Financial Modeler's Corner
00:04:24 · Peter Fuller
[00:04:24] S1: Yeah. For sure. So I started working with Alex and Janek in mid twenty twenty four. So our backgrounds, I mean, I've just told you mine. Alex, our CTO, was a software engineer at Jane Street before Tracelight. And before that, he was at at Cambridge, which is where he met Janek. So Janek's a machine guy. He did that at Cambridge and then did that in a bank for a while. So we got together and we were exploring different ideas, actually. I think it'd be fun to kind of build AI for Excel. At that point, no one was doing it. Right? There was this funny little research paper from Microsoft. It wasn't anyone significant at Microsoft, but the research paper basically said, like, yeah, LLMs have a really hard time with two dimensional data structures in general, obviously, including spreadsheets. But if you were going to kind of represent a spreadsheet to an LLM, this is kind of how you might think about it, how you do it. That's where we started. Alex implemented that over the course of a few days, and obviously, we built on it very significantly. And, yeah, the sort of the key thing for us at the beginning, which is now completely irrelevant, by the way, we've actually thrown out the database entirely. Right? This is the journey for many AI startups. But the key thing for us was that middleware, I guess, between the spreadsheet and the LLM that made the problem more comprehensible to kind of GPT-4 at the time. And we really built from there. I mean, our motivation to build for financial models in the first place, I'm sure you guys would agree with this. Right? It's like, you know, I feel like people build financial models whenever they have a really big and important decision to make. Right? And we're very ambitious. Right? We wanna make our mark on the world, and we wanna build a company that helps the biggest and most important decisions get made. And so since kind of launching that Excel agent, we've really expanded the product. You know, we're now really kind of all in one AI workspace for our customers. So they can do all of their work in Tracelight. It's like a central web app, and we have add ins to all of the Microsoft Office Suite. But, obviously, we still have that heritage as an Excel company. Right? So, you know, we're really, really outperforming in kind of spreadsheets and spreadsheet related tasks. So, yeah, that's been the journey.
00:06:22 · Paul Barnhurst, Giles Male, Peter Fuller
[00:06:22] S2: Alright. I'll let Giles are in, ask some questions so I don't hog all the mic. [00:06:25] S4: I got a... Just an initial thought when you were describing... Is it Yanik you're saying you're the other founder, machine learning at Cambridge. I can imagine somebody like that must look around now at all the AI experts popping up left, right and center and just be like, good God, you know, machine learning Cambridge. I said this some some point, like a year ago, was like, there is a world of actual, like, AI experts. He must be so annoyed with this. [00:06:55] S1: I don't think Yannick feels that way about you guys, but he definitely did about me, I think, at the at the beginning, for sure. I think I've learned this. [00:07:01] S4: You won him over. [00:07:03] S1: No. He's he's an incredible guy. Right? So he has this, obviously, deeply technical backgrounds. But, you know, he also loves, like, front end and, like, design. He's just, like, unicorn of an engineer who can do the kind of ins and outs of machine learning, but also loves an interface. And and also, you know, a lot of building with LLMs is is not very sexy. Right? Like, it's... You know, so it is a lot of prompt prompt engineering. Right? It certainly was. And it's a lot of evals and there's a lot of hill climbing and and you need a kind of tenacity and a certain mindset to be really, really good at that and and Giles has that. Right? So it's... Yeah. I think he's very, very well suited to to what we do. [00:07:50] S4: I've got another question, but I I don't wanna take over. Go for Ian.
00:07:50 · Giles Male, Ian Schnoor, Paul Barnhurst
[00:07:50] S4: I've got another question, but I I don't wanna take over. Go for Ian. [00:07:53] S3: No. Go ahead, Giles. You go ahead. You can get five in a row. The [00:07:57] S2: I'll take it. I'm gonna limit you. [00:07:59] S4: I don't know if this is jumping ahead to, like, the meat of what we're gonna get into, but, obviously, I guess what was interesting for us when we started last year with the Mod Squad, we tested Tracelight first and a bunch of other tools. And then suddenly, you know, Microsoft came out with their first agent in web and and Anthropic did all of this. I'd be really intrigued to hear what that journey's been like for you. And and I guess, like, for me, did you expect those, you know, the LLM providers like Anthropic and OpenAI and Microsoft to do what they did when they did it? Or was it a bit of a pride?
