00:14:02 · S2, S1
[00:14:02] S2: This show is brought to you by the Global Talent Co, a marketing leader's best friend in these times of budget cuts and efficient growth. We help marketing leaders find, hire, vet, and manage amazing marketing talent for 50 to 70% less than their US and European counterparts. To book a free consultation, visit globaltalent.co. [00:14:22] S1: How are you approaching messaging? So I I think there's two brands that come to mind. I interviewed the founders of Augment Code. They're unicorn. You know, they're very much focused on this message of, like, AI can help you. AI is a buddy. It's, you know, a supporter. It's a copilot. And the other side you have, think it's Artisan who you may know, like, that AI s p r company that did this very controversial, but well done, Billboard. It's like I was talking about it. Like, where do you sit there in terms of those, like, two very different styles of AI messaging?
00:14:49 · Donald Muir
[00:14:49] S0: Yeah. I gotta figure out who did that marketing campaign and hire her or him. I am familiar with those billboards in San Francisco. They're catchy. Intentionally controversial. Look. I think where do I stand? I believe in the Y Combinator ideology of building a partially autonomous AI experience where the human works in harmony with the agent to produce better output faster and more efficiently. I'm building my platform that way. This is not a black box experience. You don't drop in a data room and output an investment decision. These are, on average, $500,000,000 transactions flowing through my platform. That requires an immense amount of human judgment. What's changing is that the human is working harmoniously with his dedicated AI agent to produce better insights more efficiently with more context. I'll give you an example. In my prior life, working in upper middle market private equity, I would get a new investment opportunity to come across my desk, and I need to produce a screening memo to determine whether we wanted to spend more time in the deal. I would spend hours parsing through that preliminary data room, trying to identify across thousands of Microsoft SharePoint folders precedent transactions to benchmark the deal against and pull down any type of institutional knowledge to inform the underwrite. And then I'd laboriously create a screening demo, which would take a dozen hours. You can get 90% plus time savings in all of those workflows today with AI. And more importantly, or what I'm even more excited about, is the ability to pipe in your institutional knowledge. Rather than combing through these thousands of forgotten folders in your SharePoint, you can now pipe in context via API and instantly benchmark all deals that you've done historically and drill down by vertical, by revenue sizing, by leverage levels, by gross profit margins, by quality of management team to create really crisp benchmarks, understand what the investment merits were, what the risks and mitigants were, how those vary by industry. You can get just much more informed underwrite retaining all of that institutional knowledge at your fingertips.
00:16:56 · Donald Muir, S1
So not only are you doing existing workflows faster, but they're actually much better because the AI has complete comprehensive context of the decades of work your firm has done in the past and could use that to inform the net new underwrite on a go forward basis. [00:17:11] S1: What other go to market decisions have you made? You know, like that example you shared with doing the demo approach, which is very, very clever. What other decisions have you made, or what decisions are you actively trying to decide between right now and trying to make on the go to market side?
00:17:11 · S1, Donald Muir
[00:17:11] S1: What other go to market decisions have you made? You know, like that example you shared with doing the demo approach, which is very, very clever. What other decisions have you made, or what decisions are you actively trying to decide between right now and trying to make on the go to market side? [00:17:24] S0: Yeah. I took a contrarian bet in my second company here. First of all, my sales reps at ARK are second to none. It sounds like you got good feedback on customer support. These guys, I will go to bat for them seven days a week. At F2, I took a contrarian bet. That's my caveat. The contrarian bet is there are no salespeople on my sales team. I've only hired ex finance industry experts. These are folks who have sat in the seats, who have lived to the pain points that we are solving, who can get on a call with an MD or a principal from a middle market credit fund and share a screen and walk them through their investment memo that they created that same morning and speak to it in the same language as them and really bring to life the power of the product. And so it's ex finance professionals on the sales team that I'm teaching sales to. I have five years of go to market experience selling in the SMB space that grew to be quite well for this. And sales can be taught the finance acumen, living the pain point firsthand and be able to speak to that credibly in first person, that's been really valuable as part of my go to market motion enough too.
00:18:31 · S1, Donald Muir
[00:18:31] S1: If I reflect on all of the conversations I've been having lately, like, that's for sure a hot trend where people are doing that. We're, you know, hiring the 22 year old SDR to grind away. They're bringing in domain experts. So if they're building health care technology, they're bringing in doctors. If they're doing legal technology, they're bringing in lawyers. Like, it just makes logical sense that, like, that's who people wanna be... Who they wanna buy from is people like them. [00:18:50] S0: Here I was thinking I came up with the idea. [00:18:54] S1: Yeah. Know we're only a few minutes left, so I wanna give a chance to talk about the big picture vision here. So where do you go from here? I know it's early days for the company. What's the big picture vision? What's the big picture plan?
00:19:03 · Donald Muir
[00:19:03] S0: Yeah. The business has been inflecting in growth. I mean, we publicly launched the business just a few months ago. And we're tracking it, you know, 10 x quarter over quarter growth consistently going into q one of next year. That's a testament to the technology we've developed and that we've brought to market in a very intuitive user experience. So we're seeing inflection in platform utilization, inflection in weekly active users, inflection in net revenue growth, in retention expansion. So that's really exciting. This is the first inning. This is the first at bat in the first inning. We are literally just getting started. So starting with prefunding workflows, so due diligence of private markets, investment opportunities, that's private credit and private equity, commercial banking. From there, we go into portfolio monitoring where you do the deal, now you gotta monitor at a quarterly basis. We can do that agentically. We can have the first AI native portfolio monitoring solution that's directly integrated in a unified platform experience with the underwriting product. And then from there, well, if you wanna talk, you know, long term, once we have thousands of enterprise clients leveraging the product, we can start syndicating deals directly on the platform. And so when I think long term, how does it become a $100,000,000,000 publicly traded business in the next handful of years? It's going from providing the plumbing to do deals more efficiently, to actually brokering and syndicating those deals directly on the platform, which will be what, you know, what comes next.