Podcast Transcript: Koyfin CEO & Co-Founder Rob Koyfman
Podcast Transcript: Koyfin CEO & Co-Founder Rob Koyfman
This is the full transcript of podcast #8 with Rob Koyfman
Here is the full transcript of this podcast interview with Rob Koyfman of Koyfin. I hope you enjoy it, thank you for being you!
Here is the audio version of the podcast:
Liberty:
So hi, Rob. How are you? This is where I pretend we haven't been speaking for 15-20 minutes.
Rob Koyfman:
Yeah, Liberty. Oh, my God. Out of nowhere, you came. Yeah.
Liberty:
So, what should we talk about today?
Rob Koyfman:
Let's talk about everything and anything.
Liberty:
Yeah. It's not like there's anything happening in the world, in the markets, in geopolitics. And nothing is going on, right? We're going to run out of topics very quickly, I'm sure.
Rob Koyfman:
It always seems like today is the time in history when there's just so much stuff going on and so much uncertainty. And every time we have a conversation and can talk about different things, there's always crazy events, and many standard deviation events going on. But lots to talk about.
Liberty:
Yeah. And it's funny how people are never happy about it, whichever side it falls on, right? I remember in like 2017, everybody was talking about how volatility was so low, nothing was happening-
Rob Koyfman:
Yeah.
Liberty:
.... and everybody was complaining, "You can't invest in that kind of environment, this is not a stock picker's market." Or I don't know, back in 2012, 2013, people were complaining about how quiet things were after the crazy 2011. But now, it's the other end. Like everything is blowing up everywhere, literally and metaphorically. Like we've had a crazy past couple years with the pandemic, a crazy past many years before then, and now everybody just would like to go back to these quiet and peaceful times.
Rob Koyfman:
It's so funny you mentioned those times, because I remember distinctly in 2015 when I was still on Wall Street, and I went to an idea dinner at a hedge fund, and everyone was just so bearish. Everyone was just, "There's no growth, and debt is high," and on and on and on, and all the bear case. And the stock market didn't go anywhere for like, it was just trending sideways, earnings growth was nonexistent.
Rob Koyfman:
And I went and Googled Kennedy speech, and I listened to one of Kennedy's speeches from the '60s. And the stuff that he's talking about was just so much more important than all the negative stuff that we were talking about at the time. And he's talking about race and racial integration in the US. And he's talking about homelessness, he's talking about poverty. There were lots of people that still didn't have running water, and living really, really below the poverty line in the US. Yeah, I think that's a human mindset to just take all the facts out there, and really focus on the negatives and making the negatives seem really, really bad. That's probably something that's very human.
Liberty:
What's the saying, right? "The days are long and the years are short." At the peak, people were looking back at the past decade, and they were like, "Oh, it was so easy to invest back then. The stock market just went up all the time," and legendary bull market basically. But as it happened, all the time, people were worried forward returns are going to be super low, everything's about to blow up, the debt in this country, the commodities, everything seemed terrible all the way up. And now that things have started to be very volatile again and correct again, are we going to go into the inverse mode? Are people going to expect things to go back any day now, but we're going to go sideways? I have no idea, right? I can't predict it. It's just funny how the psychology of it is basically as soon as people all get on the same side of the boat, it's probably time that's going to switch.
Rob Koyfman:
Yeah, it's like this kind of [bear porn 00:03:06] that you see of people who are super bearish and just highlighting all the negatives. And there's just such a big industry with people doing that with newsletters and blogs. When I used to work with a woman, Abby Joseph Cohen, who was like this perma-bull, and she's known as the most bullish person on Wall Street. But I loved the thing that she said, which is, "The bear argument is typically smarter, but the bull argument is typically right." And it's so bears just sound so smart when they're talking about all the problems and all the negatives. And it's not to say that there's never anything bearish, but in general, that's the dynamic.
Liberty:
Yeah. I think we're wired to be able to look at problems very clearly. And the problems are always in the present. But Buffet, to me, has one good antidote to that, and it's like you zoom out, way, way out. And when he talks about his lifetime, right? He went through, well, he missed World War I, but then the Great Depression, World War II, Korea, the Cold War, Vietnam, the stagflation, all kinds of stuff. And despite all of these problems that they could fill dozens and dozens of history books in detail about everything that was going wrong, everything was always on the brink, and despite that through his lifetime, the wealth created was incredible. Doesn't mean it's always going to be like that, and outside of the US, it hasn't always been like that. You need, I think, the right model to create all of this wealth. But still, when you zoom out, you realize that the problems that seem very unique right now may not be quite as unique, even though they're still as tragic. It's not because it happened before that it's less bad, but still, it puts it in perspective for me.
Rob Koyfman:
Yeah, absolutely. And it all, at the end of the day, depends on how you perceive the problems, and what your attitude is, and just that balance of being optimistic versus pessimistic.
Liberty:
Yeah. I don't envy people who are trading on day trading or very short term, because you have to have an opinion on almost everything. I'm more of the style of the CEOs of the companies that I own are going to deal with those problems, and I'm just going to sit back and let them do it. And my task is almost like a board member, like I select the management and then I trust them to deal with most problems. But there's never a shortage of things to worry about.
Rob Koyfman:
Yeah. Well, what do you want to talk about?
Liberty:
Yeah. Well, I think it would be a good idea to introduce people a little bit to you. I never want to assume that people... Like we've done an interview last year, I don't want to assume that people have read it, but I'm going to link it in the show notes for this if they want to go deeper. But I'm curious about your background. Where did you grow up? What were you doing before Koyfin? How did you find your way to Koyfin?
Rob Koyfman:
My background, back in the day, I was born in Ukraine in city called Chernivtsi, which is where Mila Kunis is from. Moved to the US when I was seven years old in 1987, so you know how old I am now. And basically grew up in Brooklyn and north Jersey in a town called [Wayne 00:05:52], New Jersey. And then started my career after Rutgers University on Wall Street, and was on Wall Street for about 15 years on the sell side and buy side in different groups for equities, and macro, and options. Always the person on the desk or on the team doing a lot of the quantitative work, a lot of the analytics, a lot of the data wrangling.
Rob Koyfman:
And about five years ago, I left the hedge fund that I was at. I started investing on my own, doing a lot of these analytics on my own, starting to have to pay for the tools myself and some of these data providers. And basically experienced firsthand this real problem of these analytical tools, these investment tools today being either for professionals and being super expensive, like in the Bloomberg fact set, Reuters world, or being super, super plain, super simple.
Liberty:
You can say crappy.
Rob Koyfman:
Yeah. The crappy, simple's probably the better word because-
Liberty:
Well, today there's more good stuff. But back then, it was a desert. It was hard to find anything.
Rob Koyfman:
It was really hard to, yeah. Over the past five years, you definitely had more and more tools like Koyfin come up. But I'd say around that time was really a unique opening for tools like Koyfin to start developing because data started getting a little bit more accessible than it used to in the past. 20 years ago, there was no fundamental data or estimates data that a new startup could purchase. But now, there's companies that are selling the data, and high quality data. And so over the past couple years, you've definitely had some companies and some new products emerge that give you more functionality, for sure.
