Finscale in English
00:01:01 · Solenne Niedercorn, Charlie Tafoya
[00:01:01] S1: There's still a long way to go to transform the PE industry, which still relies on Excel for many tasks. These manual processes are a golden opportunity for anyone looking to innovate in the industry and help the constellation of players in this ecosystem improve their efficiency and better serve their clients. I reached out to Chronograph because I am well aware of the work they've been doing for years to streamline data management, analytics and reporting. This US based solution offers a portfolio monitoring software that makes life easier for private equity investors across the globe. Charlie shares with us their story and how the initially LP focused offering naturally expanded to GPs. We discuss the solution and the specific problems it addresses, one of the three essential pillars of the PE stack. Enjoy the show. Hello, everyone. Hi, Charlie. [00:01:55] S2: Good morning. How are you doing? [00:01:57] S1: Yeah, I'm fine. I'm thrilled to have you as guests on my podcast. And the listeners know, I'm a huge fan of private assets. So I'm very happy that we're again diving into the topic and to talk about the behind the scenes of Chronograph. Before we dive into the topic, can I ask you to introduce yourself to the listeners and explain a little bit your professional experience and your past to Chronograph?
00:02:25 · Charlie Tafoya, Solenne Niedercorn
[00:02:25] S2: Certainly. Well, thank you again for having me. I'm Charlie Tafoya, Co Founder and CEO of Chronograph. Started my career as an investment banker actually, so something that may be familiar to you. Did my few years as an analyst and then subsequent to that went into private equity with Pantheon, which is a London based fund of funds. And at Pantheon, I did secondaries private equity. There, really got to see across the market and at a stage when the secondaries market was really just beginning. So I think the first year I was at Pantheon, the total GMV of the market was something like 10 to 12,000,000,000. Today, that's over 100,000,000,000, so it's just growing dramatically. But to the point, would say that it was a very interesting time coming out of the global financial crisis. And you saw a lot of fund restructurings and capitalizations and just raw secondary portfolio deals. And in short, it's a very interesting advantage on the business of private equity as a whole. As part of that experience, I would say that a few things stood out. One is that really there was more data than I ever expected there to be. That data had tremendous value, certainly in what we were doing, but just more broadly across the market. But felt very strongly that unfortunately there weren't very great technology tools to take advantage of that information. So that was really the context that provided the genesis for Chronograph itself. [00:03:40] S1: Perfect. And when did you found your company?
00:03:40 · Solenne Niedercorn, Charlie Tafoya
[00:03:40] S1: Perfect. And when did you found your company? [00:03:43] S2: In 2016. I actually left my job on a Friday, got married on a Saturday, and started hacking away on Monday. So it was a heck of a turnaround. And my father-in-law didn't even know that I had left my job on the altar quite literally. So, yeah, it's a lot of life changes all at once. [00:03:59] S1: Good. Okay, so the listeners, there are amongst my listeners LPs and GPs. And some may have encountered challenges in their daily management, of course. But I don't have only LPs and GPs of private equity funds on the podcast. So I'm sure it's interesting for the others to shed light on the number of bottlenecks, particularly in terms of data management that they are facing on the day to day. That can have huge impact on investor relations, but also regulatory compliance. So how would you say data fragmentation, as you said, and the management of that data can pose challenges for the LPs and the GPs to maintain that unified overview of investment portfolios, but not only?
00:04:46 · Charlie Tafoya
[00:04:46] S2: Yeah, so I think the first comment I would make is that private markets are in effect at the state of public markets, or at least where they were in about, call it 1986, which is to say if you go all the way back to the '80s and think about the average experience of public company reporting, either you had to go down to a repository for filings and actually check out a filing, have literally a paper spreadsheet, do some computations, check the file back in, and then go try to do your deal. Or if you're at one of the bigger banks, maybe you had this new platform called Bloomberg or just a computer or computers in general. So all this to say that, certainly, we're beyond paper spreadsheets happily in private equity, but you're still dealing fundamentally with a lack of infrastructure around how information is distributed and consumed. You're dealing with the lack of standardization around how that information is reported and, again, interpreted. And you're still seeing evolving norms around the sharing of information as a whole. Now I think that, to be clear, that's totally appropriate. Right? I don't think that public and private practices and public and private markets should ultimately converge. I mean, there's certainly some trends that will cause a degree of convergence. But just speaking as, you know, the CEO of a a private company and former private equity investor, I do think that there's a lot of value to the way in which private equity broadly operates. Having said that, I think, you know, we are in 2024 now. There is a need for more digitalization as a whole. And as a result, you know, I think we're really seeing a lot of opportunity, obviously, as Chronograph to help move the industry forward. So all this to say, you're facing these fundamental issues, and really those are the issues that we've tried to tackle in turn in the form of SaaS applications for both LPs and GPs to again collect structure and ultimately report and consume their information, you know, taking a opinionated view of things like the data model that's required to have something that's flexible enough to address all sub strategies within private capital, industries, you know, that folks might invest in, etcetera. And then do that in a way, again, that can really provide a foundation to bring further opportunity to the asset class as a whole.
00:06:53 · Charlie Tafoya, Solenne Niedercorn
Things like providing more information that can unlock and find contribution as an asset creates, etcetera. There's many things happening in parallel and short that, again, gives me a lot of optimism that we are reaching a good place and balance for the industry as a whole relative to, again, sort of where it began, know, going back to, call it, even 2008 when obviously you saw the first normative shift, which we can get into in a bit. [00:07:17] S1: And if we focus more particularly on the reporting, there are some many, many different reporting that those LPs and GPs need to produce, particularly for their investors, so on both sides. How did you see this evolving over the years? I see it becoming more and more complex also if we add in addition to that all the reporting linked with ESG. So, if we could summarize the complexities of producing these reports, could you just give us a flavor of that complexity and explain to us how in general, those managers are tackling those problems.
00:07:56 · Charlie Tafoya
[00:07:56] S2: Certainly. Well, for a bit of quick history here, I mentioned that 2008 was sort of an inflection point. And that's true in many different forms, obviously, given the global financial crisis. But as it relates to private equity information, I would say that for the first time, LPs were really empowered to drive new levels of disclosure from GPs. Prior to this, really only the very largest funds would provide any level of true transparency at the underlying company level, meaning that the assets themselves and how they're fundamentally performing, their approaches to valuation, etcetera. More than normal simply to report your basically partnership financials and gap accounts and folks can know in effect what is the return that they're achieving. But they didn't have a very good sense of exposure and again, underlying drivers of performance. That really started to change in 2008. And I would say we were sort of in the second epoch, if you will, from that through 2020. And based on at least on our experience at Chronograph, March 2020 with COVID was really the next true inflection point in that you had a lot of folks with consumer exposures that were now suddenly having to revalue their portfolios, in many cases on a daily basis during the initial lockdowns. I mean, was just such a sense probably a free fall in that moment. And again, people really needed to understand what are the implications for our assets and exposures, And in short, those without the benefit of, in effect, structured information really found themselves without a paddle, which is to say, you know, they they really were caught in a hard place. So since 2020, I've not heard almost any investor try to argue that Excel is good enough. I think everybody broadly realizes the opportunity and benefits of having technology in place to assist with, as you noted, many of the evolving demands around data. But to the point, I would say that if you think of it as a soccer match, we're probably still in the first thirty minutes of play. We're probably at the thirty minute mark. So definitely still early, but happily, again, seeing a lot of normative shifts around, in particular, LP expectations with regard to GP data and technology competency. That's true even for first time managers. We're seeing this in DDQs.