Troy Lavinia - Thinking in Systems to Build Businesses
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Bill: Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to The Business Brew. I'm your host, Bill Brewster. This episode is brought to you by me. Troy Lavinia is the founder of Stream by Mosaic, my second sponsor. I am probably going to do these interviews with all sponsors because I like for people to get to know the people behind the businesses that are supporting me. I really enjoyed talking to Troy. I think that the episode will bring out his personality a little bit. I think Troy is just a great guy. I got a ton of respect for what he's built with Stream. I like how he thinks in systems, and he's got some interesting comments about hiring hockey players, and what he's learned. So, I really hope that the fans of the program enjoy this one and thank you, Troy for coming on, and thank you for sponsoring me, and everybody should sign up to Stream by Mosaic. You can find them at streamrg.com. That's S-T-R-E-A-M-R-G dotcom. They are integral to my investment process. I realized that the subscription is not inexpensive. Price is not value. Check it out. It's great stuff. Hope you enjoy the episode. Happy Monday. So, Troy, how you doing today?
Troy: I'm doing great, Bill. Thanks for having me. How are you?
Bill: I am fantastic. Thank you for sponsoring the show, man. This is exciting for me.
Troy: Oh, well. It's great. Great for us, too. It's the first time we've done this and you've been a longtime friend and client. So, I really appreciate all the support from the very start and good, we could formalize this.
Bill: When I was talking to Tad, I was raving a little bit. For those that don't know, Tad is the President and I've been dealing with him, and I said, "Man, the platform has gotten so much better since I first got on it." He goes like, "Are you just buttering me up for a sponsorship?" I said, "No, man. I honestly believe this." I wouldn't have some crappy product as a sponsor and it wasn't crappy a year ago, but the amount of work that you guys have put into the platform over the past year has been very noticeable. So, kudos.
Troy: That's great to hear. Yeah, he had mentioned that you said that. It's so good to hear. We've got our heads down and we talk to clients to understand their perspectives. I think if anything we err on the side of thinking we're not as good as we are. So, it keeps us going but it's always really nice to hear that type of feedback. So, thank you.
Bill: Yeah, you're welcome. I also feel like I'm not as good as I am, although, maybe I'm no good, so then I'd be accurate but we'll see. [laughs]
Troy: It's not what we've heard.
Bill: Well, I appreciate it. So, how did you start Stream? How did this come to fruition?
Troy: I started in the expert network industry 16 years ago at a place called Vista Research. Vista is now part of Guidepoint Global, which is one of the initial original expert networks. Then, I went to Elliott Management, that was fun.
Bill: Oh.
Troy: Doing research like this internally, so partnering with all of our PMs and analysts to make sure we had really good on-the-ground intelligence and I love doing that. Frankly, I don't know much about the investing process but I'm really good at finding sources and getting them to talk to us. I love building systems and I love building teams. So, that's what I was doing there for a little while and then wanted to do something entrepreneurial. So, I started an expert network called Mosaic Research Management back in 2010, so 11 years ago. Mosaic just sets up one-on-one expert calls for our clients and our clients are all hedge funds and public equity investors. So, we have about 150 clients in that business. If those hedge funds want to talk to industry experts, they'll come to us. We run a lot of custom searches to find good, very precise experts given the research requests of the clients. It's a service business. So, client requests an expert, we find an expert, make the introduction, client pays us, we pay the expert, and that's it. There's no residual product.
What I found out through painful trial and error of it, scaling a service business like that is really not fun. So, about five years ago, we decided, "All right, we can--" There're two paths here. We could either try to grow this business 50% to 100% a year, raise outside money, hate life, or we can slow it down, grow it 10% to 15% a year, make money, do a great job for our client base, create a great environment for our employees, but just have a slower growth type cash flow business as opposed to a fast growth business. I think that's the right path. So, that's what we decided to do and it makes a lot of sense in a service business I think for a lot of reasons. So, that's what we've been doing at Mosaic is growing the service business slowly.
The other thing that allows us to do is to incubate products like Stream. We have these 150 expert network clients and about two years ago we started hearing about Third Bridge doing expert call transcripts. Then, little after that we heard about Tegus doing expert call transcripts. There're these companies that are doing this, a few of them that are doing it well and I thought, well, we already have all the raw materials here, we're recruiting 250 experts every week, we've got 150 clients but if we can figure out a way to put this together in a high-quality way, we can probably come up with a transcript product of our own. So, we set about doing that and built Stream within Mosaic as a subsidiary and grew the business until-- for about a year grew the business, and then in April of this year, we were getting good traction. So, we spun it out. Our thinking and doing that was that operationally we created it very separate. So, there's no overlapping employees. Stream was completely self-sufficient. So, we spun it out of Mosaic. The thinking was, there's probably going to be the right way to grow Stream as a content SaaS business is much different than the way we want to grow Mosaic, and-- [crosstalk]
Bill: Just to frame this, so people understand. Stream is the library of expert interviews that I can sign on and I can have access if I'm interested in Coinbase or charter or any company, I can pull up as of now what you've got two and a half years it seems like, you just cited it. So, I apologize for not remembering exactly the year, but you got two years of expert transcripts on that company and the competitors.
Troy: Yeah, that's right. So, Stream is the transcript library. We basically took a similar model to what we were doing in Mosaic, and we decided to record and transcribe the calls. So, all of the calls in Stream are a buy-side analyst interviewing an industry expert about a particular public equity. It's a former executive, a customer, or a competitor most of the time, and the analyst is asking things that are relevant to the analyst community at that point. Most of the calls are 30 to 60 minutes. We record them, we transcribe them, and then we put them in the library. So, you can either listen to them in there like would a podcast or you can read them.
Bill: Yeah.
Troy: We've done about 8,000 calls over the past year and a half and we're ramping that library pretty quickly. So, we decided to spin that out as a separate business in April. The thinking there was we want to keep growing Mosaic slow. It's probably worth more to us as the owners than it is to an outside investor. So, we're not going to take in outside money in that business. There's not much of an exit strategy there. Whereas the right way to grow a company like Stream, which is a SaaS business, it's very scalable. We want to put money into that business and we want to grow it because we feel like we're in a really good position vis-à-vis the one or two competitors that we have out there, and if we were able to grow it, we're able to increase the library size and the subscriber base, we can create a nice little moat around that business.
Bill: Yeah.
