Financial Modeler's Corner
00:30:24 · Ian Schnoor, Giles Male
[00:30:24] S3: I love it. That's amazing. [00:30:26] S4: And I'm I'm... Would it be... I'd be right in saying, you know, once you once you agree, you know, to to some sort of enterprise deal, I'm guessing it... It's... Tracelight becomes quite sticky because it must be quite an effort to get Tracelight in, guess. On the reverse, we're actually then That's the news.
00:30:45 · Peter Fuller
[00:30:45] S1: Yeah. No. You're right. You're right. So so the... I mean, it's it's so much work. It's so much work to get, you know, to go live, right, in an in an enterprise. And and so you do have that kind of baseline level of of stickiness, but that's not the stickiness we aspire to. Right? I think user love is the is the real stickiness. And and, you know, we... Yeah. That's that's going, like, really, really well. Right? And so that helps you also expand into the enterprise. Right? Because, you know, you can have a beachhead into a into a very, very large company, but you are far from done. Right? You you have the whole company to go to go sell to. And so that's the kind of phase that we're in now. And and then, yeah, like I mentioned, everything that goes underneath the app, you know, the layers beneath the application layer, the kind of like memory architecture, the way that you make Tracelight learn from... In a compliant way. Right? I mean, like these organizations, have they have a very specific, like, way that knowledge and information is is allowed to run through the the the organization. Like, when I was a consultant, I could do a project and I could not tell any of my colleagues, right, what was... What happened on that project or who the client was and all of these things. And yet I could kind of learn generally from it. Right? I could I could bring that experience and that judgment to the next point. And and that's kind of the the trick here. Right? And and you need to build that same thing in digital form. Right? If Tracelight is gonna get better every single time that they use it, and it's just very, very deep and very specific work. And there's actually a lot of actually unsolved research stuff there as well. So, yeah, we we hope that that will be the the next thing that will make Tracelight more and more useful and and entrenched, obviously, enough.
00:32:32 · Ian Schnoor, Giles Male, Paul Barnhurst
[00:32:32] S3: A lot of you... I mean, you are obviously aware of other firms, ancillary peripheral firms, whatever to you that are not around today. They were around a year ago. You are clearly you are clearly hurdled, a number of critical hurdles by now. I think that's phenomenal, and I think the market will be better off with your success. And, and so we're excited to continue hearing about how you are doing and performing. Giles? [00:33:01] S4: A couple of things that jumped out to me, I think, already is number one, your excitement at new LLMs, which I suppose I'd never really thought about and I forgot what the second one was. My memory now, I'm in my forties, is [00:33:15] S3: You got too excited. [00:33:16] S4: Truly shocking. The second one was better as well. Paul, I'll hand it to you. I'll think about it. I'll I'll I'll figure it out. [00:33:22] S2: Thanks for that moment, Giles. That was helpful. No worries. [00:33:25] S3: For that seniors moment, that was great. I know. 42. [00:33:30] S4: 42. What was the second one? It's great.
00:33:30 · Giles Male, Paul Barnhurst
[00:33:30] S4: 42. What was the second one? It's great. [00:33:32] S2: Well, you keep thinking. I would love to know... I know you guys have added the product. Are there other tools you plan to go into expansion? You've mostly been focused, as you mentioned, kind of the due diligence, the modeling, whether it's helping with the, you know, memos in Word or research there and PowerPoint, and I think Excel are the three three main ones you have right now. Are you planning on expanding beyond that to helping with, you know, these valuations, these very specific niches? Is it always gonna be kinda that finance area in consulting? Or do you look to go to other areas, or are you looking to add more apps? Or how are you thinking, as you call this, a platform, kind of that growth play as you continue to scale and grow and want it to be more used?
00:34:17 · Peter Fuller
[00:34:17] S1: You know, I don't think it will be growth in terms of more add ins. Right? I mean, maybe there'll be an Outlook add in or something down the line, but I I don't think that will be the main vector. Right? I think the the main growth will happen within our our web app. Right? And so this is actually the central place where more and more we expect users will will be doing most of their work. Right? And, you know, actually, I think, you know, you'll still want the Excel add in and the PowerPoint add in for the for the last mile. But I think that's gonna decline in importance. Right? As the LLMs get better and better, I don't think you're gonna be wanting to spend so much time hunting through cells. Right? You you... You're gonna you're gonna kind of... You're gonna have a system that, you know, gets that done correctly and shows you that it's been done correctly, and then you're just gonna want to think at a higher level of abstraction. Same thing has happened in in in coding. Right? And so I expect the growth to be growth in usage in our web app. Right? Where, you know, it's essentially a project workspace. You have all of your input files, you know, all of your agents and chats and all of the outputs that you're creating. We can sync it with SharePoints and, you know, you can send emails from there. You can bring in emails and Teams messages, etcetera. And we... You know, this will be the central hub for how these projects are run. Right? And and so that that... That's where I do expect to see the growth. In terms of users, I mean, I... You know, we still have a lot of, you know, a lot more people to serve in our kind of core areas. Right? So like I mentioned, valuations and modeling, FTD, CDD, these... You know, and and the investors and bankers that these are these are the people that we serve. But, you know, we we also do have users in audit now. Right? And they love it too. We have users in tax, and that's going really well. So I think those would be the kind of slightly adjacent, user bases that we'd look to expand into.
00:36:14 · Ian Schnoor, Paul Barnhurst, Peter Fuller
[00:36:14] S3: Yeah. I've got a question that might be a little bit crazy, but tell me what you think about it. I mean, often companies that are succeeding in one part of a vertical at some point get worried because of the, because they... They're part of a chain. Is there any merit in discussion? Is there any feasibility one day to abandoning the existing frontier models and creating your own or somehow leveraging your own so that you don't... I mean, you've just said you're excited when a new model comes out, which is great. But there's also presumably some risk that that that that they can change their mind. I mean, it's conceivable, I guess, that, I don't know, maybe they'll find ways to restrict firms like you from using their tools. Like, is there is there a future where you don't have to rely on them at all and you can create your own Frontier LLM or is that It's... [00:37:04] S2: It [00:37:05] S1: never say never. Right? I think I think there is a risk there. It's not a it's not a risk today. [00:37:15] S3: I I think it would [00:37:16] S1: be a risk that we'd be thinking about maybe a few years from now. But, you know, as... You know, OpenAI just did it to Casa. Right? Got them off got them off from their models. And that was a [00:37:32] S3: Is that... Would that be going down all