Liberty:
That's something I'm curious to zoom in a bit, because I don't think users of various financial sites realize. But this data, it's not like you're buying data from one provider, and they give you clean, nice API, and then bam, you put that on screen, right? It's sounds like it's from a bunch of different places, bunch of different feeds, it's all in different formats, it's some of it has errors that could... You know? Seems super complex. So it's a big part of making Koyfin not just the how do you display it on the screen, but the backend sounds super difficult to build. Is that correct?
Rob Koyfman:
It's not easy. So at the end of the day, what we're doing is three things if you abstract it away. We're bringing together a bunch of different data sets, we're building an analytics layer to analyze that data and turn it into information, and we're doing it with a really pleasant and modern user interface.
Rob Koyfman:
And so that first part, which is wrangle with the data, that is pretty challenging and there is not one provider that does it. So one challenge there is to find the provider. So it's not like there's a list of those. There's an element of knowledge and research that goes into understanding what data you're purchasing to make sure that it's really high quality.
Rob Koyfman:
The second thing is that delivery method that you talked about. So just ingesting the data, because all these data providers, particularly some of the legacy ones, are delivering the data via XML, or XTP, or CSV files, and we have to process that data, so that takes a lot of time. And some of the newer providers have APIs, and web sockets, and so that's a little bit easier.
Rob Koyfman:
And then the other challenge with that is really linking all the data together. So just because you're getting data from Apple from one provider doesn't mean it's very easy to link it for data for Apple from another provider. Because Apple has different securities, Apple has different trading items, Apple has different currencies. And so all these things have to go into a symbology service where you're linking all these items together so that for the user, Liberty, if you're pulling up Apple, you don't want to say, "Hey, I want Apple data from this provider, Apple data from that provider-"
Liberty:
Right.
Rob Koyfman:
.... you just want Apple data. And so for us, there's a lot of work that needs to be done in terms of understanding how those entities are linked, and then how to display to the user how can the user find what they're looking for.
Liberty:
When you talk about the legacy providers, I'm almost imagining them faxing stuff to you, right? Some of that stuff must be almost green screen.
Rob Koyfman:
Yeah. Yeah. There's definitely an opportunity to proven that. It's like back in the day, the people who had an edge used to wait at the post office for the SEC filings before they would get mail out, and they would have the filings three days before everyone else because it would take it several days to get mailed out. But yeah, that was the trading advantage, the investment advantage that people had. And then so for us today, one of the things that, the value adds that we're providing is really making sure that that data just displays, and is in our system. And how we get it, that's our problem, and we need to figure that out.
Liberty:
Making it transparent for the customer, that's good.
Liberty:
So how did you first have the idea to build Koyfin, and what was it at first, right? Because as you iterate, yeah, it could go somewhere else. But the first idea, the first vision, I'm curious to know what it was. Did you see most of it at first, or was it something very different?
Rob Koyfman:
Yeah, I think there was some elements that I thought were very important, and then the actual details were improvised and evolved over several years. I'd say the details that I thought were very important in the beginning, I thought about some of the systems that I had used before. I'd used a lot of the major traditional systems out there. I thought Bloomberg did a really excellent job for a number of reasons. One is that it aggregated all this different data sets together, so not just stocks, but all these different asset classes. I thought that was important for Koyfin to do, so focus on all the different financial assets out there, equities, ETFs, mutual funds, bonds, FOREX, and be data agnostic. So the user gets to decide what they want to look at, and we wouldn't say, "You can only focus on X and Y." So that one stop shop was very important.
Rob Koyfman:
The second thing was really an emphasis on data visualization, so just graphing stuff and charting stuff. And that was one of the things that we decided to do in the beginning is build our charting from scratch instead of buying some of these other ready-made packages out there, which would've been faster. But because charting and grow graphing was at the heart of what we wanted to do, we built it from scratch so that data visualization aspect was very, very important.
Rob Koyfman:
And then little things like having a command bar or a place to search, kind of like how Bloomberg does it with shortcuts. So being able to just say, "I want Apple market cap," or, "I want Facebook PE," and then having that pull up a screen where that's displayed as a quick way, as a direct way to do that, I thought that was pretty important, and that's another thing that we were inspired by Bloomberg's UX and UI, so we incorporated that as well.
Rob Koyfman:
But yeah, that's that those are the big ticket items. We wanted our platform to be a little bit more easily to navigate than Bloomberg's. So Bloomberg is just commands, where we have a menu system, and so you can see where you are at all times, and that's important to orient the user in terms of where they are right now, and how do you get back to a homepage, or how do you get to other things, and having that structure pretty clearly defined. That's important for the user, and it was important for us as we were thinking about it.
Liberty:
Yeah. It's such a difficult problem. I've been interested in people building apps, and people building websites, and design, and all that kind of stuff for a few years. And building just a simple thing that has a few functionalities is already very difficult, right? To do it in a way that's clear, that looks good, that's intuitive, that people won't get lost too easily. But the amount of data, and features, and ways of displaying everything in Koyfin, it's orders of magnitude more than most of these types of problems that I've seen. And so my hat's really off to you and the team, because one of Koyfin's pages or features, many designers or UX people could spend a long, long time trying to just figure out that one and you have endless numbers of them, so it's a really difficult problem.
Liberty:
Especially because on one side, you have a ton of data, right, about like stocks, and bonds, and the macro stuff, and international. But on the other side, your users are not uniform. They're not all doing the same use case. There's this huge bell curve distribution, where some are super power users on one side, and some are total beginners on the others. Most of them are somewhere in middle, but even that huge middle is probably, I don't know, thousands of different types of use case. So building something that can accommodate a very large fraction of that user base, I don't know, that sounds to me like a huge design challenge. Did you have a design background, or did you build anything of the sort before, or was Koyfin your first baptism by fire for that kind of problem?
Rob Koyfman:
Koyfin's definitely unique, I've never built a startup before. I'd say throughout my career, I definitely focused on dashboards and visualization throughout my career and very early on. My first manager, [David Coston 00:14:12] had this really unique ability to create charts in sell-side research reports and really focusing on what is the message you're trying to present? Like what are you actually trying to say with a graph or with the colors or how you orient the different elements together? And once you start thinking about it, it's actually pretty deep, because it's not just putting stuff in it. Like you don't just take the default Excel chart and put it in a report. You can, and that's what a lot of people do, but that's not very effective. Do you have two axes? Do you have one axis? How do you color code them? How many data points do you actually have on the X axis? Do you show the months? Do you show the years? Do you show the quarters? What's the difference? Is there a difference, right?