Troy: So, that's what we did and then we sold the business to AlphaSense about two months ago. We founded the company back in the beginning of 2020, and then 15, 16 months later spun it out from Mosaic, and then three or four months after that sold it to AlphaSense, and now we're going to take it and it's going to be the internal content generation machine within AlphaSense, which is an AI based data management platform similar to a Bloomberg, or CapIQ, or a FactSet that investors and corporates use to gather information to research companies.
Bill: That's got to be pretty rewarding, man.
Troy: Yeah, Bill it is. So, this is one of the things that we had hoped for when we started Stream. So, we started it within Mosaic 16 months ago, and one of the things I've learned about myself is that I'm decent at the first 18 to 24 months of a company and it's what I really love doing. So, take a shoestring budget, pull together a few good people and an idea, create something valuable. I'm not particularly great from years two through 10 and taking that and growing it and I don't have that experience. So, the plan was, Stream was always let's create something really valuable, and then let's raise venture capital once we get to a certain critical mass, and we can put in place a really great experience management team, who can take it to the next level. Or, if we were lucky enough to have a liquidity event, then we could sell it to a strategic or to a private equity, who could do something similar. So, that's luckily what we're able to do with AlphaSense. So, the plan is what we planned from the start, which is amazing.
Bill: That's cool.
Troy: Yeah. I'll be staying on for the next, I'd say two years at least just because what I found is that we get along really well with the team there. It's been a really good fit from a cultural standpoint and I'm just really excited to have the additional resources to help build the business over the next couple of years.
Bill: Well, what would be nice I think as a consumer is, I've noticed-- I mean, you're reaching out to me, always asking, "Do you want to do some calls?" I think having a broader set of people reaching out to more and more people to get more and more calls in the library and transcripts in the library, it seems like a no brainer win-win to me. One of the things that when I was talking to you, because I'm on FinTwit. Tegus is the platform that everybody had known about first, because I think that they came out a little bit with the marketing a little bit quicker, I guess. But what I've noticed about your transcript library is the breadth is, for lack of a better term, super wide. They're very complementary products, I would say. It's not one or the other is needed.
Troy: Yeah. That's the way we've thought about it from the beginning and what we've really seen be the case for clients.
Bill: Jessica planted this seed in my head. So, she should be rewarded for good sales but once she said it, I was like, "Oh, I get this."
Troy: Yeah. We talked about it a lot. I think that one of the things that goes back to is just the abundance mindset versus the scarcity mindset. This is a new category that we're all creating, and Third Bridge was there first, and then, Tegus was right there and now Stream is there. I think we're the three that are doing this really, really well in slightly different ways. There's a big enough pie to go around first of all and then from the client standpoint, these products sit really nicely together. You might not need three, but you can definitely use two of these really, really well side by side. So, I always think about this consumer streaming services, if you think about Netflix, Amazon Prime, Hulu, etc., I know at least in my house we have subscriptions to I don't know how many of them? Maybe seven or eight.
Bill: If only a bundle existed, you might not need to have that many subs. [laughs]
Troy: Yeah, that could be. But we used to.
Bill: Yeah.
Troy: We use Netflix, we use Amazon Prime. I think the reason we do that is just because that's the mind space that you have for this type of content. I think it's similar in the B2B space. So, I think most of the corporates and the investors have room for two of these services in their mind and in their workflow.
Bill: Oh, that's for sure.
Troy: [crosstalk] Yeah. So, they complement each other really nicely. I'd say about more than half of our clients are using either Third Bridge, or Tegus, or another type of transcript service in addition to Stream.
Bill: Look, if you're a retail person, I think you got to have some amount of money to justify it. But after having access to these networks and the library, it's really, really hard for me to imagine doing fundamental research without it. There's a lot of really good insights.
Troy: Yeah, that's the feedback that we get from everyone and it's nice. Now, these are expert calls that are typically only available to the largest fund managers and now more people have access to them. It's kind of democratizing it.
Bill: Yeah. It's on trend. Getting information out into the world is a good thing, I think. I'm not sure that everybody's going to love it because some people use to try to generate alpha with it but I think it's a good thing to do and you're not going to keep it. I don't think we're living in a world where information is going to able to be kept to private anyway on a go-forward basis. So, why not lead with the product?
Troy: Yeah. I think that that's the way things are headed, right?
Bill: Yeah.
Troy: You can go with that force or you can go against it. So, it made a lot of sense for us to try to create a product that captured that momentum.
Bill: What got the entrepreneur bug in you? I would think you are consulting or hired by them, that's a pretty good gig and then you go and you say like, "Damn the torpedoes. I'm starting a business."
Troy: Yeah. So, from what I've come to realize is I think most people are entrepreneurs at heart or not.
Bill: Yeah.
Troy: I think there're generally three categories of people specifically. So, you have entrepreneurs, and then you have like employees or contributors, and then you also have artists. I think most people would primarily fall into one of those categories from what I've seen that people that I've worked with, and that I'm friends with, and that I've hired over the years. People who are entrepreneurs at heart who are living as an employee, it's a round peg in a square hole, no matter how good the work is. So, I loved what I was doing at Elliot but there was an itch there and I knew that I needed to be doing something for myself, and I had seen a couple of my friends go out and do their own thing. So, I was complaining to my wife often enough that she said, "Hey, this has got to stop. Either you start the business or you're going to regret this for the rest of your life." So, now's the time to do it. We didn't have kids, yet. So, she gave me the leeway to step out and do the business and then did that, got it pretty stable, and then I've actually given her the green light to do that as well about six years ago. So, [crosstalk] can I both-- [crosstalk]
Bill: Oh, cool.
Troy: Yeah. So, we both have businesses and it's worked out really nicely for both of us.
Bill: Do you have kids?
Troy: We do. We have a nine-year-old son and a four-year-old daughter.
Bill: You guys both have businesses and two children. Congrats. I have mad respect for that family.
Troy: Oh, it's a good one. You work hard but you can also have a lot of flexibility and plan the kids in to your day. So, I think it's created a good lifestyle for them, too.
Bill: Yeah. I need to be careful how I frame this because lucky is not the right word that I want to use, but very fortunate I think to have COVID occur when it occurred because everything could be done over Zoom, right? All of a sudden, your business sits in the center of, I don't know, a lot of work trends that I think makes sense and are going to be there in the future. I guess you could probably do it over the telephone anyway, but I think that just thinking about the capital like nature of what you do, it couldn't have been hurt by COVID if that makes sense.
