The Prof G Pod with Scott Galloway
00:11:55 · Ed Elson, Gabe Stengel
[00:11:55] S1: So let's talk about the product itself. It's basically a chatbot that answers quest... Any questions that you have about finance. It's very similar to ChatGPT in that way. It's basically ChatGPT but for finance. I think that goes for basically every AI startup that I'm looking at right now. Every AI startup is ChatGPT for x y z. Why not just use ChatGPT? [00:12:21] S2: I think there's two parts of that question. One is, what is the interface for the work you wanna do? Is it chat, or is it something else? And the other is, like, the domain specificity of what we do. I'm gonna start with the latter. ChatGPT, in a lot of ways, is a pretty smart 15 year old kid who has generic accomplishments and and can do basic math, can do basic reading, has reading comprehension skills, and so on, would you rather have a generic 15 year old or a 15 year old who has maybe studied finance for the last four years and then also comes to work every day with a big textbook of all SEC filings, all earnings calls, and then reads Bloomberg on a daily basis. Right? What is the context they have and what do they know how to do? Rogo is like ChatGPT in a lot of ways and it's dissimilar in many more ways. We have so much data that ChatGPT doesn't have. And not only do we train on that data, [00:13:10] S1: but we How do you have data that that ChatGPT doesn't have?
00:13:13 · Gabe Stengel
[00:13:13] S2: Sorry. We pay for it, and we integrate it. Right? We have a... You've used the product. It's a different product than ChatGPT. In some ways, it's clunkier. We cite everything we allude to. We have millions and millions of documents that you can pick from when you query. And for a normal consumer who might just be looking up how long to bake chocolate chip cookies for, it's probably a worse experience. For an investment banking analyst, for a hedge fund PM, for, you know, the CEO of a private equity firm, it has everything they want and all the data they want. And we go out and we form data partnerships, and we purchase data from other folks, whether that's market data, whether it's SEC filings directly from the federal government through EDGAR, whether it's earnings transcripts through providers. You know, there are all sorts of providers, FactSet, SP Global, Refinitiv. We have all this data that we integrate. And then on top of that, we integrate a firm's data themselves. And so we can have all your IC memos, all your historical pitch decks, all your historical Excel models too within Rogo, and you could ask questions about that. And not just individual questions like, hey. Summarize, you know, why we think that Chewy is gonna grow 20% next year. You can say, look over all the models we've had for Chewy over the last ten years, and tell me what assumptions we got right and which ones we got wrong. That's not something ChatGPT is even close to being able to do. And it's because we focus on ingesting financial data and citing it in all of our answers.
00:14:30 · Ed Elson, Gabe Stengel
[00:14:30] S1: Are you concerned at all that AI is becoming too powerful? I'm I'm sure you get this question all the time, but this is the ultimate AI doomer question. What are your thoughts about AI doomerism versus accelerationism? [00:14:44] S2: Yeah. I was actually getting... I was getting dinner with my dad a while ago, maybe a year and a half ago, and I fully panicked. I was like, dad, AI is coming. You don't understand because you don't understand how technology works. But it's coming, and it's scary. And I'm not sure why I'm scared, but I'm just I'm just viscerally scared. It feels like a disrupting thing. [00:15:03] S1: Because of the work that you were doing or because of the conversations people were having? [00:15:06] S2: Like Just all of the above. Right? Like, I mean, it's something that lives in the collective consciousness of folks in in our world is this idea of AI. Right? People have read science fiction. They've gone to the movie. They've seen Terminator. It's a scary thing to think about. I am not that scared anymore, and I'm not that scared for a number of reasons. One is artificial general intelligence just feels farther off to me than I think it felt a year ago. Yeah. And even if it wasn't that far off, I've, you know, adjusted the way I think about what AGI is actually gonna provide. And I'm excited for it, but, I mean, it's it's... That's above my pay rate. [00:15:43] S1: I wanna talk about your your career. So you you were working in investment banking for about two years, and then you decided to start a company. Why?
00:15:43 · Ed Elson, Gabe Stengel
[00:15:43] S1: I wanna talk about your your career. So you you were working in investment banking for about two years, and then you decided to start a company. Why? [00:15:54] S2: Yeah. I always wanted to start a company. I think that's, you know, a result of of overconfidence and and not wanting to work for for other people. But I mean, even back when I was, I think, a sophomore in college, you know, a buddy of mine and me tried to create a a pitch deck preparation tool for investment bankers back then. And we actually went into the Credit Suisse offices and met with like a, you know, someone who led North American investment banking, and obviously, we were kinda laughed out of there. We couldn't do anything. But it's been on [00:16:25] S1: True all of you. [00:16:26] S2: They're like, literally, who [00:16:27] S1: let you in here? [00:16:28] S2: Like, I'm already bad. But I've been thinking about it for a while. And I mean, I I loved my time at Lazard, and I learned so much, and I had amazing mentors. Mhmm. And I thought that LLMs and generative AI was gonna change everything, and I wanted to be able to work on it in the way that I thought was gonna be most productive and interesting. And I love to build things. Like, I am interested in creating products every day and thinking about the buttons to put in and the interactions and what it should look like, and that's what I'm passionate about.
00:16:28 · Gabe Stengel, Ed Elson
[00:16:28] S2: Like, I'm already bad. But I've been thinking about it for a while. And I mean, I I loved my time at Lazard, and I learned so much, and I had amazing mentors. Mhmm. And I thought that LLMs and generative AI was gonna change everything, and I wanted to be able to work on it in the way that I thought was gonna be most productive and interesting. And I love to build things. Like, I am interested in creating products every day and thinking about the buttons to put in and the interactions and what it should look like, and that's what I'm passionate about. [00:16:56] S1: I remember when you started this company, you barely used the word AI. I mean, I... It was... I I mean, you told me it was a it was a... What what did you call it? A natural language A [00:17:09] S2: natural language interface Yeah. For financial data. Which just doesn't... I mean We were [00:17:14] S1: so scared
00:17:14 · Ed Elson, Gabe Stengel
[00:17:14] S1: so scared [00:17:16] S2: of using AI as like a buzzword. And mind you, when we started Rogo, it was pre chat GPT. And actually, we prototype Rogo using very anachronistic NLP, natural language processing techniques called, like, context free grammars. But when we were starting Rogo, we didn't wanna feel like we were just, you know, tying into some buzzword y trend and we were, you know, hopping on the back of this big shift. I mean, we wanted to seem legit. I think that was a mistake. You should use these terms. They're powerful terms and, like, we are an AI tool. Why were we doing all this, you know, verbal gymnastics to not say AI? Because we were, like, kinda self conscious and, like, thought we were, like, holier than thou. That was dumb. [00:17:56] S1: But it worked. I mean, you you raised $2,000,000 in your pre seed round. And now here you are. You're at a million dollars in revenue. I mean, what do you think your investors liked about you? I'm sure it made you appear I think so. More specialized.