Financial Modeler's Corner
00:32:32 · Ian Schnoor, Giles Male, Paul Barnhurst
[00:32:32] S3: A lot of you... I mean, you are obviously aware of other firms, ancillary peripheral firms, whatever to you that are not around today. They were around a year ago. You are clearly you are clearly hurdled, a number of critical hurdles by now. I think that's phenomenal, and I think the market will be better off with your success. And, and so we're excited to continue hearing about how you are doing and performing. Giles? [00:33:01] S4: A couple of things that jumped out to me, I think, already is number one, your excitement at new LLMs, which I suppose I'd never really thought about and I forgot what the second one was. My memory now, I'm in my forties, is [00:33:15] S3: You got too excited. [00:33:16] S4: Truly shocking. The second one was better as well. Paul, I'll hand it to you. I'll think about it. I'll I'll I'll figure it out. [00:33:22] S2: Thanks for that moment, Giles. That was helpful. No worries. [00:33:25] S3: For that seniors moment, that was great. I know. 42. [00:33:30] S4: 42. What was the second one? It's great.
00:33:30 · Giles Male, Paul Barnhurst
[00:33:30] S4: 42. What was the second one? It's great. [00:33:32] S2: Well, you keep thinking. I would love to know... I know you guys have added the product. Are there other tools you plan to go into expansion? You've mostly been focused, as you mentioned, kind of the due diligence, the modeling, whether it's helping with the, you know, memos in Word or research there and PowerPoint, and I think Excel are the three three main ones you have right now. Are you planning on expanding beyond that to helping with, you know, these valuations, these very specific niches? Is it always gonna be kinda that finance area in consulting? Or do you look to go to other areas, or are you looking to add more apps? Or how are you thinking, as you call this, a platform, kind of that growth play as you continue to scale and grow and want it to be more used?
00:34:17 · Peter Fuller
[00:34:17] S1: You know, I don't think it will be growth in terms of more add ins. Right? I mean, maybe there'll be an Outlook add in or something down the line, but I I don't think that will be the main vector. Right? I think the the main growth will happen within our our web app. Right? And so this is actually the central place where more and more we expect users will will be doing most of their work. Right? And, you know, actually, I think, you know, you'll still want the Excel add in and the PowerPoint add in for the for the last mile. But I think that's gonna decline in importance. Right? As the LLMs get better and better, I don't think you're gonna be wanting to spend so much time hunting through cells. Right? You you... You're gonna you're gonna kind of... You're gonna have a system that, you know, gets that done correctly and shows you that it's been done correctly, and then you're just gonna want to think at a higher level of abstraction. Same thing has happened in in in coding. Right? And so I expect the growth to be growth in usage in our web app. Right? Where, you know, it's essentially a project workspace. You have all of your input files, you know, all of your agents and chats and all of the outputs that you're creating. We can sync it with SharePoints and, you know, you can send emails from there. You can bring in emails and Teams messages, etcetera. And we... You know, this will be the central hub for how these projects are run. Right? And and so that that... That's where I do expect to see the growth. In terms of users, I mean, I... You know, we still have a lot of, you know, a lot more people to serve in our kind of core areas. Right? So like I mentioned, valuations and modeling, FTD, CDD, these... You know, and and the investors and bankers that these are these are the people that we serve. But, you know, we we also do have users in audit now. Right? And they love it too. We have users in tax, and that's going really well. So I think those would be the kind of slightly adjacent, user bases that we'd look to expand into.
00:36:14 · Ian Schnoor, Paul Barnhurst, Peter Fuller
[00:36:14] S3: Yeah. I've got a question that might be a little bit crazy, but tell me what you think about it. I mean, often companies that are succeeding in one part of a vertical at some point get worried because of the, because they... They're part of a chain. Is there any merit in discussion? Is there any feasibility one day to abandoning the existing frontier models and creating your own or somehow leveraging your own so that you don't... I mean, you've just said you're excited when a new model comes out, which is great. But there's also presumably some risk that that that that they can change their mind. I mean, it's conceivable, I guess, that, I don't know, maybe they'll find ways to restrict firms like you from using their tools. Like, is there is there a future where you don't have to rely on them at all and you can create your own Frontier LLM or is that It's... [00:37:04] S2: It [00:37:05] S1: never say never. Right? I think I think there is a risk there. It's not a it's not a risk today. [00:37:15] S3: I I think it would [00:37:16] S1: be a risk that we'd be thinking about maybe a few years from now. But, you know, as... You know, OpenAI just did it to Casa. Right? Got them off got them off from their models. And that was a [00:37:32] S3: Is that... Would that be going down all
00:37:32 · Ian Schnoor, Peter Fuller
[00:37:32] S3: Is that... Would that be going down all [00:37:34] S1: That that that... You know, it's it's it's it's plausible. It's plausible that that could happen. I think you have seen vertical startups build their own models. I I say it like... It's like quite unquote build their own models. It's like do a lot of post training on on kind of open source basis. And I think I think the cursor guys did a did a really, really good job at that. Right? I think composer is a is a really strong model series. I like... If I look at our internal, like, coding model usage, I think there there was quite a lot of composer. I think that's actually now mostly been replaced by grok. So, you know, people get fable to do the kind of like big hard planning and thinking and then they use Grok to to do the work. But I think the Harvey guys are training their own model. I think usually when people do that, the first reason is is actually cost. Right? So your your job is to get your customers the very best ROI on on every token that they use with you. Right? And I I think it's extremely unlikely that you're going to train a model that is gonna be you know, at the frontier in terms of pure capability. Right? I think that that is the that is the lab's job. But it is possible, right, with enough data and enough expertise that you can, you know, train a model that is on the on the Pareto frontier. Right? And even if, you know... But but it's, like, much more efficient. I, you know, I won't commit firmly to it, but I think there's a there's a there's a world to do that.
00:39:09 · Ian Schnoor, Paul Barnhurst, Giles Male
[00:39:09] S3: Cool. No. No. I can't expect anyone in this space to commit firmly about anything beyond dinner tonight. So, I mean, I... Even even that's a stretch. Right, Giles? But I, I, you know, I have no idea. That's hours away. Anything could happen before then for me. [00:39:24] S2: Yeah. Was gonna say if you did commit, we would have been wondering. [00:39:26] S3: Yeah. Right. I... Well, no. That would be helpful to think about that. I'm... I I know you must have been thinking about it because, of course, as a responsible company, you're thinking about all the potential future, permutations and what the potential risks are and what does that mean and where do we allocate our resources. I mean, you'd be no different than anybody else. So I'm sure you are. But, anyway, I just was curious to know what the major bottlenecks would be. Anyway, you've given a great answer. I appreciate it. And it's been fascinating to have a small window into your world, and your lens right now. So, Paul [00:40:00] S4: I remembered my second question. [00:40:01] S3: No. You did. Come on. You did. Wow. [00:40:04] S4: I remembered it. [00:40:04] S3: See, just takes a few minutes sometimes.