Troy: Yeah. I think it's been a generally positive trend fortunately for this business, I would say.
Bill: Yeah.
Troy: We started Stream maybe a month before COVID hit. I probably haven't met 95% of my colleagues in person, yet.
Bill: Yeah, that's wild, huh?
Troy: It's crazy.
Bill: Yeah.
Troy: But you see them all the time and Zoom creates such a good experience that you feel like, if you have the right meeting rhythms in place and the right structures in place, you can work really, really effectively. So, that's been good.
Bill: I interviewed a woman Margot Edelman and she does this trust index. Their trust in tech is declining and I find it shocking because imagine COVID without tech.
Troy: Yeah, seriously.
Bill: It would have been impossible.
Troy: Yeah. Think about the reality versus the perception or what the media portrays, right? So, I think about my-- I'm not a big consumer of news and information, frankly, just because I feel like it can be a distraction from what I'm doing right ahead of me. But there's a lot of information out there that would lead you to believe that technology is invasive, your information is out there, and that's a scary thing.
Bill: Yeah.
Troy: But the day-to-day reality isn't quite so scary. It's actually quite good, right?
Bill: Yeah, for sure.
Troy: [crosstalk] Look at what we're doing, look what you're doing.
Bill: Yeah, I'd even argue that some of my information being out there has helped me in many ways, which is odd.
Troy: I'm generally a big believer in the open book theory of life and definitely of business. I learned this when I first started my company, whenever I'd have a business idea, we send somebody in NDA. I'm going to share something really sensitive with you and we don't do that anymore. What I found is that there's always more to be gained by sharing freely than there is lost in my experience. There hasn't been a single case where I've been burned by sharing ideas, confirmation, and information more freely rather than keeping it close to the vest.
Bill: What do you think about you, or your skill set, or your enjoyment? Why do you think you're good at the, well, I shouldn't say good at because I think you're probably good at a lot of stages, but why do you think you gravitate towards the shoestring startup nature of businesses?
Troy: I think I like it. I think I'm pretty good at it because I'm a B+ or higher at many different aspects of business.
Bill: Huh, interesting.
Troy: Yeah. That's what you need when you're getting started. You need just a handful of people who really care about each other, who are really passionate. So, I think I'm pretty empathetic, pretty passionate, and have a good motor. So, those are all things that you need for the first 12 months to 18 months of a company.
Bill: Yeah.
Troy: I'm generally decent at a bunch of different things. So, if we need to write sales emails or sell a product, I can do that. If we need to engineer the workflow and the systems to create the product, I can do that reasonably well, and I enjoy all of those things and I love hiring. For example, I love-- [crosstalk]
Bill: That's what I was thinking. You got to be really good at thinking about like, "What players do we need now and how do I find the right ones?"
Troy: Yeah, absolutely. I love creating hundreds of fake org charts drawn up.
Bill: [laughs]
Troy: [laughs]
Troy: Is that you do? You just do org charts?
Troy: Oh, I love it. I think about who's the ideal person? At least me, I'm always thinking about what does this org chart need to look like in a few months and who are these ideal people? Oh, I talked to Bill. Bill could be really great person for this particular role. So, I really like that. That's what I like. I think is that first year or so of a business, you really have to be doing a bit of everything, and you got to be in the trenches with people, so it creates a great camaraderie and there's a lot of joy and it can be created in doing that.
Bill: Yeah.
Troy: And then also a decent amount of value, too. So, you're pretty well rewarded for it if you can do it well and create something valuable.
Bill: Yeah, man. I would think so. I am asking these questions because I think that startup phase is really difficult in figuring out like, "What can I outsource versus what do I need to keep in-house because the budget is tight at the time?" Are you somebody that's naturally gravitated towards team building and motivation from an inherent type thing or is it something that you just learned over time?
Troy: Oh, boy. That's a great question. I think that the teams are like a system. So, I think a lot about what's the work that needs to be done in order for this system to operate properly and then who are the people that can do it? So, I don't know if that answers your question but that's how I think about team building. Making sure that everybody fits within the system really nicely, and that everyone has a role that contributes to the greater good of the system, and then I think we're always looking to enable everyone to be doing the work that they like to do the most, and that they're best at, and that's the work that couldn't be done by a less expensive resource potentially. So, we've done a lot of outsourcing and we do a ton of delegation. So, I always think that if you're working in our business and you're doing something that you don't really enjoy doing, or that you're not really good at, or that could be done 80% as well by somebody who is in the Philippines, or India, or one of the lower cost areas of hiring, then we should make a change in order to facilitate that. Because I want people to be doing the things that they're best at, that they enjoy the most, that can't be done less expensively.
Bill: When did you learn that skill? I asked the question that I asked because I'm at times a bit of a control freak, and it totally impedes my ability to move forward, delegating would go a long way in my life at times.
Troy: I'm not sure exactly when I learned it but it was pretty early on. Like, I'm the person who was thinking when it was me and my first colleague, Pete in Mosaic 11 years ago, I'm the kind of person who is writing up the procedures for what we were doing while it was just the two of us.
Bill: Yeah.
Troy: And there're some amazing tools out there now, though, Bill, if you can do something, you can record yourself doing it, you can find a virtual admin. Most of what you do can fall within two or three tranches of work, and this work that you're doing here needs to be done by you, right?
Bill: Yeah.
Troy: Like you're the talent. But I don't know, how much of the rest of what you do within your whole business system. How much of its done by you and if there are things within that business system that are done by you, that could be done by somebody else. I think it's been fun-- [crosstalk]
Bill: Well, Troy, let me ask you a question.
Troy: Yeah.
Bill: How seamless was your scheduling experience? You can be honest here. Other than the fact that you-- [crosstalk]
Troy: There is my admin. I can ask her. Oh man, no, I think it was pretty good.
Bill: I think you might find that the link came in a little late. There's just stuff that look what it was a fly-by-the-night little podcast, and I was doing this stuff on the side. I didn't have to worry about, do I need an admin or do the conversations get more serious, I don't know that I need a research analyst. But the idea has popped through my mind where it's like, "Look, I can't do the research that I need on the guests and also research companies in the way that I want to research them." There's just not enough of me to get it done. I need to go through a J curve in my own life where I'm spending more money, but opening up time and I haven't had to face this in a while. It's a nice problem to have but it's something that's requiring letting go a little bit and I think that that's a learned skill.