Rob Koyfman:
And so there's this whole science, which is called data visualization now. And back then, at least one person that I knew was doing it was [Edward Tufte 00:14:57]. And so I started reading his books. I actually took one of his lectures. He travels around the country and does these two-day seminars, which I think are awesome and definitely would recommend it for anyone. But he basically created a science out of this, and he's got a couple of different ideas that he talks about. But he'll talk about the straight off with putting a lot of elements, or putting kind of like going, and putting more and more elements, and how much information does that provide? And so finding that optimization between elements or the number of things that you're presenting and how much more information that's presenting to the user is really, really important. And so you think about it as like hey, if I take an element away, is that presenting the same information or just about the same information? If that's yes, then take the element away. If you're adding an element and it's adding information, then you should add the element, and then figure out something else to take away. So that trade off is pretty important.
Rob Koyfman:
But the other thing is in sell-side research, you create these presentations and reports, and you go out and pitch it to people. You go out and pitch it to salespeople on the buy-side, and you have these meetings. And it's really interesting, because when you put a piece of paper in front of someone, you get to see what they ask about, and you get to see, do they understand what you're actually saying just by putting the piece of paper in front of them? And now, it's explaining, "Oh, this line means that, and this line, it means that." And you start developing a little bit of a intuition of what works doesn't work.
Rob Koyfman:
So that was the beginning of when I was started thinking about visual elements, and presentation, and discovery. And I would say the other interesting project I had was at Citigroup when my team was implementing Palantir on the trading floor, and Palantir was this technology or company that came to us and they could do anything, but they had idea what investors did. And so they had all this power behind them, but they're like, "Well, you take these calculations, and you tell us what's important. What should we do?" And so my team was responsible for creating these different dashboards that Palantir technology could create for the traders to really look at different relationships and different data points. And the conclusion of the project was Palantir was way too sophisticated for what traders needed to look at. They just wanted to look at a price or correlation, and Palantir wanted to optimize things and wanted to find crazy relationships, and traders didn't care about that stuff, so it's a project that didn't really go anywhere. But I'd say creating those dashboards or trying to really distill what the end user was trying to see and doing that in a computer was another really interesting experience for me.
Liberty:
That's funny how your intuition for a lot of that stuff was probably refined with PowerPoints and Excels. And it reminds me a bit, maybe showing my age. But when you talked about the trade off between putting more stuff on screen, but at some point, it becomes kind of counterproductive because you're just confusing the user and they're getting less information out of it even though there's more, back in the day of the early web, homepages started to be so, so busy. Like Yahoo and all these pages that show you 15,000 different things. And then when Google came out with just simple search field, that was a breath of fresh air, right? Same thing it seems like with UX, where if the goal was just to show as much stuff as possible, you could just cram it in everywhere, but then it would be totally unusable. So finding that this balance in between is the real challenge.
Rob Koyfman:
And it's also defining like what that threshold is for value or information. And so before Google came out, I'd say people argued that you need to have the tree of where to click, and you need to have... Because that's important for the user. And Google said like, "No. Actually, this search box is the thing that's important. Nothing else."
Liberty:
Right.
Rob Koyfman:
And they turned out to be right. And you know? Steve Jobs said, "Look, this keyboard, you're not adding a lot of value because you're taking away screen. And so let's take away the keyboard, because you have so much more there that the user can then use and display information." That was a very variant perception that he had of [inaudible 00:18:36] ... so it's not always clear what that hurdle is, and I think it depends on the person.
Liberty:
Your Palantir anecdote also makes me think about how it seems like a huge advantage that you came from actually doing the investing and the analysis yourself to then build a tech product that creates tools for other investors and financial people. And I know it's the same for Rich, your co-founder. You could have some alternate history where Koyfin is founded by a bunch of computer scientists and engineers who just love making graphs and building the backend and the software. But they've never invested. They've never been on Wall Street. They've never done the research and used the tools. Maybe what they would've built would've looked great, and loaded quickly in the browser and everything. But if you don't have the experience to know what's useful and what's not, it's like the Palantir guys, right? They could build you all kinds of stuff, but they didn't know what to build to be useful.
Liberty:
That's another thing that makes Koyfin special. You and Rich have this background. And I don't know how... Like is it something you try to do with other employees? Do many of them also have financial background? Or are they more like engineers, but do you try to teach them about what investors do? Or what's the balance there?
Rob Koyfman:
Yeah, I'd say that's a really interesting topic and point. And related to that, I remember when I started thinking about Koyfin, and coming up with the idea, and iterating on the presentation, and just thinking about what is it going to do? What's the functionality it's going to perform? Look, the functionality, isn't all that revolutionary looking at valuation, or financials, or graphs. That's something that is available in other platforms and in some way or another. But I'd say tying all that data together, and making it easy to use, and allowing the user to visualize this stuff easily is the value add.
Rob Koyfman:
And I remember one pushback I received was this guy met with me, read my presentation, was like, "Look, everything you're trying to do. I can do in Python today." And I said, "Right. But most people don't know Python. Most people can't code this stuff." And he was just very, very surprised at that. You know? Like if it exists, if people want to do this, why don't they just learn Python to do this? And that's maybe another lesson from my Wall Street days. Like they're not going to learn Python. Most people aren't, I don't know about capable, but that's not... Python's not just-
Liberty:
That's not their focus, right? They [crosstalk 00:20:41]-
Rob Koyfman:
That's not their focus, right.
Liberty:
Yeah. There's only 24 hours in a day, and people will spend most of those learning about field X or Y. And if I learn about something else, I guess what I'm trying to say is you can't expect everybody to know everything.
Rob Koyfman:
Yep.
Liberty:
It's like the guy who's compiling his own Linux Colonel, and he's building his own PC. And that's cool if that's what you want to do and spend your time on. But for a lot of other people, like buying a MacBook from Apple, that's probably going to do everything that they need much more easily.
Liberty:
It almost feels to me like before Koyfin, I used to use a bunch of different sites to do some of the same things. Not even everything, but some of the same things. I knew that this site had the best, like Watchlist and this other site had the best charts, and this site could do some international stocks, but this other [inaudible 00:21:20], and I like four or five steps open at the same time all the time. And Koyfin has consolidated all of that into the same place for me.
Liberty:
And it feels a bit like what people were saying about Android versus iPhones. Okay, the iPhone came out, and the Android people were like, "Okay, but the Sony is more energy efficient. And this HTC has a better camera. And this Samsung has a better screen. And this other phone, the Pixel has a better processor," or whatever. It's like okay, that's fine, but it's all different phones. Like I can't put these six phones in my pocket and use them, right? So sometimes, it's better to be really good at everything, even if you're not the very, very best at every single thing. The whole package, the product as a package is where the value comes from, not a list of features.
Rob Koyfman:
Yeah. And I'd say the thing that's wrapping all that is user interface, is UX and UI. And UX, UI is a dimension that you would innovate on. And as a, it's a really important dimension because it's what the user feels, and what the user feels is how they perceive the product.
Liberty:
Yep.
Rob Koyfman:
And I hate using the iPhone because it sounds like so cliche. Yeah.
Liberty:
Yeah. I was trying to think of something else, but couldn't.
Rob Koyfman:
But there were phones before the iPhone, and you could call and stuff like that. But it's really that quantum leap in usability, and then having the media aspect of movies and songs that really simplified a user's life which was the big innovation.
