Financial Modeler's Corner
00:00:13 · S0, Peter Fuller, Paul Barnhurst, Ian Schnoor, Giles Male
[00:00:13] S0: The Mod Squad featuring Ian Schnoor, executive director of Financial Modeling Institute, Giles Male, humble MVP and cofounder of Full Stack Modeler, and Paul Barnhurst, the FP and A guy. [00:00:32] S1: I've continued to be confused about how bad Copilot is, given how strong the models are that are powering Copilot. Right? I think Microsoft does have that innovator's dilemma problem now. Let's just take Excel. I always compare Excel with coding. And one big difference, I think, between those domains is coding was really nicely set up, actually, even before ChatGPT. Coding was really nicely set up for AI to come along. Right? You had IDEs. You had a really nice collaboration environment. You have diffs. You have git. You have version control. All of these things are really important if you're gonna start working meaningfully with someone or something else. In this case, that something else is AI. [00:01:16] S2: Welcome to another episode of the Mod Squad. I'm really excited to be joined by my cohosts, Ian and Giles. Ian, how are you doing? [00:01:26] S3: I am doing well. Paul, trying to keep up with the madness like everybody else is, I think. And we're getting ready [00:01:33] S4: Do we everybody else? Just me. Is [00:01:35] S3: that that him or not? Yeah. Woah. Was that me? [00:01:39] S4: Yeah. That was on you. I think you just run with it. That's a great start. Love it.
00:01:39 · Giles Male, Ian Schnoor, Paul Barnhurst
[00:01:39] S4: Yeah. That was on you. I think you just run with it. That's a great start. Love it. [00:01:43] S3: We're getting excited for the modeling conference coming up in three weeks. September 24, just over, we've got an amazing lineup of speakers and gonna be thousands and thousands of people at the world's first ever twenty four hour online virtual modeling conference. So, yeah, lots going on. We're busy, having fun and excited to meet with Peter today. [00:02:01] S2: Yeah. Really excited for that conference. What are we? Three weeks out about? Three and a half? [00:02:05] S3: Yeah. No. Three weeks. September 24. Twenty four hours. [00:02:08] S2: Giles, what have you been up to? [00:02:10] S4: Just working. I don't have a life outside of work at the moment. It's one of those things where I'm happy to be busy, but even like this week on its own, I'm doing copilot training tomorrow with a team of about a 100, doing some collaborative claw training on Friday with some other quite well known trainer with a large beard. That's interesting, isn't it, Paul? And then we've got The UK XL Esports Finals in London on Saturday. So, yeah, crazily busy and also trying to keep up with everything that's actually happening in AI world as well.
00:02:10 · Giles Male, Paul Barnhurst
[00:02:10] S4: Just working. I don't have a life outside of work at the moment. It's one of those things where I'm happy to be busy, but even like this week on its own, I'm doing copilot training tomorrow with a team of about a 100, doing some collaborative claw training on Friday with some other quite well known trainer with a large beard. That's interesting, isn't it, Paul? And then we've got The UK XL Esports Finals in London on Saturday. So, yeah, crazily busy and also trying to keep up with everything that's actually happening in AI world as well. [00:02:41] S2: And I can confirm his comment and no live because the time he decided to meet with me last week, because I moved our meeting, was 10:30 his time on a Friday night to prep for some training. So that tells you he's working around the clock. I can vouch for that. It's the big bearded guy he talked about that he's gonna do a training [00:02:59] S4: I should be rich. [00:03:01] S2: Alright. Well, we're thrilled this week to have a guest with us. We have with us Pete Fuller. He's the CEO of Tracelight. Some of you may have heard of it. It was the first... I believe it was the first tool we tested on the Mod Squad series back in September about a year ago. That platform has expanded and grown quite a bit since then, so we wanted to bring him on and just talk about the journey, a little bit of his background, and where he sees modeling going. But why don't we start with just giving you a minute to just tell us a little bit about yourselves? Tell our audience who you are and how you ended up where you're at.