Troy: Yeah, I think it's absolutely a learned skill and I think if you can put your attention on the good feeling that comes with when you're able to hand that off successfully, and you can see somebody just running with something for you, that's such a good feeling. To the extent that that feeling can override the concern and the fear that anybody who starts anything. You have a pride, you're a craftsman, just like I was with recruiting experts. Yeah. To the extent that you can enjoy the process of handing it off, you can enjoy creating a good job for somebody that they enjoy doing, and then have that off your plate. That's a good feeling.
Bill: Yeah.
Troy: I always say, you just got to stay committed to that delegation. What does the system look like right now? What kind of people do you have working with you?
Bill: If you envision a chicken with its head cut off and then you put my head on that chicken, that's the system. I got a producer, and he's fantastic, and he's got a great team. But when it comes to review and whatnot, I'm looking into hiring somebody that'll help me do some of the easier edits, I think can be done by somebody else, and then if they have some questions on some of the content because this is a really light touch show. I don't edit that much but I usually want to listen at least once to make sure that nobody's saying anything sensitive. If I can train people to hear, this is what sensitive information actually sounds like, and sometimes in recording somebody will say like, "Ah, that's not going to fly with compliance or something."
If I could trust somebody to say-- obviously, Matthew knows to cut that. What he doesn't know-- Well, he knows, but he doesn't want to take his own editorial ear and put the content back together. If I could outsource that stuff, it would free up a lot of time because the amount of editing and doing the show notes, stuff like that, that stuff takes a lot of time that is not really value added to me or my guest's life.
Troy: If you want to connect offline, I love this stuff.
Bill: Okay. Good. I'm sure you already have my org chart drawn up.
Troy: For example, for us there're certain types of work that needs to be done by strategic thinkers. Then there're certain types of work that's client facing that you want to be done by certain folks that are maybe onshore, who are able to react in real time and hop on Zoom. Then we have recruiting of experts, which is something that we're doing every day. We're recruiting hundreds of experts every day at this point within Stream, but that can be done by certain types of folks that are different than people who are client facing. Then we have administrative tasks that can be done by VAs in the Philippines.
Those are some of the roles that we're scaling on a pretty crazy basis at this point. We've got say, maybe a third of our workforce is in the Philippines right now and they're great. They're absolutely fantastic at anything with regard to like booking, if you're scheduling, booking, prepping a guest for an interview, those types of things.
Bill: Yeah, that would be helpful.
Troy: Yeah. They can do those things just as well as anybody around here and then there's people there with technical proficiency and everything. So, editing, and compliance review, and all types of stuff.
Bill: Well, it's just making sure that-- For example, scheduling, prepping saying this is what you should need or expect to have for the podcast. Stuff like that, that's just should be a packet that's sent out to every guest. That would be nice to have somebody else do.
Troy: Yeah.
Bill: That would that would free me up to do the research that I need to give a good interview because the one thing that I have found is I don't want to get on the mic without knowing what somebody does, because you got to be able to talk through something that just the lights go on, whatever, you got to go.
Troy: Yeah.
Bill: That requires a lot of preps.
Troy: Is there a dossier that someone can create for you or do you need to get online and really roll up your sleeves and dig in for an hour or two?
Bill: I don't know. I don't want to have a gotcha conversation, but I like that you don't know what we're about to talk about when it goes on. You and I are just talking about how you think in systems and how you build teams, I don't know that we would get to this conversation if I had a dossier that was sent. Now, maybe that's stupid of me to say. It could make sense if I just said, "Send me your background, send me some interesting stuff about you."
Troy: Oh, I wonder though, if I wonder if what I meant was a dossier that an admin could create for you about me. Anyway.
Bill: Yeah, probably. I don't know. We should connect offline because I like where your head's going. How are you dealing with labor right now? If you're scaling up and you need help, that's not exactly the easiest market to hire people, is it? It doesn't sound like it?
Troy: No, that's what I've heard, too. It's supposed to be a tough one. I think the key is one of the fun things is you have to find deep labor pools for your key roles. We have roles where we need to hire hundred people over the next 12 to 18 months, there're two or three particular roles within this company.
Bill: That's a lot of people, man.
Troy: It's a ton of people. If we were trying to do one-off hunt and peck for those types of people, that's a real bottleneck and that won't work. Then there's other roles where we need maybe five people over the next 12 to 18 months, which we can take a lot more time and be a lot more esoteric in the types of people we're finding there. I think that's one of the most important things at first, at least when we're scaling this is looking at, is this a mass role or is this a niche craftsman type role within the business? If it's a mass necessity type role, then you need to have a really, really big, deep, responsive labor pool behind that. Otherwise, you're just painting yourself into a corner, I think. So, I think we're really lucky in that sense. But then also, you have to think about it when you're designing the system too. We wouldn't have designed our system. We have a system for doing what we do that requires two or three roles, lots of them, lots of those people.
Bill: Do you mind sharing an example?
Troy: Yeah. An example would be the people who recruit experts for us. See, you think of Stream almost as a podcast network, where we have 200 interviews a week, but essentially, it's a buy-side analyst interviewing an industry expert, not dissimilar from that.
Bill: Yeah.
Troy: How do you run a podcast network that's doing 200 interviews a week?
Bill: Can I ask you something extremely stupid because I use this product every single day of my life?
Troy: Yeah.
Bill: Do you have an app that I could listen to these on?
Troy: Yeah. It's mobile friendly.
Bill: Oh.
Troy: Do you have iPhone?
Bill: Yeah.
Troy: Yeah. Do you use Safari?
Bill: Yeah.
Troy: Yeah. Just go to the website on Safari and you can listen to these like, you'd listen to a podcast.
Bill: Oh, dude. That's what I should be doing when I'm walking around and listening to Joe Rogan. I should be listening to these.
Troy: Yeah.
Bill: Yeah. I sit down and I read them. I turn them out and I read them.
Troy: I think that that's the way everybody historically has done it.
Bill: But I'm an audio guy. Stuff sticks when I hear it.
Troy: Me, too. It's strange, right?
Bill: Yeah.
Troy: I listen to audiobooks. I'm functionally illiterate, which is ironic for somebody who runs a transcript content business. But I listen to audiobooks, I listen to podcasts. When I listen to the Stream interviews, I pick things up and it's really interesting to me. Yeah, you can listen to them on 1x, 2x, 3x-- [crosstalk]
Bill: Oh, I'm so embarrassed that I haven't done that already.
