Generative Now | AI Builders on Creating the Future
00:23:15 · Mike Mignano, Gabe Stengel
[00:23:15] S0: Got it. Makes sense. Did you have that capability on your team? Like how do you go about solving for that? I mean, are you hiring CISO? And yeah, tell us about it. [00:23:25] S1: You figure it out. I mean, it's like all of these things. You trial by fire. Can you execute? Bring in the expertise where necessary. Otherwise, you know, like a lot of engineering problems, you can think about them from first principles and there's a lot of resources. And you can, you know, work with your partners and stakeholders to solve them. [00:23:43] S0: But it's interesting. Like you said, it slows you down. And the name of the game, it feels like right now for all AI startups is speed. I mean, we even talked about it early on. In order for a company like Rogo to succeed, you've gotta race far enough ahead of the model providers before they decide that finance is actually a vertical they care about. How do you balance that? How do you move fast in a world where the cost of moving fast and making a mistake in your industry is really, really high? [00:24:13] S1: I mean, we move slower than if we were a consumer company, for sure, from a feature perspective. Like you just have to. I mean, it's a sort of a, you know, threading the needle constantly and thinking about trade offs constantly and allocating as much bandwidth as you can to all your problems at the same time and just staying disciplined. There's no, you know, there's no silver bullet for execution. It's execution.
00:24:13 · Gabe Stengel, Mike Mignano
[00:24:13] S1: I mean, we move slower than if we were a consumer company, for sure, from a feature perspective. Like you just have to. I mean, it's a sort of a, you know, threading the needle constantly and thinking about trade offs constantly and allocating as much bandwidth as you can to all your problems at the same time and just staying disciplined. There's no, you know, there's no silver bullet for execution. It's execution. [00:24:36] S0: Yeah, totally. It's tough. I mean, it's crazy the pace of innovation and shipping you're seeing from startups right now. And it seems like it's just by necessity, right?
00:24:36 · Mike Mignano, Gabe Stengel
[00:24:36] S0: Yeah, totally. It's tough. I mean, it's crazy the pace of innovation and shipping you're seeing from startups right now. And it seems like it's just by necessity, right? [00:24:47] S1: Yeah. Well, and it's also thinking about, look, if I was a horizontal company, like let's take a glean, you have different trade offs. And you say, hey, am I willing to build an on prem version or a cloud prem version or build in this security stuff? Probably not because I'm racing more against ChatuchPet and I'm gonna be slower to these other verticals. Whereas if you're a finance company and the race is to get into the largest financial institutions, well, focusing on security is actually the thing that allows you to move faster and get into customers' hands rather than the thing that's slowing you down. And so it depends on what sort of company you are. And for us, it's all about the trade off of like, you know, is this functionality and enterprise grade security actually a speed up in the near term and the long term? Or is it something that that's gonna slow us down? And I think for a company like OpenAI, like a lot of the security stuff is a slowdown, right? Because they're not competing with us selling into large investment banks. They're competing with, you know, Perplexity and Copilot and Anthropic to get to all consumers.
00:24:47 · Gabe Stengel, Mike Mignano
[00:24:47] S1: Yeah. Well, and it's also thinking about, look, if I was a horizontal company, like let's take a glean, you have different trade offs. And you say, hey, am I willing to build an on prem version or a cloud prem version or build in this security stuff? Probably not because I'm racing more against ChatuchPet and I'm gonna be slower to these other verticals. Whereas if you're a finance company and the race is to get into the largest financial institutions, well, focusing on security is actually the thing that allows you to move faster and get into customers' hands rather than the thing that's slowing you down. And so it depends on what sort of company you are. And for us, it's all about the trade off of like, you know, is this functionality and enterprise grade security actually a speed up in the near term and the long term? Or is it something that that's gonna slow us down? And I think for a company like OpenAI, like a lot of the security stuff is a slowdown, right? Because they're not competing with us selling into large investment banks. They're competing with, you know, Perplexity and Copilot and Anthropic to get to all consumers. [00:25:43] S0: Yeah, totally. So, okay. So now you've got a bunch of customers, you're post PMF. Walk us through maybe the day to day for some of your customers in terms of some use cases. Like the people that sit in rogo all day, like what are they doing today?
00:25:57 · Gabe Stengel
[00:25:57] S1: So I'll give you a great example, which is when I was an investment banking analyst and we were, you know, showing a bunch of great potential acquisitions to a large healthcare company, you would have a list of 10 company profiles in slides. And you would say, hey, look at, you know, this company, look at this biotech, look at this research company. And you would say, this is their CEO. This is what they focus on. This is why it's strategic to you. This is the, you know, what their snapshot financials look like. And that would take hours and hours and hours. One, because, you know, if I'm, let's take some random biotech name, maybe I'm looking at a company like Regeneron or Vertex. I don't know what they do. I'm an investment banking analyst. I'm not, you know, an oncology expert. And so it takes a while for you to read, synthesize, figure out what's in their R and D pipeline and write it up. In ROGO, you can say, hey, take these 10 companies, make 10 PowerPoint slide pages, and you can get an output in thirty seconds. And so that saves a huge amount of time. On the other end of the spectrum, not just junior bankers. I mean, there's senior investors and bankers who go in and instead of, you know, instead of having to ping an analyst on their team and say, hey, Gabe, I need a PIB on Datadog. They can just go into Rogue and say, hey, news run on Datadog. Okay, cool. What are they doing in this market? Why are they down in that market? What has their product focus been? What's their M and A strategy been? And just have a thread where they get answers that they can work with immediately and dive deeper instead of asking for some deliverables just to help them prepare for a meeting.
00:27:19 · Mike Mignano, Gabe Stengel
[00:27:19] S0: Yeah. That makes a lot of sense. The thing that people have been talking about across every industry, but also sort of finance and capital allocation is, you know, is AI going to replace X? What do you think of sort of the role of a product like Rogo in ultimately displacing sort of human powered work that it augments today? [00:27:40] S1: It's going to replace workflows. I don't think it's going to replace people. Yeah. In the same way that, you know, that workflow I describe of creating a PIB for my managing director. Ten years before me, you know, you would create the PIB and then you would go and print it out and bind it and go deliver it to your managing director's, you know, apartment at eleven p. M. So that they could read it in the morning. You're not doing the printout work. You're not doing the binding. You're not delivering it. [00:28:04] S0: Right. [00:28:05] S1: You're still working pretty hard. You've filled up your time with other things, right? Like, these are institutions that work hard. They wanna, you know, compete with each other. They're not trying to to rest on their, you know, rest on just healthier margins. There's gonna be more and more work. That said, it's gonna be different work, right? Like you might not spend as much time data cubing and preparing presentations in like, you know, in the thick of an Excel, and you might spend more time thinking about a company or a problem. You might spend more time meeting with stakeholders and founders and executives, forming those relationships.