Rob Koyfman:
And for us in our industry, there's just so much improvement that we can make on user interface and on how things look, that when financial advisors or professionals that have used other systems that are more traditional and some of the legacy systems out there, when they see Koyfin, they're like, "Holy cow! I cannot believe this is web-based. And I cannot believe it just does what I want it to do, and it doesn't look like these Java applets that were put together with a blue outline." So that user interface innovation that vectors is really important of what we are focused on and how we're differentiating.
Liberty:
I think it's such a great point. Because I guess financial people, especially tech people, too, but quantitative people tend to focus on what they can quantify. So that's why even Apple has been misunderstood for so long, because much of the innovation was in stuff that's very fuzzy, right? The user interface, the experience, is it delightful? Is it nice? Does it look good? All that stuff is hard to put in a spreadsheet.
Liberty:
But with Koyfin, I feel like the value of any improvement made on UX is especially powerful. And by that, I mean, if my tax software improves, I'm using it once a year, and I'm trying to rush through it and get out of it as soon as possible, right? But if they improve, like they save me a couple clicks and they make it less confusing, it's like okay, it's cool for that one time a year.
Liberty:
But with Koyfin, people live in there all day long, right, if they're investors. And so any improvement is magnified by the amount of time that you spend into it. If I spend all day clicking around in Koyfin, and you come out with new version that saves me a few clicks, or make something more obvious, or reveals to me something I wasn't seeing before even though it wasn't the data, but maybe I wasn't noticing it because it wasn't presented in an obvious way and now I understand this company better or I notice something about how, I don't know, their working capital changed. At this point, there was an inflection, and now I go dig into it, I understand some change in the company that I wouldn't have seen if I didn't have this visualization that showed it to me.
Liberty:
So I guess what I'm trying to say is with the type of app that you're running, there's huge leverage to UX. It feels like the old platforms. Because I've never worked in finance, but I had the chance to use Capital IQ for a while. I felt like I was on GeoCities. It feels very, very like from another era. So yeah, kudos on bringing this type of stuff to the 21st century.
Rob Koyfman:
Yeah. You know? I think psychologically, there's an aspect of time saving that anyone would appreciate from a product in terms of like hey, this used to take 20 clicks, and now it takes 10 clicks or this is just faster to use. But I think from a psychology UX perspective, you also have a person, a user who intuitively expects something or knows when takes longer than it should, right? It's like if something isn't pre-populated, you're like, "God, why? That should be..." Like my expectation is it should take shorter, and that a lot of times creates frustration and friction. When you just intuitively feel like something should be there, something should be pre-populated or preset, or the system should just know that that's the case instead of you picking it, I think that's another element that leads to the user experience being pleasant versus not pleasant.
Liberty:
And I think that's what the power of the My Dashboard feature is. Because if you go to some other site, and say this site as everything. But when you want to find it's like okay, I have to remember go in this section, go under this type of thing, look at... You have to find your placement.
Liberty:
With Koyfin, you can customize your own views. And I feel like I'm starting sound like a Koyfin infomercial, but I-
Rob Koyfman:
Yeah, great.
Liberty:
I love the product, so I'm going to say what I think. The power of this is you customize your own views. And at first, it can be a little... There's a learning curve, right? You go into graphing, product, and it's like there's a thousand things you can do, right? So you go through them, you figure what you like. But once you've set things up, almost every day, I never go into these other [inaudible 00:26:13] views by myself. I just go into things I've customized for myself, and in there, there's everything I want to see basically. So this part saves me so much more time than other sites that are less customizable. So yeah, that's another great UX improvement, I feel like, over most of the past.
Rob Koyfman:
I think that brings us to the previous point you made, which is how do you create a system that does so much for so many different people-
Liberty:
Yep.
Rob Koyfman:
... and keep it simple enough? And this is something that I don't know the answer to, and I think there's just like we're still trying to figure that out. And we have students, we have hedge fund managers, and we have everyone in between using the platform. On one hand, you would say, Well, who's it for? Is it for students, or is it for hedge fund managers?" But on the other hand, you would say, "Wait, the fact that you have so many different groups using the platform, that actually tells you something. That's actually value. That might be competitive advantage." And the way I think to solve that problem of so many different people, and so many use case, and so many different data is to allow that customization, is to allow to say like okay, just because you have this data, it doesn't mean you should see it in your face. It means you could create your dashboard and just look at stocks, and that's your focus. And if you're someone who's looking at ETFs, you could create your dashboard and just look at ETF and ETF metrics, which have nothing to do with stocks.
Rob Koyfman:
And the other part to mention with that is the modular way that we've created Koyfin with this very flat structure, and that if you want to go into the macro dashboards, they're available to you, and they're pretty easy to find under the headline macro dashboards. But if you don't want to access them, that's okay. You could just be in that area where you have single stock analysis, and you have a market scatter plot where you could display different companies on different vectors.
Rob Koyfman:
But that's the challenge that we think about all the time in terms of like with so many different user sets, groups, and data point, what are you actually, who are you actually for? And this concept of a one stop shop, all in one place provider, where the user then customizes their path and their journey, I think is really important to what we're doing.
Liberty:
Yeah. I love software that's like that. The way I describe it is the floor is low, but the ceiling is high. So you can come in easily. Even if you're a student, all you want to do is type GameStop and see a chart, right? Look at your stocks. That's fine, you can do that. Or even just look at the homepage and see what the market's doing in general. But if you're a hedge fund manager or something, you can build your own super complex custom views and look at very advanced stuff.
Liberty:
So maybe this is because we're recording, but another software that's like this is a DeskScript, which I'm using to edit the audio. They've simplified audio editing to a crazy level. Basically, you upload your audio file, and they're going to do a transfer of it in text so it looks like a Word file. And then when you remove a word in text, it removes the equivalent audio in the file. So you can edit the text and it edits the audio. So-
Rob Koyfman:
That's so cool.
Liberty:
... that's a super low floor to me. It makes editing audio so much easier. But then behind the scenes, if you dig a bit deeper into the app, there are still all of the other audio tools where you can go edit the audio directly, and run equalizers and compressors, and go by hand, like remove like 0.1 second in this space, or do a fader. You can still do the powerful stuff. But the first thing you see is much more user friendly.
Liberty:
That's the power of software. Back in the more physical world, you add the camera for the pros, and they add this huge DSLR with the glass that costs the price of a car, and the consumers had this little point-and-shoot thing that took super crappy photos, and they had to be physically different. But with software, it's all a bunch of bits, right? So you can kind of mash the two cameras together, and the beginner will take much better photos because there's the engine to take good photos even if the UI is kept simple, and then the pro can unlock the pro features by digging deeper, or turning on some features, or whatever.
Liberty:
So I don't know. It's crazy how many limitations that we use to have don't really apply to software. That doesn't mean it's easy to build, right? If you're building the software, the complexity is all still there. But as a user, we can now find all kinds of stuff that is still pretty easy to use, but can scale up to whatever scale level you ever reach.
