First Time Founders with Ed Elson – Could this AI Founder Replace Investment Bankers?

Founder says AI will automate banking grunt work, not bankers

Rogo is building an AI tool for finance professionals, and its founder argues it will take over drudge work rather than bankers' jobs. Past technology created jobs, and culture and regulation set the pace of change. Its edge is licensed financial data with cited sources. The company is still early, so persistence matters more than money.

Takeaways

• Stengel says AI will augment, not replace, bankers. Bankers would welcome automation of PowerPoint and Excel work, and Rogo makes people smarter. He points to ATMs, after which bank teller numbers rose for three decades, and argues technology has historically created jobs.
• Culture and regulation shape how fast jobs vanish. Ed cites The End of Work and Andrew Yang's robot warnings. Stengel notes economists a century ago expected a fifteen-hour week, yet the US week fell only from about 44 to 41 hours. Regulation, not capability, keeps many jobs human.
• Licensed financial data separates Rogo from ChatGPT. Rogo licenses data from providers such as FactSet and S&P Global, ingests SEC filings from EDGAR, and cites sources for every answer. It can run quick earnings updates, benchmark net revenue retention quarterly, and compare ten years of a firm's Chewy models.
• Before product-market fit, willpower is the scarce resource. Stengel cites Jack Altman's argument that willpower, not money, runs out first. He says Rogo is nowhere close to a successful company and plans ten more experiments over three months before reconsidering.
• Galloway says raise big, spend with discipline. Raising a lot of money does not mean a company deserves it. Red Envelope raised $60m from Sequoia and Western Presidio and then spent aggressively. Galloway says overfunded companies struggle and some boards he sits on overspend.
• Stengel values his people over his biggest customers. Rogo had 18 employees, aiming for 50 by year end, and Stengel says he is still learning to manage. He would rather lose his five biggest customers than his five best people.
• Founder life leaves little room for friendships. Stengel works six days a week with cofounder and COO John Willett, a close college friend, and they rarely socialize now. Kevin Ryan told him to accept he can do only 20 percent of his work.

Rogo's path to a seed round

1. As a Princeton student, Stengel pitched a pitch deck tool to Credit Suisse and was dismissed. He later spent about two years at Lazard, working on M&A and in the data group.
2. Rogo was first prototyped with older natural language techniques, before ChatGPT existed, and avoided the word AI.