Troy: Oh, yeah. No, well, this is our fault. We haven't really publicized this and put it out enough. We're also working on a mobile app. So, it will be much more obvious.
Bill: Yeah, I think that would be awesome. That would be huge enhancement.
Troy: Yeah. That's one of the things that we get from this partnership with AlphaSense, this acquisition by AlphaSense, because they've got world class technology, and these are the kind of things that we can be rolling out [crosstalk] going forward.
Bill: You know what you strike me as? You strike me as the kind of guy that wants to own a lot more of a watermelon than a whole grape, which is I like how you just strike me as somebody that, "I don't care where the credit goes, I don't care what I need to do to get there, I want to build the system, I want the system to work, and it's going to be great, and it's going to get bigger over time." Is that fair?
Troy: I think that's fair. I think there's a lot of reasons for that. It's not like I'm a great, I'm not just some great-- It's not a really great altruistic thing. I just think that that's over the past 10 years, probably a journey, evolution, where you want your teammates to be successful because if you can have a team of people doing something really well, and they can enjoy it, and they can all be bettering themselves, and growing over time, and it can create the business outcomes you're looking for, that's the juice right there in my opinion. So, that's what I enjoy the most.
Bill: How did you feel when AlphaSense approached you? Did you feel you were letting go of your baby at all or were you really amped to partner?
Troy: No.
Bill: Initially, I know you are now. But-- [crosstalk]
Troy: Yeah. No, the way I always thought about it is, listen, I'm a pilot. I don't know this is one analogy, but I'm a pilot, I have this plane, and I can fly it only a certain distance, and then somebody else should take the controls and fly it to the next distance. Or, it's like a race. I've got the baton and I can handoff the baton not I'm going to step aside, but I'm still working on it. But really what was best for this business is that there're a lot of resources going towards this. We've got product market fit, we've got a great system that scales, and so the more that I can hand that off and enable other people to run with it, the better.
Bill: Yeah. That's what I mean. You're a guy that wants to let the watermelon become the watermelon, rather than be like, "No, it's mine and I need to have it." I think it's really smart of you to be like, "This is where it should go and it can be way bigger and way better if it goes there."
Troy: Yeah, I think that's right. That's nice of you to say it that way.
Bill: Yeah. It's like a respect for the business itself rather than an ego pursuit if that makes sense.
Troy: Yeah, I think so. Well, I think also it's easier too when you enjoy the craft. I just really enjoy this first year or two of creating a business. It's fun for me. I don't know. It's just it's one of the things that I enjoy doing. This isn't the thing that I have tattooed on my arm that's going on my headstone when I die.
Bill: Yeah. Oh, that's cool.
Troy: Yeah.
Bill: Yeah. What was AlphaSense's-- I guess, what can customers look forward to after they take over? What were you excited about partnering with them for?
Troy: Oh, yeah. Well, I think strategically, it just makes a lot of sense. When you have this much content and its long-form content, so I don't know for your listeners who aren't familiar with it, each of these interviews-- we're doing a couple of hundred of these interviews a week, and each of them are a transcript that's five to 20 pages long. It's just really dense, long-form content, and not-- [crosstalk]
Bill: Seems like none are shorter than 10 and 18 is what I seem to get into often.
Troy: Okay. Yeah. It's a lot.
Bill: Yeah.
Troy: Over time, I think, you need to have some really great technology sitting on top of that in order to make the discovery of those insights really effective. I think from a browse, you think about the different experiences browse versus search and so when you come in to Stream right now, we've put the minimal amount of effort and money into the technology experience because for us, it was all about content, because we figured if you have really good content and enough of it with just a technology experience that doesn't hurt the product, then you're good. That's what we've done so far. But now you take AlphaSense, which has spent the last 13 years building the world's best search experience for business documents, we get to layer that on top. You can start to look at these transcripts and see sentiments, you can start to see KPIs pulled out automatically.
Bill: That's pretty cool.
Troy: There's all kinds of cool stuff that you'll be able to see and then essentially data sets that you'll be able to create or that you'll be able to see coming from these qualitative documents. There's that, which I think is really nice. So, it's going to make the discovery in the search experience a lot better. I think there's a lot more that we can be doing in terms of understanding your preferences. If you've read certain things, we can start to serve things up to you like a Netflix type of experience. Like, "Hey, we Bill, we thought you'd like these things." So, the browse experience should improve, the browsing experience in addition to the searching experience.
Bill: It'd be cool is if I could say like, "I like these patterns." This is all pie in the sky stuff. [crosstalk]
Troy: Oh, yeah.
Bill: I like this pattern recognition in what I'm looking for and then if there's a transcript that comes by you can say like, "Hey, you may not know this industry, but this is a pattern that we know you like."
Troy: Oh, we should talk about it because you can almost create a filter based on that type of pattern.
Bill: Yeah, it'd be super interesting.
Troy: You get email [crosstalk]. This is what's super fun because I think I don't understand what you do well enough to understand what the important patterns would be. But if you can explain them to us, that's something that we can then take and run with.
Bill: Yeah, I can get you a focus group or something pretty easy.
Troy: Oh, that would be great.
Bill: Yeah.
Troy: Yeah, I think just the overall experience and the ease with which you can find and discover things that are valuable is going to improve significantly and the amount of content is going to increase significantly as well. That's one of the big efforts right now is just thinking about how to increase the amount of content while maintaining or improving the quality of the content, and then most people might not have used AlphaSense before, but in AlphaSense you have all the broker research, all the sell side research, plus any of the company filings, and announcements, and transcripts, plus any news, now plus the Stream information on the ground perspective. You've got these four key perspectives that are coming into one place with a lot of really strong technology on top of it.
What if you wanted to see companies where the public sentiment, let's say, from the brokers and the company itself, and the news was positive, but there was a shift in sentiment amongst the on-the-ground transcripts, on-the-ground interviews shifted from positive to negative recently. Maybe that's something that's interesting. You can see the variant perception there, let's say. Anyway, anytime you've got those four key types of information coming into one place, and it's easy to discover patterns and trends within them, then think there's a lot of room for some really fun stuff to be done there.
