 Hi everybody, I'm here with my good friend, Rich Napolitano, who's a tech industry executive who's now, Rich, entering into a new journey. I'm really excited to be talking about this. I've been watching your career for years. Thanks for coming into the Marlboro studio. Good to see you. No, great. Dave, good morning and good morning to theCUBE and it's great to be back on theCUBE. So a little different, right? A little different. You and I, first time on theCUBE was 2010. Yes. We were talking storage, cloud meets big data, all that stuff and you've had quite a journey in your career. Talk about that. I mean, you started, I think actually we're in an old digital building. Yeah, yeah. This is like some MRO building. Yes, yeah, great flashback. I think my wife actually interviewed in this building before she started in the industry. There was some storage guys here. I think it wasn't Grant, wasn't he a Grant Severe? Is that, but who knows him from a Deptec, but a guy named Irv Lyles. I don't know if you remember Irv Lyles. Irv Lyles, there was a storage guy. Back when digital made spinning disks, I think they had some marketing people out of this building. But yeah, so we're back. They're gonna sound like old guys now. Well, you know, hey, after COVID I came out and I told this guy in the room all of a sudden, you know, a little grayer. But so you have a real systems background. I mean, son, EMC, you know, you did Plexi, you sold Plexi to HP and a bunch of other stuff going on. Tell us about your background. Yeah, no, I'm an engineer, you know, originally a software engineer. And I started my career at digital, as you pointed out, in the operating system group. It was a VMS operating system. And so when I really boil it all down the long career, I've really done one thing, which is build software for enterprises and sell it to them. That's really it. And so that pattern is exactly what's going on here now at E360, it's really the same thing. Build great software and deliver value to very large scale enterprises to allow them to operate their businesses more efficiently, et cetera. So it's really the same pattern again, whether it's a big company or a small company, it's really the same challenges. Build great software. Really? When I heard you do a wealth management, I'm like, what? Wait, is it like a fintech firm? Are you doing crypto? Is it like, right? But explain what attracted you to come to Advisor 360 and then we get into what you guys do. Yeah, so what is fintech? It's a pretty big spectrum. A lot of people follow it. There's many things, everything, as you said, from crypto to regulatory tech to mortgages, to payments, to banking, to capital markets, and then wealth. And that's where we are. We're focused on the wealth business. So if you will, we aspire to be the sales force of wealth, so building software for wealth industry. And what fascinated me about the company was that this industry is extremely fragmented, right? It's almost like the early days of the solar system where there's all these companies and technology out there and these large enterprises are trying to go on the journey of transformation. We have a chart on this. Alex, bring up that chart if you would. What's this called? Kitch's? Kitch's. Michael Kitch is a wonderful guy. It reminds me of the security chart that I use from Optu. Yeah. There's like 8,000 companies and it's a mega eye test, but explain this. Yeah, no. I mean, this is one of the things that attracted me to an industry. And frankly, I talked to Michael before I joined A360 because I wanted to understand more about the industry. And I mapped it to exactly what you said. This chart looks just like the software security chart. And so much like has happened in software security, you see many of these point solutions that are out there on market, a huge amount of complexity. And people use these tools to solve specific problems and the market's highly fragmented with all these homebrewed weave together solutions that don't really solve the whole problem. So these are all point solutions. And these are all SaaS-based point solutions that have been around forever. Yes. Okay, so you guys are the new entrant, you're the disruptor. We're one of the new entrant. There's probably 10 or 20 new companies every day aimed at a specific little niche problem, whether it be trading or risk or document management or back office workflow or there's digital onboarding. There's a many, many point solutions. So when you look at this chart and you see it in more detail, you'll see that there are 10, 20 companies in each one of these point solutions with a tiny, tiny market share, tiny, tiny percent share of market, tiny, tiny revenue. They're often very small businesses, maybe $10 million, $20 million. The vast majority, 90% or more of the people on this chart are less than $20 million. So we highlighted this all in one and you're in there, advisor, 360 is in there. So is that kind of, what does that mean all in one? You guys do everything here? Yeah, so our joke is we're in all in one but we're not in everything in one. So we do a lot. So we do a lot. We basically allow the broker dealer to operate their business, right? And so we do reporting, so we do home office activities, which we'll talk about in a minute. We'll do a lot of advisor experience, which is why the company is called Advisor 360 and a client portal. But it's really based on something very, very important which we'll talk more about, which is really there's a unique and very complicated data problem in this industry. Where did the company come from? Yeah, no, great question. So we respond, we respond out of one of the biggest and most successful independent broker dealers in the industry. It was called Commonwealth. And so Commonwealth advises historically have been some of the most productive and most successful in the industry. So this technology has been what is powering Commonwealth for a long time. And one of the biggest insurance companies are the first or second biggest one came to Commonwealth and said we'd like this technology. And that's what formed our company. So we spun out of Commonwealth. We formed an independent