Rob Koyfman:
Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. You could optimize a bunch of different things. You could optimize for the power user, but I think it's a very important to show the value for any user that comes to the platform, and show them the immediate value with, whether it's predefined paths that you want them to take, or leading them to the "Aha!" moment as soon as possible. Because as a user, when you enter a new product, you're basically like, "I don't want to use this product. I'm pretty sure I'm not going to use this product. Convince me that buying this product is good." And it's up to the product to say, "This is why you want to use me," so and you have to do that pretty quick. Because most people, you probably have a little bit more patience than most people in terms of reading stuff, but I'd say the average user would just click around a little bit and be like, "Mm, I don't get it. I'm out of here. Let's go on to the next one."
Liberty:
Yeah, onboarding is such a tough challenge.
Liberty:
But when you talk about you want to have all kinds of users, makes me think of AWS or I guess Stripe, all these platforms that become popular with startups and small companies. But some of these small companies or customers are tomorrow's big customers, right? So I bet a bunch of people learning about finance and Koyfin today, maybe in five years, they're working on Wall Street, or they've started a company. I don't know, they have an exit, they have millions to invest. You can grow up on Koyfin, which is part of the low floor, but high ceiling part.
Liberty:
I wanted to back to the startup life. How is it to build a company? I think you said it was your first company, so I'm curious about that part. I've had my own little startup experience, but I've always been fascinated by people building a business. Like there was a nothing, right? There was a blank sheet of paper. But now, there's lots of people, lots of products, lots of customers. How was it, this going from nothing to what we have today? How was the experience for you?
Rob Koyfman:
I mean, it's exciting. It's really great. I think you were saying before the days are long and the years are short, I hope I didn't butcher that. But so I think that's clearly evident in our product in terms of we've had periods of weeks and months where we were bogged down with something, and sometimes, I just felt like it's never going to end. We got through it, and today, after several years of work, we're seeing this product that's being recognized and has such positive feedback, and I love seeing it being used by so many different people. So this kind of concept of building something is just amazing. Something like if Koyfin didn't exist, if I never had started Koyfin, the world would go on and be the same, but people would be using something else and maybe something a lot of stuff wouldn't be as good, and that impact you have on people is really awesome to think about.
Rob Koyfman:
A startup is really hard. It's really, really hard. I remember when I started Koyfin and when we started looking for investors, the thing I heard most was like, "You've never done this before. We're not going to be, we don't fund single, first time founders." Or, "This is just really hard. You don't know what you're getting into." And I understood that, but I didn't understand that, and I could see their point now.
Rob Koyfman:
There's so many things that, also, we got lucky with, with like our team, and just being at the right place at the right time. The thought not getting lucky with those things, it's possible we wouldn't have succeeded. And I know we're doing a revisionist history and looking back. And history is always like, "If this thing didn't happen, then this thing wouldn't happen," and you go back. You know? If George Washington wouldn't be alive, would the US exist today? And all the, like you could get very meta about this. But there were very specific things that we really got lucky on that if we didn't get lucky on those things, I'm not sure if Koyfin would exist today.
Liberty:
Do you have anything specific in mind?
Rob Koyfman:
No.
Liberty:
Or is it just a bunch of little things, but all taken together, they matter so much?
Rob Koyfman:
I'd say the obvious thing to say is just team matters, right?
Liberty:
Mm.
Rob Koyfman:
And just your team matters. And me starting Koyfin, I didn't have a technical background. I also didn't have a network of engineers, and I didn't have a technical co-founder. And I basically hired a bunch of engineers in Ukraine that I didn't really know, but I had seen some of the things that they developed before to start the first iteration of Koyfin. And one of those engineers is the engineer that's still with us today who basically architected our entire front end. And right now, if we took five engineers, the chances that one of them would be able to be so smart, and have that capacity to think big picture, and to create and to really be in charge of a front en,. I don't know what the probability of that. I think it's very low because we've interviewed hundreds of engineers since then, and there's just not that many people that can do what he did, and I think we got extremely lucky finding him, and the fact that he's still with us today and helped us build the entire thing is just amazing. And so that's one example.
Rob Koyfman:
There's a bunch of people examples, investor examples, customer examples. I think the fact that we met some of the early supporters that we did, like you and Patrick O'Shaughnessy that let us advertise in this podcast was just super lucky and really helped us gain this traction that we were gaining very slowly.
Rob Koyfman:
And yeah, I think as a founder, you're constantly punched in the gut from things that are just not going right. Just like everything, people, and product, and customers, and money, and you just have to keep moving forward. And I've definitely had days where I'm just like, "God, I cannot believe what's going on, and this is just not going to work." It hasn't happened that often. But I remember three years ago, we were at this crossroads where we were just developing the product and just had all these technical problems. And I was pretty close to hanging it up, and had a conversation with my wife, and she was just like, "Look, just give it six more months and see what happens."
Rob Koyfman:
And yeah, it's tough, but that's the hard stuff, and I'm sure people feel these ups and downs in other industries. But there's just not a lot of support to lean on in terms of a startup is just a very few people. And as a CEO founder, you don't have the right to complain to people. Your job is to hear people's complaints and make them feel optimistic and positive about the future. And so you're constantly just hearing negative things from people who are bringing their problems to you.
Liberty:
Mm.
Rob Koyfman:
So having that ability to just process it, but not let it affect you I think is very difficult, as well. It has its ups and downs.
Liberty:
It reminds me of parenting, right? You can hear about it, but before you experience it, you can't really know what it's like. It also reminds me, I don't remember the wording exactly, but I think it's [Mark Andreessen 00:36:01] has a line which is in startups, when you're doing a startup, there's only ever two emotions. It's like terror and ecstasy. It's it is doing great, but then everything is going wrong and we're going to die. Oh, okay, it's all going to work. Oh, no, we're going to die. It switches back between these extremes, it sounds like. Is that kind of your experience?
Rob Koyfman:
Yeah. I think the further along you get, the more you have now customers and revenues a little bit. But you know? If I ever have another company or, I don't know what the path is, I definitely see how second time and third time founders have an advantage of just being able to know what the journey is, and experience it, and make all the mistakes. I think the mistakes you make as a first time founder are just very expensive.
Rob Koyfman:
There's an awesome tweet I saw that someone created. Ah, I forget who it was. But it was basically the same concept, but it was this woman who was just like, "Oh, my God! Everything's great!" And the next thing is she's just super depressed, and there's really depressing music. You oscillate between the two for sure very, very often.
Liberty:
I'm curious. Did you know other startup founders? Did you have an ecosystem that you could learn a bit from? Because I know on the west coast, everybody's at YC and San Francisco, and you can meet a bunch of people who did it before. But it feels like with your Wall Street background, did you feel you have this support system around you, or was it more solo?