00:08:34 · Peter Fuller
[00:08:34] S1: Yeah. No. No. That's that's... I have to be intellectually honest about this because I actually went back to a memo that I wrote to raise our our seed round back... Way back in the day. And rereading that memo, it's clear that I didn't expect Anthropic and OpenAI to launch and add in to Microsoft x... Excel. Right? Of course, I talked about collapse, but I I I just didn't think that was a likely product direction. I was obviously completely wrong about that. Like, clearly, I expected Microsoft to. But, you know, like, there's a few things going on there. Like one, when big labs launch products like that, yeah, of course, it's it's easy to be scared. It's also very, very validating actually for what you do and you just get orders of magnitude more attention in your space. Right? So Anthropic in particular launching, Claude for Excel was a huge moment for all of us. Right? And it was actually, it was fantastic for sales and I, you know, it's not like everyone goes like, oh, okay, we'll just dump Tracelight and we'll go and use Anthropic. It was like quite the opposite. Everyone got interested in in Excel. Right? So that was really good actually. And like the core argument for us, which remains the case to this day and slightly expanded form is that the needs of the top 1% of users, right, are different from the needs of the other billion people using Excel. And that's that's still true. So that's very much us as a as a company. We have no ambition to go fight Microsoft and Anthropic for the for the billion users. We'll fight them on the 10,000,000.
00:10:17 · Ian Schnoor
[00:10:17] S3: That's awesome. And listen, we're... We love we love supporting the, the startup and the and the little guy as it will against the $5,000,000,000,000 market cap. And this... And we love Microsoft too. Right? I mean, at FMI, we've got a wonderful partnership with Microsoft, but we love the innovation that comes out of, nimble, creative, small, hungry organizations. I mean, we all work at... You know, and run small, nimble, hungry organizations. So we're... So we love that. But, you know, we've... We talked a year ago. I don't remember if you remember, guys, that it felt like at the time last year that we were in the early stages of the auto industry. We remember that in the early nineteen hundreds, there were... We didn't remember this. Paul might have remembered this, but Giles and I just just read the research on it that back in the early nineteen hundreds, there were about 3,000 carmakers in The US, and that quickly got condensed down either through consolidation or just, you know, companies just evaporating, and not making it. And we've already seen both extremes in the agentic AI space with spreadsheets. I mean, it's a couple of the companies that we interviewed and that we that we tested in early days are gone. They just they just threw in the towel. And others seem to have taken a more niche approach and said, you know what? We are gonna focus on this niche and this target and this particular subset that we don't think we don't think the big folks will either focus on or they can't do as good a job on. And I'm just wondering. I mean, as Giles... Just to build a follow on to Giles' question, what is your plan or strategy to, you know, ensure survival and growth? Because as you said, I mean, it... Most people have discovered it doesn't really make sense to go against head to head against Microsoft. So so what's what's what's the plan? I'd love to know how you're planning to develop something, you know, or what you're doing to develop some niche.
00:12:10 · Peter Fuller, Giles Male, Paul Barnhurst
[00:12:10] S1: Yeah. Well, call me an idiot, but I actually am fine going head to head against Microsoft. Like, in my my in my user base, I'm... I have vast respect for Microsoft. Do I think they're a good product organization? No. I do not. Do I think Copilot is a good product? No. I do not. I think it's actually... And I'm sorry if if if you guys have allegiances there, but I think it's Honor. [00:12:40] S4: Honor. Let it let it out. I I was what everything you're about to say. I [00:12:45] S1: remain shocked by how bad it is. Right? [00:12:50] S2: I've... Anyway, I won't