Bill: As somebody who's posting a lot of the transcripts, how do you search out whether or not people know what they're doing when they're giving the interview or do you search that out and do you try to mitigate bias by coaching people up or anything like that? How does that work behind the scenes?
Troy: Yeah. We decided early on not to try to control the content of the interviews too much. Just going on the thesis like we'll do what we do well, let the interviewers do what they do well. I think what we've done a good job of is creating a system and an ecosystem that has multiple checkpoints in place to assure quality, to ensure quality. The analysts who are hosting these calls, it's not just any client who can pay us a couple $100 to do calls. It's a very specific pool of clients and analysts that we've recruited, and we've interviewed, and we've screened them, we've made sure that they have a certain amount of experience doing these types of expert calls because there's a big difference between an analyst who has done 500 hours' worth of expert calls and an analyst who's interning for the summer someplace.
Bill: Yeah.
Troy: We've screened them for things like that. Then before we allow them to do calls on the platform, we have them do a few calls and we read them. We have a panel of clients-
Bill: Wow, cool.
Troy: -[crosstalk] read them, and basically give them a driver's test to make sure that they're good enough at hosting these calls, generally, in order to be on the platform. Then I think we do a really good job of matching topics to analysts in a way that results in the analysts who are hosting the calls generally knowing the topics really well and the incentive systems are aligned. So, that's the case. Generally, there shouldn't be a lot of bad calls on the platform but there's additional screening and ratings and things like that we do to scrape out anything or identify any problematic interviews [crosstalk] from a quality standpoint.
Bill: [crosstalk] considered building on the transcripts or anything?
Troy: I think that would be great. Yeah. Right now, we have thumbs up and thumbs down but we're not doing enough to get it in people's faces. I think generally it's tough to get this audience to vote on anything but yeah it would be great even-- [crosstalk]
Bill: I don't know how much that would introduce bias or not. I'm just not sure but it is a thought. I personally have found the quality of the transcripts to be quite good. There have been, maybe one or two, and I've read a lot, where I've been like, "I don't know that this person had industry knowledge to do it, it's kind of base.
Troy: Yeah.
Bill: But man, I'll tell you what, when you guys said yes to partnering with me and sponsoring me, I was really, really proud that you said yes, because I hope that the quality of this podcast is of similar quality of your transcripts.
Troy: Oh, man.
Bill: I view us as similar brands in that way. So, it was very cool of y'all to say us.
Troy: Well, I really appreciate you saying that. Yeah, we've got this in place. Have you ever noticed anything that's on there that you don't think deserve to be on there? You let us know and generally, if you can control the quality of the host, you can control the quality of the content because you know the buy-side analysts, there's a certain pride of ownership and a pride of craftsmanship.
Bill: Yeah.
Troy: Yeah, they're not going to just hop on these calls and throw something against the wall. In most cases, they're taking their own time to get on the call and to try to get some really good information from it themselves.
Bill: And they're paying. It's real money that's coming out of their pocket.
Troy: Yeah. It's not something that-- Yeah, generally the quality is pretty good. So, I appreciate you saying that.
Bill: Yeah. Actually, as part of the sponsorship, I'm going to do my best to read insights from some of the transcripts that I've been reading, and the first episode that we did, I incorporated some of the insights from Coinbase.
Troy: Oh, cool.
Bill: Because we've mentioned Coinbase in the conversation. The analysts that did those calls reached out to me and he's like, "I just want you to know that was me." I was like, "Oh, cool. I like that."
[laughter]
Troy: No, that's cool. He actually heard it and he put it together.
Bill: Yeah. It's your pride of ownership thing. There is a bit of a competitive nature I think to giving the better interviews, which is good.
Troy: Oh, absolutely. Yeah. I think there's something that can be done there as well. If you think about if I'm an analyst doing calls on a platform, if I can somehow make some of those, I don't know, if I can use that to help develop my personal brand or if I can use that to create an audience of some sort, there might be something there.
Bill: If we brainstorm long enough, we're going to make you a creator economy platform that's ready for the Metaverse. That's a how we'll pitch you. [laughs]
Troy: I think a lot of people would listen to a podcast that [laughs] had this those keywords.
Bill: That's right. That's what everybody's saying these days. It might as well be you.
Troy: Let's do it.
Bill: Yeah, I like it. Where do you see yourself in 10 years, man? I know that's an impossible question to answer.
Troy: I'm going to coach football.
Bill: Yeah.
Troy: I've started coaching my son's football team.
Bill: Does he play tackles?
Troy: He plays flag right now but he's itching to play tackle, and I played football growing up.
Bill: How do you feel about that?
Troy: I'm okay with it. I wouldn't want to restrict him from doing it. I think that there's a lot of plusses and minuses, but generally as a backdrop I think team sports are fantastic. I've hired a ton of people from team sports and I think that what you learn from playing team sports just far outweighs almost any other experience that people can have growing up in terms of preparing them to be successful and just decent people in the workforce. I think that it's a great thing for him to play team sports. If he likes football, I think there's enough precautions in place now that somebody can play tackle football and live to tell the tale in most cases, and that's a lot different than when I was playing. I played football in high school in college and had-- [crosstalk]
Bill: Where did you play?
Troy: I played at Penn for a couple of years.
Bill: Really?
Troy: Yeah. I had a few really, really bad concussions my freshman year [crosstalk].
Bill: Dude, that's big time. I didn't know that you were a real football player. This is terrifying. I can never make you upset. You'll kill me. You seem so nice and smiling.
Troy: That's right. A pacifist over time.
Bill: Beat it out of you.
Troy: I upset enough people.
Bill: What did you play? What position?
Troy: I played fullback my freshman year, and I played tight end my sophomore year, and then I quit because I had a bunch of concussions and they slowed me down. Couldn't be as aggressive as probably 40, 50 pounds heavier than I am now.
Bill: Huh, that's interesting.
Troy: Yeah. I think that just given the awareness people have around that now, I think that I feel comfortable with my son playing, and just being really sensitive to any of the head injuries, and making sure that there was enough time off between games and things like that. But I love coaching them.
Bill: Yeah.
Troy: I got to tell you, Bill, it's really, really fun. I've never coached anything before and I've been managing people for 10 years now. I get to take all this fun stuff I learned about motivating people and managing people and apply it to nine-year-olds, it's like the greatest thing ever.
Bill: That's cool.
Troy: Much more difficult than running a company.
Bill: [laughs] Well, they're all so insane.