Rob Koyfman:
Yeah. You know? It's definitely more solo, and the support system on the west coast is way deeper than it is on the east coast. And you know? I lived on the west coast for several months when we were part of an accelerator, and it's just a different attitude towards helping people. I don't know how to explain it, but this pay it forward on the west coast of just people having started many startups before, and just taking meetings, it was just much more clear. I felt that I don't know what it is on the east coast, just maybe just people are just busier. I'd say that there's less of a startup culture. Like even the people doing startups when I started were, and maybe their first startup, or there wasn't a deep network like there was in the west coast. So definitely traded notes with people. But I don't know, on the west coast, you just have this really, really deep culture of founders doing it over and over again, just helping others, and just this pay it forward mentality.
Liberty:
Yeah. It sounds like, once again, it's one of these things that's hard to quantify, but culture matters so much. It's very hard to decide just to build it on purpose, right? It emerges from past experiences and past stories that people have in their heads, but if you tried to replicate it elsewhere. Because so many places have wanted to build their own Silicon Valley, and it just doesn't work like that, right? It's not something that you can just decide to do. So it feels like a big difference.
Liberty:
I'm curious now that Koyfin is more established, looking forward, what kind of challenges, or what are the bottlenecks right now just to keep going, keep building more stuff, and go to the next Koyfin version, 4.0 or I'm not sure where you are now?
Rob Koyfman:
We started charging our customers money last year, and that's been going really well in terms of our revenue and how that's been growing, so we're very happy about that. And we have some short term goals in terms of functionality and how we acquire customers. We've definitely shifted our focus now that we're charging money, and seeing what people pay for, and what people are using, and stuff like that, so that's really given us a really nice perspective and a really important new information, new data on what people value.
Rob Koyfman:
I think we could focus on the short term, like we want to build this functionality. But I think longer term, Koyfin has this really amazing opportunity to create this home base for financial data, and allowing our investors to really do what they do more efficiently. And if you think about what an investor does and abstract it away in terms of different things that they're doing, whether it's analytics, or tracking, or following different stocks, or collaborating, or trading, we want to basically do all those things, and we want to allow Koyfin to really streamline that process.
Liberty:
Including, when you say trading, you mean like something with a brokerage where you can buy and sell from Koyfin?
Rob Koyfman:
Yeah, absolutely. I mean, you have... Oh, cool. Yeah, you definitely... For us, the jobs to be done framework for our users. Our users want to trade, and they want to execute, and they want to follow those trades, and they want to analyze their portfolios, and they want get alerts on those. If I think about our users and everything that they're doing today that's outside of Koyfin, we want to bring that onto Koyfin because it just makes it easier when everything's on one platform, when everything's connected, and when you're just used to the UI and the UX and you have that brand association with that workflow.
Rob Koyfman:
So we definitely want to think about expanding beyond just the core functionality we have today, and I think we've really built our platform to allow that, to allow the different modules that you could embed. So you could have a trading module and a dashboard that lets you execute a portfolio module, and a module that brings in your crypto assets from a different broker. Because maybe we're not executing that, but you can bring those positions in, and put it in a portfolio in your dashboard.
Rob Koyfman:
So yeah, I think all those things are super exciting for us.
Liberty:
Awesome. Can you share how big the user base is now? How many users, how fast it's growing, that high level metrics?
Rob Koyfman:
Yeah, we have about a quarter million of registered users. And so it's about double from a year ago, so it's been a nice growth rate. I'd say over the past six months, before that, we were totally free, so it was very nice and easy to grow users. Now, we've had this shift where we're charging for the platform and the free version is more limited, so we're seeing a little bit of a shift or a turn, in that some of the free users they don't want to pay and so they're dropping off, and then some of the free users are moving up into our paid tiers, which is great, and then new free users are coming, so we've been in this little shift over the past couple months.
Rob Koyfman:
I'd say our recent focus has been centered on monetization, and I'd say going forward, we're going to be doing more things that are going to help with growth and really organically growing through the platform. Like collaboration, like being able to share assets, like being able to form groups and have different watch lists or dashboards that groups are sharing together. And so really kind of pushing that lever of growth to take advantage of the functionality that's on the platform.
Liberty:
And I'm curious. How did the pandemic affect Koyfin? And I'm guessing like other financial platforms, it's been good for it. Maybe it's hard to know, but do you feel like it's pulled forward some future growth? Or do you feel like it's just accelerated growth, but then it's not going to go away when things move back to normal?
Rob Koyfman:
Yeah, it's a little bit of both. So definitely pulled back, pulled forward a bunch of growth, but I think it really fast forwarded this transition.
Liberty:
Mm-hmm (affirmative).
Rob Koyfman:
A couple transitions. So one is, I'd say, the transition of individuals wanting to invest. I think that was pulled forward and that that was accelerated because more people were sitting home, more people had time to learn about the stock market, investing in the stock market. I think you definitely had a bump of individual investors that started to think about stocks. And obviously, some of those are GameStop, and AMC, and meme stocks, and aren't prime Koyfin users. But that's the trend, that's not a one time thing that's going to come back. And so this whole concept of individuals wanting to really understand what it means to invest, what it means to research a stock and understand its financials, valuation, fundamental metrics, I think that's just the shift we're seeing with people being more interested in this do it yourself mentality of trying to figure it out.
Rob Koyfman:
And then this other concept of working from home. Whereas previously, you might have had a Bloomberg terminal that you're accessing at work. Now you're sitting at home, it's very difficult to access that Bloomberg terminal via VPN that you have to log into, and you have to allocate 30 minutes and stuff like that.
Rob Koyfman:
And needing the tools and the analytics on your own computer, that's another theme. That's going to continue to happen. It was definitely a big bump during COVID, but I think that's not going back to how it was before.
Liberty:
And when you look at the usage on Koyfin, my intuition is that it's almost following the VIX, right? When things are volatile, when things are moving, everybody who logs into Koyfin is trying to figure what's going on. And when VIX is going down and there's less happening, are you seeing this kind of usage pattern, or is it different?
Rob Koyfman:
A little bit. So we're definitely seeing more users when crazy stuff's happening in the market. But really, the core of our user base is using the platform day in and day out. So our DAU over MAUs, or Daily Average Users over Monthly Average Users is about 50 to 60% for paying users. So the majority of our users are logging into a platform every day. When shit hits the fan, more users log in to really understand what's going on. You mentioned about tax software being once a year. We're really a software that if you're using us, you're using us every day or every other day to track what's going on in the market and the stocks that you're following.
Liberty:
Cool.
Liberty:
The last thing I wanted to talk about is a less happy subject, but I wanted to talk about the team in the Ukraine. And obviously, it's been a very, very difficult period for them right now. I want to respect their privacy, in a way. But in another way, I feel like they're an important link between [Fintwit 00:44:48], the community that I feel part of, and the Ukraine. And so I was curious how this period was for Koyfin, for the team, about anything you can share. I don't have a specific question, but just in general.
