00:15:24 · Charlie Tafoya, Solenne Niedercorn
But from there, I would just say in short, we put our heads down and really started grinding for candidly a number of years to really build up the trust in the market and build up against sales motion and everything else that goes into selling software in this space. I'm gonna have to send them this episode because hopefully they'll love the shout out. But our first client was Pacific Life. And I think what's notable is that they were the first client of Investran back in the day, became the main accounting system actually in the private equity space for many years. So yeah, doing something right out there in Newport Beach. But we're very grateful to their early trust. In fact, they gave us some of our really great early feedback that still informs our product to this day. And they've been one of many great partners and clients that we've managed to build over time, noting that today we actually manage over $20,000,000,000,000 in gross assets on the platforms in very significant scale and candidly a bit of a who's who on the LP and GP side around clients and quality clients at that. [00:16:26] S1: I guess you went to bigger and bigger clients, correct? So what was your strategy in the beginning and how it happened in real life?
00:16:34 · Charlie Tafoya
[00:16:34] S2: Well, I think Pacific Life certainly has a decently sized program. I mean, to the point that they're very large insurer, right? And so regardless of the size of the program, there was a lot of realities that we certainly encountered, which were to say things like information security reviews, vendor and contracting processes, stakeholder buy in, again, all the things that actually go into the sale of software. And so being able to navigate that really set a high bar from the outset around overall process competency. And so as a result, actually our second client was APG, the public scheme of The Netherlands, which is the largest public pension plan in Europe. Again, very sophisticated and candidly complicated process to get that sale done. But that really, I would say, set the tone for how we approach the market. So we had the benefit of really starting at the most sophisticated end ultimately. Can go through a number of names in due course here. But in short, yeah, would say we really benefited from securing many of the very largest LPs as clients and then have worked since that time to expand across the AUM spectrum. I think what's important to note is that we actually started exclusively as a provider to LPs. That was really where we saw the biggest and most immediate disconnect in available technology. But it was in late twenty eighteen heading into 2019 where we saw the opportunity to naturally extend into the GP space. As previously mentioned, very different problem set in that, again, it's more workflow and data collection oriented. But we had already solved for a number of technology complexities around things like the data model itself, as mentioned. We need something that can address basically all forms of investment. The fundamental infrastructure, noting that again in the case of an LP, you're probably talking about tens of thousands of underlying companies, hundreds if not thousands of funds, etcetera. In short, we had to have highly performant tech. And so for us, it was really an opportunity to take in effect the back end, if you will, and build a new front end that was serving a different a different use case, but again, with the same sort of concept in place and again, the same infrastructure in place. But that was that was the approach that we took and, again, had a lot of success out of the gate.
00:18:43 · Charlie Tafoya, Solenne Niedercorn
You know, one of our first clients on the GP side was actually the SoftBank Vision Fund, which was, you know, it's obviously a huge huge program and and highly voluminous program. Again, sort of demonstrating our competency, if you will, at the enterprise end of the market. And then obviously in 2019, the Carlyle Group invested in Chronograph and became a client as well, which which is something that we're very, very excited by Carlyle in addition to Nasdaq. So happy to provide more background, but that was sort of how we came to market as you noted. [00:19:13] S1: Perfect. So you mentioned already several times that you were serving, you were initially serving LPs and then you expanded the model to GPs. Could you take typical use cases? So I have in mind Carlyle. Carlyle is one of your clients and Montana Capital, maybe you can select others and explain to us what problem you're solving concretely for them.
00:19:32 · Charlie Tafoya
[00:19:32] S2: Certainly. So at the highest level, it's really about realizing and enforcing your data rights as a general partner. If you look at the solutions that existed prior to Chronograph coming to market, they were largely template based, meaning that, you know, you would have, in effect, a middle office team that would distribute a template to an underlying portfolio company. They would fill that in and send it back, and then you could, in effect, consume that information and report out as needed. You know, I'd be candid in saying that at Chronograph, we're pretty skeptical of templates on both the LP and GP sides. I think templates are very limiting in the degree of fidelity that they provide. Right? I mean, because they're predefined, it actually reduces flexibility to provide more information that you might otherwise might receive in things like a quarterly report, etcetera. But they're also not the source material that often the investment teams themselves are looking to. Meaning that, you know, if you sit on a board as an investment professional, you're looking at board decks, you know, audited financials, you know, memos and emails and so forth, ensure unstructured information that actually provides the richest context. So what we've delivered at Chronograph is a tool set that can take advantage of all the type of information. So, you know, taking in, again, any form of unstructured information. You have templates, sure, great. You know, we'll take those in as well. But then we can extend that further into qualitative information, meaning things to your point, like ESG surveys, like regulatory and compliance surveys, etcetera. But in short, giving general partners in this case the ability to query their portfolio companies in any way they see fit and in any way they see appropriate for the nature of the relationship, meaning control or non control, take that information in, again, structure in a way that makes it now useful for things like evaluation or things like your LP reports or other internal monitoring with other constituencies, etcetera, and having a single... Truly a single source of truth that you can look to to understand at any given point in time how does this company perform both quantitatively and qualitatively.
00:21:30 · Charlie Tafoya, Solenne Niedercorn
And now having something that's validated, just so you can again make use of that in any way you need far into the future. [00:21:36] S1: Charlie, I would be keen on discovering with you the way you built your products. And yes, can you describe your team, your tech team? We heard and we felt from the beginning that you're a tech savvy company. So yeah, it would be great having more details about this. [00:21:53] S2: Absolutely. We do everything in house at Chronograph. We don't outsource anything. And this is something that we felt strongly about since really day one. It really helps that we have two technical founders and that we can get in there and read the code alongside folks. And we even chose to base the company here in Brooklyn so we can attract creative folks who wanna do something a little bit different. We have to teach them what private equity is often because you don't find many devs who have a natural understanding of private capital markets. But that's something that we've developed as a competency is really an ability to take extremely high performing, really A plus developers, each in the business of private equity and deliver differentiated solutions. So we felt pretty strongly about being based in Brooklyn just again as a sort of different approach to approaching this problem. But even more so, again, as developers ourselves, we felt very strongly about keeping things in house so that we can always be delivering incredibly high quality coded and solutions to our clients at the end of the day.
00:21:53 · Charlie Tafoya, Solenne Niedercorn
[00:21:53] S2: Absolutely. We do everything in house at Chronograph. We don't outsource anything. And this is something that we felt strongly about since really day one. It really helps that we have two technical founders and that we can get in there and read the code alongside folks. And we even chose to base the company here in Brooklyn so we can attract creative folks who wanna do something a little bit different. We have to teach them what private equity is often because you don't find many devs who have a natural understanding of private capital markets. But that's something that we've developed as a competency is really an ability to take extremely high performing, really A plus developers, each in the business of private equity and deliver differentiated solutions. So we felt pretty strongly about being based in Brooklyn just again as a sort of different approach to approaching this problem. But even more so, again, as developers ourselves, we felt very strongly about keeping things in house so that we can always be delivering incredibly high quality coded and solutions to our clients at the end of the day. [00:22:51] S1: Great. So you are serving and there you have a team in Europe, so you're serving different continents. How do you integrate and how far do you go in integrating local specificities and when it comes particularly to, I don't know, GDPR in Europe or regulatory conformity with regard to sustainable finance, how far do you go in those adaptations?