Troy: Oh, they're crazy. We're undefeated, Bill?
Bill: Are you? Nice.
Troy: We're 7-0 and we have the Super Bowl on Sunday.
Bill: Oh, that's awesome. Are you nervous?
Troy: No, I feel great. It's just such a good group. We were doing the fundamentals, we were doing what it takes to win, and I say, I want them to get better and learn a lot. I want them to have a really good time and I want them to win football games. [crosstalk]
Bill: That's cool. I like that.
Troy: If all of them can want to play football again next year or want to continue on, then I think that's the job.
Bill: Yeah.
Troy: Yeah. But I was thinking I was telling my wife yesterday I was like, "I really like coaching football. In a few years, I'll go and be a coaching assistant for one of the NFL teams. I'll work for free. Just work my way out. I want to do it."
Bill: That'll be dope.
Troy: So, that's one thing. Yeah, I'm going to be a football coach and I'm going to be a yoga teacher, and think I'm going to write some books.
Bill: That's cool, man.
Troy: That's where I'm going to be in 10 years. Yeah, where are you going to be in 10 years?
Bill: I don't know. Actually, hopefully doing this. I enjoy teaching. I'm nervous because I think I need to learn a lot myself. I really just learn in public. But I have looked my entire life for way to give back and I think I have found a piece of it in this podcast. I think my youngest is four, so, I figure in 10 years, he's probably not going to want to talk to me anyway, and I'll have none of them want to talk to me.
Troy: [laughs]
Bill: But I don't know, I want to put in the reps with them now because I think these years are really important. So, I got a four-, six-, and seven-year-old. But then once that's over, I actually wouldn't mind teaching golf. I played golf, I want to coach the golf team, I like that, and I like doing this, and we'll see, man. It's been fun. In Florida, I got to do more in the water, and I don't know, I got to get active again. I have let myself get a little too sedentary and that's upsetting because I got all this playground around me.
Troy: It's sleepy here too, though, and we like sleepy. We're kind of sleepy, too.
Bill: Yeah. Well, then this really might work.
Troy: Yeah. 8:30 PM bedtime is my ideal.
Bill: We threw a chili cook off and everybody was home by 9 o'clock. I was like, "Yes, it's going to start raging and then everybody just went-- [crosstalk]"
Troy: I can tell now, if I'm going to be friends with people, if they make a 5:30 or 6 o'clock dinner reservation, they're probably going to be my friend.
Bill: [laughs]
Troy: If they make 8:30 reservation, it's probably not going to work.
Bill: Yeah.
Troy: It's not going to last. It's going to be a one off.
Bill: That's how my household is. Mostly because my wife. She's in bed at 9:30. No later.
Troy: Yeah. I get in bed, I lay there. My wife walks around in circles in the bedroom asking me questions.
[laughter]
Troy: It takes her about 45 minutes of that to peter out and join me in bed and then we watch a TV show, we go to bed. That's it.
Bill: TV in the room?
Troy: Yeah. We don't have a TV, but we just have the iPad or laptop in bed. We've been watching Ted Lasso. Have you watched that?
Bill: No, I hear it's fantastic. I've been to Ted Lasso themed get togethers. I got to watch Ted Lasso.
Troy: Yeah, it's solid. Do you guys watch TV, any good shows?
Bill: Yeah. We're into Succession. We've been watching that. When I was at a Ted Lasso theme thing, my sick mind was watching Squid Game, which I wish I never started.
Troy: Is it good?
Bill: I don't know, man. It says something weird about humanity that it's as popular as it is. But I also couldn't stop watching it. So, it says something about me that I'm that way.
Troy: Yeah. They're getting good in general like creating things that we cannot watch.
Bill: That's right. I think what's super interesting about it is, I don't know what the number is but I think maybe they spent a maximum of $30 million on that show, and then hundreds of millions of views or whatever. 100 million views, I don't know what it is but it's crazy. But I don't know that I would tell you to start it. I would stay at Ted Lasso.
Troy: It's a little bit softer.
Bill: That's right. Yes. Good game. I think it makes you want to cover yourself and wonder what's wrong with you. And Ted Lasso, everyone that watches it is like, it just makes me happy.
Troy: It's such a feel-good show. It's actually legitimately funny too, like laugh-out-loud funny. This is fun. What else do you want to [crosstalk] I can probably keep talk all day.
Bill: I don’t know, man. Whatever you want to.
Troy: I think next time we talk we should come prepared with a list of television show recommendations if anybody else in your audience is like us and goes to bed at 8:30 at night.
Bill: I tell you what you should watch. I interviewed the guy, the director of Class Action Park. I think is what it's called. It might be just Action Park or whatever on HBO.
Troy: Oh, I saw that one. I like that.
Bill: You should listen to the interview. It's cool.
Troy: I've listened to the interview.
Bill: Yeah. He's a nice guy.
Troy: I grew up in Pennsylvania.
Bill: Adventure Park.
Troy: Not far from Class Action Park.
Bill: Yeah.
Troy: Yeah.
Bill: That place was insane.
Troy: Yeah.
Bill: [laughs] You and your football buddies would probably go and destroy people there if you ever went.
Troy: Oh, yes totally.
Bill: [laughs]
Troy: Yeah, absolutely. Day trip from Penn.
Bill: Oh, that's funny. Okay. You played at Penn as in Wharton Penn, like UPenn?
Troy: Yeah, Wharton Penn.
Bill: There you go. That's the good Penn.
Troy: Yeah, not the state.
Bill: That's the good Penn.
Troy: Yeah. [unintelligible [00:54:20] football this year. But I'm going back to a football game on Saturday, taking my son and a few of my friends are pretty heavily involved still. So, we're going to go down on the field-
Bill: Oh, wow.
Troy: [crosstalk]. Yeah.
Bill: That's awesome.
Troy: [crosstalk] Your four-year-old is a boy?
Bill: They are all boys.
Troy: Your six and seven-year-old, all boys?
Bill: Yeah. I might as well just get them pads now.
Troy: Yeah. They're going to hurt themselves at your house if they don't have pads.
Bill: [laughs]
Troy: My son, he's a good musician. That's his thing. Ever since he was six months old, he's been watching Rolling Stones videos and really into it. He plays guitar really, really well for a nine-year-old, like, really good and he loves good music. Yeah, he knows a bunch of Rolling Stone stuff and Led Zeppelin, and Ozzy Osbourne, pretty good stuff. I never thought he was going to play sports. So, he had no interest in sports at all until a year and a half ago. And now, he's just all in. He's playing football, soccer, basketball, just loves it.
