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?
00:23:15 · Charlie Tafoya
[00:23:15] S2: Well, there's there a couple of questions in there. So one, our client base probably reflects the total distribution of private capital, which is to say about 65% of private capital's whole states in North America, 35% ex North America. And our client base is basically exactly that. We have clients across all regions globally, very big presence in Asia, which is great. Great presence in Europe and The UK. To your point, we have a team based in London as our second office. And, yeah, we've actually been global really from the earliest days. And so in short, we've always had to consider, you know, the global context in its totality, which is to say, to your point, different regulatory regimes with regard to technology, different types of users and user norms, etcetera. And so, you know, call me a globalist, but, we very much, appreciate the fact that we, again, do have a highly distributed client base. And, again, these are sort of, at the end of the day, actually routine considerations for us. One thing I would stress is that we deal exclusively with private information. So for us, issues of security, as you can imagine, confidentiality, and ultimately privacy have always been core to our brand. And I think there's simply no opportunity for deviation from that because, again, it is what we do, which is to say, administrate and help administrate private information.
00:24:31 · Solenne Niedercorn
[00:24:31] S1: Okay. And when you're thinking of the future and particularly technological innovations within your company, Which one or which ones would you say are the most impactful for your clients?
00:24:44 · Charlie Tafoya
[00:24:44] S2: There's the invoked two letter word of AI, which everybody's talking about quite a bit. In fact, I just got back from speaking to her in Europe discussing AI and its implications for portfolio monitoring and and private equity broadly. So, you know, just as a technologist, how can one not be excited by the opportunities that AI presents? But when it comes to AI, I think, you know, what we're urging is a bit of candidly sobriety and caution with regard to what's achievable today. It's been incredible to see the rate of change of the solutions that have come to market. I think that's the thing that, you know, we're monitoring most closely is how do how do these solutions and capabilities continue to evolve? Because if simply linearly project, again, it's gonna be striking to see where we're at in two or three years. But today, the reality is that they can't generate alpha on their own. I really don't... I haven't seen anything personally that really I would view as being sufficient and actually providing differentiated insights around how a given asset or portfolio will perform. At the end of the day, underlying performance is a function of human phenomena, repeating behavior, all these, again, qualitative factors that go into actually building a great business or finding a great investment. And so I think where we see the most relevant applications of AI in this moment are around creative uses, which candidly are a little fewer in private equity, but more to the point, productivity uses. And so things like summarization of diligence information or summarization of other long form content you may be getting, noting that, again, LPs receive thousands and thousands of PDFs and reports in any given quarter. And so that's where, you know, we're spending our resources when it comes to integrating AI. Again, that is something that we're quite excited by. But to the point, I think we are... Yeah. I just think realistic around what, you know, what the capability... Actually applicable capabilities are today. But beyond that, beyond AI, which again is is certainly a very in vogue topic, you know, I would just say that to return to some of my opening comments, we're still in the early innings for private equity digitalization as a whole.
00:26:47 · Charlie Tafoya, Solenne Niedercorn
And so for anybody listening out there who has a firm or is part of a firm, I would just say it really starts with getting your data architecture and governance models in place to begin with. How are you gonna administrate data? What tools are you using? Again, what is the governance model for that? Meaning, who can update what and when, etcetera. And happily, there's very strong patterns that have formed, I think, in the industry as as previously mentioned. And there's a lot of consultants out there certainly who can give you great advice on that point. Once you have that architecture in place, you you need... You really need to integrate it into your process. Right? Ensuring that you're moving beyond, again, sort of manual aggregation in Excel to take advantage of these great new capabilities that a number of folks can offer now. And, you know, once you've done that, then you begin to build the foundation of a dataset that then can be used for, you know, different applications, whether analytics or AI driven use cases, etcetera. But until you have that infrastructure in place and you have that integrated into your process, I would say don't try to leapfrog because you're gonna be leapfrogging off the cliff with, you know, no no true support in place. So, we'll pause there, but I think that's how we, view the world today. [00:28:01] S1: Great. So what are your next steps?