00:03:01 · Paul Barnhurst, Peter Fuller
[00:03:01] S2: Alright. Well, we're thrilled this week to have a guest with us. We have with us Pete Fuller. He's the CEO of Tracelight. Some of you may have heard of it. It was the first... I believe it was the first tool we tested on the Mod Squad series back in September about a year ago. That platform has expanded and grown quite a bit since then, so we wanted to bring him on and just talk about the journey, a little bit of his background, and where he sees modeling going. But why don't we start with just giving you a minute to just tell us a little bit about yourselves? Tell our audience who you are and how you ended up where you're at. [00:03:31] S1: Well, yeah, thank you very much for having me. I'm very excited to join you guys. So, yeah, I'm Pete. I'm the CEO, and I'm one of the three cofounders of Tracelight. So we founded the business in mid twenty twenty four when the LLMs could barely write valid formula in a spreadsheet. And before founding Tracelight, I was a venture capital investor, very, very early stage VC investor here in London at a place called Entrepreneurs First. And before that, I was at McKinsey five years, obviously did a lot of modeling there and was also part of QuantumBlack, which is McKinsey's AI practice, basically. Before McKinsey, I mean, a bunch of weird and wonderful things. I ran a a charity in East Africa. I pounded spreadsheets. Amazon briefly as well. One or two other things. So, yeah, that's me.
00:03:31 · Peter Fuller, Paul Barnhurst
[00:03:31] S1: Well, yeah, thank you very much for having me. I'm very excited to join you guys. So, yeah, I'm Pete. I'm the CEO, and I'm one of the three cofounders of Tracelight. So we founded the business in mid twenty twenty four when the LLMs could barely write valid formula in a spreadsheet. And before founding Tracelight, I was a venture capital investor, very, very early stage VC investor here in London at a place called Entrepreneurs First. And before that, I was at McKinsey five years, obviously did a lot of modeling there and was also part of QuantumBlack, which is McKinsey's AI practice, basically. Before McKinsey, I mean, a bunch of weird and wonderful things. I ran a a charity in East Africa. I pounded spreadsheets. Amazon briefly as well. One or two other things. So, yeah, that's me. [00:04:12] S2: Love it. Fun journey. Well, why don't we start... Can you tell our audience start by telling a little bit about Tracelight, kinda how it came about, a little bit of the backstory, what you're doing today, and we'll just go from there.
00:04:24 · Peter Fuller
[00:04:24] S1: Yeah. For sure. So I started working with Alex and Janek in mid twenty twenty four. So our backgrounds, I mean, I've just told you mine. Alex, our CTO, was a software engineer at Jane Street before Tracelight. And before that, he was at at Cambridge, which is where he met Janek. So Janek's a machine guy. He did that at Cambridge and then did that in a bank for a while. So we got together and we were exploring different ideas, actually. I think it'd be fun to kind of build AI for Excel. At that point, no one was doing it. Right? There was this funny little research paper from Microsoft. It wasn't anyone significant at Microsoft, but the research paper basically said, like, yeah, LLMs have a really hard time with two dimensional data structures in general, obviously, including spreadsheets. But if you were going to kind of represent a spreadsheet to an LLM, this is kind of how you might think about it, how you do it. That's where we started. Alex implemented that over the course of a few days, and obviously, we built on it very significantly. And, yeah, the sort of the key thing for us at the beginning, which is now completely irrelevant, by the way, we've actually thrown out the database entirely. Right? This is the journey for many AI startups. But the key thing for us was that middleware, I guess, between the spreadsheet and the LLM that made the problem more comprehensible to kind of GPT-4 at the time. And we really built from there. I mean, our motivation to build for financial models in the first place, I'm sure you guys would agree with this. Right? It's like, you know, I feel like people build financial models whenever they have a really big and important decision to make. Right? And we're very ambitious. Right? We wanna make our mark on the world, and we wanna build a company that helps the biggest and most important decisions get made. And so since kind of launching that Excel agent, we've really expanded the product. You know, we're now really kind of all in one AI workspace for our customers. So they can do all of their work in Tracelight. It's like a central web app, and we have add ins to all of the Microsoft Office Suite. But, obviously, we still have that heritage as an Excel company. Right? So, you know, we're really, really outperforming in kind of spreadsheets and spreadsheet related tasks. So, yeah, that's been the journey.