Bill: That's awesome.
Troy: Yeah, it's cool.
Bill: The football thing, I actually for a second, I was on this, I'd never let them play. Now, I'm on a kick where I actually want them to play because I don't think there's any better game to teach working together than football. I don't know how messed up you can actually get as a kid these days. You're not taking the huge hits yet.
Troy: There's so much awareness around it, too.
Bill: Yeah.
Troy: I think in any type of physical sport, there's a chance of injury, right?
Bill: Yeah.
Troy: The catastrophic injury, but I feel the concussion stuff that we grew up with, it seems there's so much awareness around it that that should be not as big of a factor. The thing he started playing a soccer, do you ever get into soccer? Do you watch it?
Bill: I don't. I got into FIFA when I was a kid but it was very hard for me to actually enjoy watching soccer.
Troy: FIFA on Nintendo.
Bill: Yes, it was PlayStation, but yeah.
Troy: Yeah. Me, too. It was great.
Bill: Yeah, it was fantastic.
Troy: I played soccer for-- When you're a kid and there's a time period where you're too young for anything, and Soccer is the only sport you can play?
Bill: Yeah.
Troy: I played soccer for two years then and then as soon as you could play other sports, I stopped playing soccer. Never saw a soccer game until this year. Then my son started playing soccer, and I've watched it, and that's actually a fun sport for kids. If you asked me this a year ago, I would have said no. That's not interesting at all. But that sport teaches teamwork and all the good stuff that you'd want, and less violent, and it's really fun to watch too, if the kids are decent, nine or 10-year-old range, it's good. So, I've really, really enjoyed that. I've watched a bunch of soccer every Saturday when he's playing.
Bill: Do you guys get into hockey up there?
Troy: He hasn't just because he never learned to skate.
Bill: Yeah.
Troy: He's kind of on the trains leaving the station on that one.
Bill: Yeah. Well, they get kids so young. It's crazy.
Troy: I know. Yeah.
Bill: Up in Chicago, they were hockey fiends. My kid liked it but I didn't have the heart to tell him but I was just like, "Not that good at hockey, man." Some of these kids can skate.
Troy: Totally. Yeah, I never learned how to ice skate. Well, I've hired a ton of hockey guys and easily if I had to choose one sport to hire from it would be hockey.
Bill: Why?
Troy: Okay. So, I heard separately from a friend of mine, who's a senior HR person at Goldman that hockey's the most successful of all the people that they hire as well. The thinking is that there's some natural filters that take place in hockey that don't take place in other sports. For example, you need to learn how to skate, which means you need to fall down 5,000 times and continue to get up. When you do that at a young age and there's probably some inherent either you learn it, you learn stick-to-itiveness through that or you're prewired for stick-to-itiveness, like, to stick with things. But just that process is one filter that other sports don't have. Another one is that, your parents have to give a crap about you. They have to take you places to play an hour and a half away at 5 AM for practice.
Bill: Yeah.
Troy: Most of the people come from a good parental system where at least one of their parents cares about them and is supportive. I think there were a few other things but maybe they're just looking for evidence to support the outcome. But generally, they found hockey was the most successful group of people they hired from of all the sports in college.
Bill: That's interesting.
Troy: I found the same thing, too. For me, there's less ego and less me-first type of mentality than any other sports. There's more camaraderie, there's also more not taking themselves too seriously, but serious enough that from 9 to 5 or whenever its heads down, they work their butts off, but they don't take themselves too seriously other than that. Yeah, hockey people.
Bill: I would think fullbacks not because you played it but that's a position that cares about blocking and doing its job. Fullbacks and linemen, I would think would be good fishing pools, too for the--
Troy: Yeah, I hired a few linemen. Yeah, virtual admins from the Philippines.
Bill: [laughs]
Troy: Hockey players from Canada, those are who you want.
Bill: All right, there you go.
Troy: 80% of your staff can be those people, you're in good shape, no matter what your business is.
Bill: Well, I'm going to follow up with you offline for real about trying to systematize what I got going on because it's getting a little bit out of control.
Troy: Oh, yeah. You've the talent, Bill. You just want to sit down or you just come in, sit down, run it.
Bill: I care about how much it costs but it's getting to be a stupid thing to care about.
Troy: I know. You know what will scare you though is if you think about what your time is worth. Even if you think about this all the time, you're still willing to do things that you really shouldn't be doing given how much your time is worth?
Bill: Yeah.
Troy: Even if you logically know these things, I still catch myself doing it.
Bill: Yeah. Well, like I said, it's gone from something that was fun to something that I'm actually pursuing pretty seriously and if you're actually pursuing something seriously, you probably need some infrastructure around you.
Troy: Let's go. I want to help however I can-
Bill: All right, cool.
Troy: -if there's anything I can do.
Bill: Well, I hope that we helped you a little bit but I hope that more than helped you, I think I hope that people learned who you were, and are genuinely interested in your product because I fundamentally think it is integral to research processes, and I now said it three times, but I'll say it a fourth, like, thank you for partnering with me.
Troy: Oh, man. Thank you.
Bill: Yeah.
Troy: Before, you knew we could be a sponsor, before we could afford to be a sponsor, you were using the product and saying nice things about it. So, I really appreciate that.
Bill: An OG Stream user here.
Troy: Absolutely. Day three. I think you were really like one of the first 15 or 20 paid subscribers is my guess.
Bill: Yeah, it was early.
Troy: Yeah.
Bill: And I was a little nervous. Frankly, I was like I don't know how much is in this transcript. But over the last 12 months, this thing has been built out. It has been impressive to watch.
Troy: Thanks.
Bill: Yeah. I mean it sincerely. So, thank you for doing it. I got a lot of value out of it.
Troy: Likewise. Let's do this again. Let's keep talking about the business stuff and what you're doing isn't really that dissimilar from what we're doing operationally. So, let's trade notes and see if we can help each other out.
Bill: All right, cool. I have a feeling that for the beginning of this trading of notes, you may be helping me more than I'm helping you but I will do whatever I can to help you as well.
Troy: I don’t know. We'll see.
Bill: [laughs] All right, man. Well, thanks for stopping by.
Troy: All right. Thanks, Bill.
Bill: All right.
[music]