Rob Koyfman:
Yeah. So we have a pretty large [inaudible 00:45:04] ... in Ukraine, about 20 employees that are based there. We had a office space in Kyiv that has since closed. It was a co-working space, so it was pretty easy to transition. But this conflict, this invasion that started about a month ago was just a total shock to us, as well to the rest of the world. And at first, we just didn't know what to do, or we were just trying to just understand the situation. But thankfully, pretty early on, we encouraged our employees to relocate to Western Ukraine where it's relatively quieter, and so most of the employees that we have were able to relocate to Western Ukraine and are living around Lviv, which is the major city in Western Ukraine. And so even though there's air raid sirens every day and the country's at war, there aren't the bombings that you see in Kharkiv and some of the other cities, so it's relatively safe. And even though it's not normal, it's relatively normal.
Rob Koyfman:
And so we've just been so touched by the support that you've shown, and Fintwit with has shown, and having an association, and having a relationship with our product, and knowing that that product's built by the team in Ukraine, and the outpouring of support has been just so heartwarming. And really, I think it really shows our team that we're building products for people, but just having that association, having me forwarding those emails of people checking in and asking about our team, and really saying thanks that they're worried really shows that there's people on both sides, so that's been amazing.
Rob Koyfman:
So the team's doing well. You know? We've always been a remote first company. Even though we had an office, a lot of people worked remotely one to two days per week, so we're able to transition pretty quickly. The first week was definitely a slowdown in productivity, but we're probably back to capacity or very close to capacity. We still have two employees that are living in the eastern cities because of family reasons and other reasons, but they're fine. They're in a safe area, and so we'll continue to monitor that. But yeah, we're doing well, and hopefully, the situation improves pretty soon.
Liberty:
Yeah. Yeah, no. Thank you, and it's good to hear they're safe. It's so easy sometimes. Yeah, you're scrolling around on Twitter, and you forget that behind every username and every avatar, there's a real person, right? It's the same for a website. I'm clicking around on Koyfin all day, but someone has decided to put that button there, or someone is dealing with a database on the backend, someone... Like it's all made by people, and we tend to forget it. And so I think it's very important to remind people that, especially on Fintwit, like as you say, you have a quarter of a million users. People are using their stuff every day, and so I think it's important that they know who's making it. And when there's safety is at risk like this, yeah.
Rob Koyfman:
Yeah.
Liberty:
I wish I could do more, but yeah, I wanted to mention it.
Rob Koyfman:
Yeah. Thank you. And again, we really appreciate all your support and all the how you've rallied the community behind us. It's been great.
Liberty:
Yeah. It probably shows why I'm not a real interviewer. I probably shouldn't end on the down [crosstalk 00:48:09]-
Rob Koyfman:
[crosstalk 00:48:09]-
Liberty:
... like this.
Rob Koyfman:
Yeah. So I wanted to talk about some of the current events that are happening. I never asked you this, but wanted your take on the Twitter edit button?
Liberty:
That's a good question. I feel like it's all in the implementation. It could be done well and it could be done badly. Because most people are just like, "Yeah, it's obvious. We just want to be able to edit stuff."
Rob Koyfman:
Mm-hmm (affirmative).
Liberty:
But they don't think about, okay, but how much can you edit? Can you edit after it's been re-tweeted 15,000 times, and then you change the meaning of what's being re-tweeted by all these people? Sometimes, even changing one character can change the meaning of something, right, if it's a number or whatever.
Liberty:
And so I think if it's done right, if every tweet that's been edited, there's a clear thing at the bottom that says, "This tweet has been edited," and you can click and see a version history, right? Like in a Wikipedia page, or a GitHub, or whatever. And you can see what's been edited so that it's much harder to fool people or mislead people. I think if it's done right, it could work. I think it would be a good idea. But if it's done badly, it just would make Twitter much worse.
Rob Koyfman:
Why are people so passionate about... I don't understand this passionate about an edit button. Sorry, I get the fact that sometimes-
Liberty:
Yeah.
Rob Koyfman:
... you want to edit a spelling mistake or whatever it is. But I think Twitter's view's very clear in that they're trying to prevent what you just described-
Liberty:
Yep.
Rob Koyfman:
... which is changing the original intent and meaning of a tweet that could go viral or whatever it is and leading to misinformation. And I think that's a really clear view that the position that they've taken, and I don't know.
Liberty:
I'm not even sure if people are that passionate about, I can't know for sure. But to me, it feels almost like a meme, right? It's a thing that people say because other people say it, and it's an easy thing to be outraged about it. It sounds clear. It sounds like Twitter sucks so much that they can't even do this simple thing, right? A quick sound bite. It's just when you think about it longer that you realize the reasons we were talking about. But most people don't get there. They just want a quick sound bite, the quick outrage, and then they move on. They're not designing products. They're not thinking about UI, and community standards, and disinformation by bots and whatever. They're not thinking about all that stuff, so to me, it feels like, I don't know, it's more meme.
Rob Koyfman:
Yeah. I mean, there's a lot of stuff that I think Twitter on the product side can improve. Oh, for sure. You know? Reddit has done such a good job of filtering and handling spam with the way that they have... One, they allow the community managers to handle it, and the fact that you need to have some karma before you pull stuff, and they have a pretty good system to detect that. But Twitter's just there's just so much stuff that you can remove from Twitter that I don't think anyone would argue with if you were to remove it, but just surprising that they don't have the checks and balances to prevent these types of accounts from existing.
Liberty:
If I was put in charge of Twitter as a product, right, of UX on Twitter, the first thing I would do is load up every other messaging app, make a list of the table sticks features, and just copy those. Like the DMS on Twitter are like-
Rob Koyfman:
Yeah. Yeah.
Liberty:
... 15 years old, right? They basically haven't improved. Just do all the other stuff that Signal, and Messenger, and iMessage are doing, just put it there. Like try to replies, and your encryption, and pinning, and... They've added pinning, right? But yeah. Just bring all the easy stuff to table sticks with other platforms before you even think about innovation.
Liberty:
As far as moderation and all that, it's a really difficult problem. Because some people would want to bring Twitter further into the algorithmic direction where it's less you follow people, you get stuff chronologically. I like that they give you the option to have both timelines. But if you start to have more human moderation and ranking, I don't know. I can see both sides on this. But on a lot of the other basic features, there's not both sides. They're just way behind and nothing is moving.
Rob Koyfman:
Right.
Liberty:
They're just not executing. I'm curious what you think about Elon buying 9.2%, and getting a seat on the board, and do you think this is going to end well, this is going to be the thing that improves Twitter? Or...
Rob Koyfman:
Man, I don't know. I'm skeptical that Elon could be the change agent that really... Look, Elon's like, what we know about his motivation is from his tweets, so we don't know what he's really doing, right? So he basically said that, "Let's keep Twitter an open forum." Or free speech on Twitter, that's the thing that he's really pushing for, and that's the big idea that he's rallying behind. So I'm not sure what that means, if that means bringing Trump back on Twitter, or it means... I guess the one, you have to, I guess, take a view, and you have to figure out where you are on the spectrum of moderation, and either of totally free speech, everything goes, or you have a duty to moderate, that's at least hateful activity or violence, which is what Twitter does.
