00:35:09 · S4, Brett Caughran
[00:35:09] S4: Yeah. [00:35:10] S1: How do you think about selling to quants? I know like uh Tegus, for example, in the past had a lot of appetite from Quants to sell the API and they didn't because their view is you're sort of then turning further turning these alpha insights into beta at an execution speed. And maybe it's a little bit different here because there's each firm has their own agent, but there's been a big push to systematize fundamental investing in these qualitative insights, channel insights are a real key part of that. How do you think about that sort of quantitative or systematic um investor as a client?
00:35:47 · Sagar Kadakia
[00:35:47] S0: I think that's that's a that's a great question. So I I'm in the view of so I think earlier on in my career I was very much against things like APIs. I I was like, hey, we're not gonna sell to everyone. Um, you know, we're gonna cut off some people from access because then you know maybe they won't buy from from a firm like like Qualitate. Um, or hey, they're gonna have to work in our application. I think in today's age, if you do that, you don't have a business. You have to meet people where they are and you have to meet people in the strategy, right? You if you got to go headless, right? That's just where everything is going. That's where qualitate is going, right? Um and the alpha generation concept, right, is moving back to the firms because publicly available data at this point is worth zero. Um, right? Uh, everybody has the exact same information of what's available online. And so then the only uh alpha is the stuff that's in people's heads, right? And so uh that information is becoming more valuable. And there's a real orchestration layer of being able to pull all of this information in and actually generate insights and not like AI slop, right, on the outputs of this stuff. And so I think it's okay if people have information uh that is proprietary from us through an API or through a UI or through, frankly, whatever medium that they want to. It's ultimately what they do with that information, right? Two folks can have the exact same access to the qualitate library and they will almost certainly be making lots of different decisions because what other context are you feeding into your data warehouse? Are you doing short-term decision making, long-term decision making, right? All those types of things. And so um I'm not in the camp of uh um if we give access to a bunch of folks, the um uh uh the the alpha goes away because I think the alpha is ultimately up to the company on how they generate it.
00:37:50 · S3
[00:37:50] S3: Yeah, no, I was I was gonna ask if you could play that out like two years forward, you know, taking your AI crystal ball that we all you know have or purport to have. What happens when more and more calls become expert, uh AI generated? There's a limited supply of experts, um, you know, that the data becomes commoditized in its own way. Like, what does it do to alpha? What does it do to um the like the supply of experts, the cost of information?
00:38:22 · Sagar Kadakia
[00:38:22] S0: Yeah, that's a good question. Um I'm gonna give you guys like an example of of why this works. Um qualitate is in the business of generating net new information, right? That's what we do, right? We we we give people information that they can only get from talking to people, right? That's what primary research is. That's what that's what qualitate does. Um here's how this works in the in the qualitate world. Let's say uh you you have uh the qualitate API, you pulled out a bunch of, I don't know, cybersecurity uh discussions. Um historically, it has ended there. And so uh, Brett Caughran, I would agree with you from that standpoint where it's like, hey, if everyone's just pulling the exact same data, uh uh the value of that data may diminish. What happens now in the qualitate world, and what I'm seeing now, they pull down information into their into their warehouse, they commingle it with all the other information that they have, and everyone has different information. A set of questions get generated. Those questions will be different on every firm because the context is different. That passes into the interviewer, and now the interviewer captures information that is net new, that has never existed based on the gaps of what it just analyzed. And so, in a world of AGI, which is kind of what you were explaining, which is what we are moving towards, the value of any service where there's a human in the loop is going to massively accelerate, which is what expert calls are. There is a human in the loop, right, involved, right? Even if it's just on on one side. And so the AI interviewer allows you to capture net new information continuously. And that information is yours. That never gets fed back into the core library. So that's something very important that we should we should highlight, which is all of our clients are building their own libraries on top of Qualitate. We never share anyone else's transcripts. We don't have to, right? And so from that perspective, there's always alpha that's able. And then which companies can continuously generate more questions? Because Qualitate can use its AI interviewer to answer those questions. And so that is why I think that every firm can generate as much alpha as they want.
00:40:35 · Sagar Kadakia, S3
It's just how fast are your systems internally able to aggregate lots of information, generate questions, push it to Qualitate, get those answers back, and then make a decision on what to do, right? Do you have that infrastructure built? That's what people are building today. [00:40:58] S3: Like even like as today, or living ahead. It would be a good problem for you to have. [00:41:04] S0: Yeah, it would. I I actually think uh the the population of experts is increasing uh because we've now made it a marketplace. So I think about like, for example, like pre-Uber, uh you got to call a taxi dispatcher, and there was definitely like a limited number of cabs. Now, I mean, anyone can be an Uber driver, right? Because you could do it on your own time, your own schedule, all these types of things, right? Um, there's there's you don't need like a $2 million medallion or whatever it is, right, to ultimately, ultimately drive. And so the and not everyone can take a call tomorrow at 3 p.m. during work, right? And so actually the pool was quite finite uh because all the restrictions in place, right? Now those restrictions are no longer in place. And so the pool of experts is actually dramatically higher, um uh, which is uh why the the addressable market is going to substantially increase, right? What's qualitate doing? Qualitate is making primary research faster and cheaper. What happens when you make things faster and cheaper? People want more of it.
00:41:04 · Sagar Kadakia, S3
[00:41:04] S0: Yeah, it would. I I actually think uh the the population of experts is increasing uh because we've now made it a marketplace. So I think about like, for example, like pre-Uber, uh you got to call a taxi dispatcher, and there was definitely like a limited number of cabs. Now, I mean, anyone can be an Uber driver, right? Because you could do it on your own time, your own schedule, all these types of things, right? Um, there's there's you don't need like a $2 million medallion or whatever it is, right, to ultimately, ultimately drive. And so the and not everyone can take a call tomorrow at 3 p.m. during work, right? And so actually the pool was quite finite uh because all the restrictions in place, right? Now those restrictions are no longer in place. And so the pool of experts is actually dramatically higher, um uh, which is uh why the the addressable market is going to substantially increase, right? What's qualitate doing? Qualitate is making primary research faster and cheaper. What happens when you make things faster and cheaper? People want more of it. [00:42:06] S3: But wouldn't something like uh, I don't know, an SVP of cybersecurity uh with 20 years of experience, like the supply of that's fixed.