems and it's not going to be anyone company doing everything. So I think there's an ability to create a great experience for everything that you need. And excited about companies working together to solve problems to make clients lives easy so that they don't have to spend time porting data from one system to another or reading a PDF. Well, that's a good stuff happening. So you guys have been doing some creative things in terms of marketing. I'd love to hear some interesting examples of creativity, a brand that you guys are doing at Arch. So we of course have our art chat, but beyond that a couple years ago, we had this idea of tax day is not a holiday for most people. It's a really painful day. But how can we make tax day our holiday? We're here to make it so that tax days an easy day. So you don't have to worry about where am I K ones? So the idea came to create a K one cookie. There's a great bakery in New York City called a funny face bakery. I think they have possibly the best chocolate chip cookie in New York. It looks like a LeVane chocolate chip cookie, but it is 10 times better, much higher quality chocolate chips, really an amazing cookie. But they got notoriety by creating these funny cookies that were basically like caricatures of people's faces. So they do like a Kardashian cookie or a Larry David cookie that you could buy and give to your friends. So we partnered with them and we created a first of its kind K one cookie. And for tax day, they started this two years ago. We sent some of the chocolate chip cookies and the K one cookie to a bunch of our clients. And then last year we did a bigger mailer of K one cookies. So if you're listening and you haven't gotten a K one cookie yet, send us a note. We're happy to add you to the list. But that's just a way to show we're not just a boring tech company building software that doesn't have a soul. We care. We're a little bit scrappy and we want to bring a little bit of levity to these things are painful like collecting your K ones. Yeah, you would think that every tax account would love to get a hold of a K one cookie. We have gotten great feedback from people with their K one cookies. So usually people will send them funny things about them like eating the K one cookie while filing their tax return or whether or not they share with their colleagues. So it's become a really fun thing for us internally to see what clients say. It's good stuff. Or I love to turn to close with two closing questions and one is what advice would you give to an emerging allocator on technology adoption? Talk to your friends. See what they are using. See what they love. Understand not just where people are today, but where they're going. We think about being aligned not a dot. So what solutions do we have today and where can we go in the future? So I think if you talk to friends that have implemented solutions or view solutions understanding Is that a company that cares? Is it a company that will solve more of your problems in the future and does it work with other companies that you need it to and Hopefully that'll help you make better decisions And I'd say also sometimes ripping a bandaid off and just moving quickly can be less painful for you and for your loving vendor on the other side And the other question I have is what one book article or other resource you commonly refer to people? I love thinking fast and slow the Dan O'Connor in book I think it just has timeless lessons that affect every kind of decision that you'll make and a lot of things that I think if you think about them can help you live a happier and better life Good stuff Ryan has been awesome hearing the story about arch and all your insights. I look forward to staying in touch Likewise Scott big fan. Thank you for having me on the pod keep doing what you're doing because the world needs more insights on what's happening within investment ops We'll keep going. Thanks Ryan. Thanks Scott Thanks for listening to the show if you like what you heard hop on our website at capital allocators.com where you can access past shows join our mailing list and sign up for premium content Have a good one and see you next time