Rob Koyfman:
You know? I think what they did with the New York Post article in the last election when the article came out on Hunter Biden, and Twitter blocked it and a lot of other media agencies. And it has since turned out that article probably should have been published or allowed to have been published, even though there may have been some sources that weren't quoted. But at the end of the day, it sounds like that laptop did exist, and it turns out to be Hunter's, and the FBI knew about it. It turned out it was this really sensitive subject, and it sounds like Jack made the decision to really say like, "No, we are not going to allow this to happen." And so you know? Then it's a really, really tough issue. I don't know where, how he could solve that or what the answer is. But it does seem like Twitter is trying to censor stuff and where it feels that it's important to do so. And maybe the intentions are good, but the intentions aren't the only thing that matters, so I don't know.
Liberty:
Yeah. I haven't followed the details of these stories. But on a high level, I've been on different communities online since '95 or something. And it's so hard to get the, I call it the pH, right? You have the right pH level, right?
Rob Koyfman:
Mm.
Liberty:
If it is too much of this or too much of that, the community kind of disintegrates and goes to crap.
Liberty:
I feel like people like Elon have very different problems than a lot of us. Like Fintwit, I'm surprised at how well that community runs, right? Because it's all decentralized. There's no moderators. It's just self-organizing and emergent, and it's still really good, at least if you curate who you follow, and you make certain choices. But there's exceptions, but generally it's been pretty good.
Liberty:
I feel like in some of the other communities, people who are in politics, like knife fighting in politics all day long, or the huge accounts like Elon, all these people seem to care a lot about what the Twitter algorithm will promote, right?
Rob Koyfman:
Mm.
Liberty:
It's the same thing people who are arguing on Facebook. Once it's not just chronological timeline of who you follow, but it becomes the algorithm that shows you what they think you're going to engage with the most, that becomes tough, right? Because even if Twitter is not trying to make certain decisions, all this ML stuff is a huge black box. And they can't [inaudible 00:54:36] ... I don't know, that's super tough. I don't think I have a solution. Okay, you could say, "Oh, we want more free speech. We're going to turn these dials in this direction." But then Twitter already has a huge spam problem and troll problem, and they're already not dealing with that. Would that make that problem worse and drive away more pillars of the community away from Twitter? People already find Twitter pretty toxic in many, many sub-communities. You drive these people away, and then the whole thing becomes worse? Because all these communities are always a power law, right? There are 300 million people on Twitter, but there's probably like 500,000 people who produce basically almost all of the content.
Rob Koyfman:
Mm.
Liberty:
And so if you start driving a meaningful number of these people away, you make Twitter as a whole much worse. So it's not about so much free speech and censorship, but I don't know, creating the right incentives for quality interactions. And I don't know. It's so hard, right? I'm glad I'm not in charge of Twitter.
Rob Koyfman:
It's really hard, and that's why I think it's... You know? When thinking about what Elon can fix or how does he fix it, it's just very tough to define the solutions to these problems. I don't think it's that easy to define.
Rob Koyfman:
But also, this idea of kind of people calling for a new Twitter, or let's create something, like a new platform or an alternative platform. And just thinking about how that power law and the liquidity that Twitter has in terms of people and important people, I think Paul Graham was like, "Look," saying like, "Twitter's always going to exist. Always is a long time." So clearly, at some point, it's not going to exist or there's going to be something different. But thinking about that transition, or what the alternative is, or what the other, the new platform is going to do that's different. I guess we could have said the same thing about Facebook 10 years ago, or thinking about how Snapchat and TikTok, where they came from and stuff like that. But that was almost a different, and it's a different way of communicating. Twitter's a very direct way of communicating, which is just with these text snippets. So yeah, I don't know.
Liberty:
The way I think about it is Twitter is the interest graph. So on Facebook, Facebook's not weird, but Facebook used to be the real social graph that you could put online. So it was people you know, people you work with. And now over time, it's become all these other publishers, and memes and stuff. But it was more trying to recreate what exists in the real world.
Liberty:
Twitter is almost a hundred percent based on interest, and that kind of graph didn't really exist in the real world, at least not for the long tail of interest. You could always have people like, "Oh, I like this sport team." "Oh, I like it, too," and they find each other in the city, right? There's just plenty of those. But any interest that's more niche, or more diffuse, or the people couldn't find each other to create this community, and Twitter has been the way for a lot of those to find themselves.
Liberty:
So I don't know. Maybe it's because it's like my network and I don't use the others much, but Twitter feels special to me. It feels very different from Facebook. And that's the part I'd be afraid that would get broken if they make too many changes without thinking about the impacts, right?
Rob Koyfman:
Yeah.
Liberty:
Twitter has been incredibly resilient to bad management. It's such a good idea that they couldn't kill it, even though they manage it so badly.
Rob Koyfman:
Yeah.
Liberty:
I feel like if Elon can just somehow get them to get out of their own ways on execution and just do these table stick stuff. Like even if he doesn't change the rest too much, if he just have helps them figure out how to improve the basic functionality, I'd just be happy with that.
Rob Koyfman:
Yeah. Yeah. As a user, yes. As a shareholder, maybe it's not going to move the needle on the stock, though.
Liberty:
Yeah. I'm not a shareholder, and it's in a too hard pile for me.
Liberty:
Same with Facebook, there's so much drama owning these stocks, right? You never know when you're going to wake up in the morning, and look at some headlines, and realize there's a huge controversy around the company. And I don't know, I prefer boring, B2B enterprise stocks that nobody talks about, and nobody puts on the front page.
Rob Koyfman:
Right. The headline risk for Texas Instruments is pretty low.
Liberty:
Indeed. People still think they only make those calculators.
Rob Koyfman:
Right, right. They said the chip and the microwave defected today.
Liberty:
This was great.
Rob Koyfman:
Cool. Thanks so much, Liberty. Yeah, please cut out all the boring stuff, and I'm looking forward to listening to it.
Liberty:
Oh, I almost forgot.
Rob Koyfman:
Yeah?
Liberty:
Anything else you want to add? This is the time to make a pitch. Are you looking for hiring people? Are you want to direct people somewhere? Anything, this is the time.
Rob Koyfman:
Nice. Yeah, I'd love to. One, if you don't have a Koyfin account, go to Koyfin and sign up for free, and then you could see what we charge for and whether you want to pay for that. So if you're looking at stocks, valuation, financials, transcripts, filings, we have all that stuff and more.
Rob Koyfman:
And the second thing is if you are an engineer, and you want to help build Koyfin, and particularly want to help with our front end, and our data visualization, and our graphing, we're looking for senior engineers that know React. If you don't know React, but you know another JavaScript framework really well, that's okay, too. But if you want to come work with us, we'd love to have you and help us pull Koyfin.
Liberty:
Awesome. I'll put the link in the show notes for the jobs.
Rob Koyfman:
Cool. Sounds good.
Liberty:
Cool. Have a good day.
Rob Koyfman:
Okay. Thanks, Liberty. Bye-bye.
Liberty:
Bye-bye.
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