company. I'll talk about that in a second because there's a lot of misunderstanding about that industry. So it was like an Amazon deal. They built this for themselves and then said, hey, this is actually something that we could sell to others in the industry, including their competitors. Yes, including their competitors, exactly. I mean, it's a very interesting model, right? Because what they realized was that the expense, and we've seen this now in all of our pipeline and all our prospects, the expense to build this, depending on the scale of the company, is at least $50 million a year. A year? A year to $100 million a year to build, deploy and continue to innovate in this space because it's so rapidly evolving. It's a lot of staff, right? It's a lot of staff, it's a lot of tech, a lot of developers. And so that's why you see so many point solutions out there because there's constant needs to continue to innovate in this area. So it's minimum to do a good job. It's $50 million a year of R&D. And so the idea was to take what was born inside of this one company called Commonwealth, spin it out, bring other people onto the platform and create a shared R&D model of this independent software company. And so we learned a lot on that journey. But the key thing is that, when you look at A360 now, what is it? It's 7,800 people now. It's a profitable entity. We're serving millions of households. We have a trillion dollars of assets under management. We have a roadmap that is packed with innovation. And now we're taking this technology that's driving, you know, this is public now, Mass Mutual, one of the biggest insurance companies in the world, and Commonwealth, one of the most productive and successful independent broker dealers in the world's operations completely end to end. Now we're bringing that to market to even their competitors. So you came in to actually turn this into a software business. Correct. Out of just, you know, a one-client business. So what was that journey like? Did you obviously hire a bunch of people you got to use to network? So it was an adventure. So, yeah, I've learned so much in the last three years because I'm not an expert in the wealth business. Obviously for a long time I've sold in financial services companies, as you know. You know, some of the biggest banks, you name them, insurance companies. I've always sold enterprise things into for a very, very long time. You know that. So the journey was, you know, take this technology that was born as a department inside of a financial services company and bring it outside and have it stand on its own and then figure out how to modify that such that it could be an enterprise-class service delivered to other enterprises at five times the scale and make that a software company in the middle of COVID. So thank God it worked. Amazing team, but huge amount of cultural transformation, huge amount of process and discipline, different tools and technology brought together. So if you look at people, processes and underlying technology, all changed. We've already written more than 25% of the entire platform. This year we're at another 25% entire platform. So a huge amount of investment in R&D. And the culture, you say it is a mindset to go from, okay, we got one client, we're an internal IT department to we got to think like a software company. You got it. So the pivot, yeah. So that was hard in a lot of respects, honestly, because the nature of financial services company is that there are services company and so their approach to problems is oriented, service oriented, which means it's people oriented. And technology companies solve problems with technology first. So your instincts are actually in the opposite direction. And so the evolution of tools and technology was really important. Like we adopted a whole new modern tool chain, which was frankly hard for some people, right? When I first joined, we weren't sure we can get this thing to scale to a factor of four or five greater, to deliver it as an enterprise class service, to build out a service delivery, metering and monitoring of everything in the infrastructure to deliver four to five nines of availability as an enterprise service. That all had to be built out from scratch, right? Engineering discipline around testing and automation and simple things like AHA, Confluence and Jira. I mean, and how is that manifested? When I first joined, people said, ah, you could never get this code to run into cloud. So it's running in the cloud, obviously, right? So now our next client is deployed fully in Azure. Oh, interesting. I mean, when I first started, the cloud was just coming out in 2010. It wasn't, financial companies would say, no way, I'm never going to go to the cloud. And now, they're like the biggest consumers in the club, but I want to come back to the structure of the company. You're saying you're independent? What is the organization? So that's super important, and frankly, one of the biggest news numbers about us. So what does it mean to be spun out? We're a privately held, privately funded company, right? And so we're held effectively, the structure is really very identical to what private equity does. So think about it as private equity owned. Has to, happens to be a family office. And so to be clear, we are not owned by CFM. Like that's just, they're a sister company. And actually what they are to us is just a client. So the relationship is, we just support them like we do any other broker dealer, right? So it's really important to get that distinction down. So the private equity firms, something called Clowridge, which people don't get yet, which we're talking about more, so I appreciate the time to be able to say this. So what's in Clowridge? So Clowridge is this family office, private equity. Inside of Clowridge is a venture fund that has already funded 40 other companies, literally. And whether FinTech or consumer or dozens of other things. So that's one entity, which is called Clowridge Ventures, Clowridge VC. Then there's Southworst Resorts, which has resorts in the Nassau, in Scotland, in the Cape Cod. I mean, all over the world, they have these resorts. Then there's Commonwealth, which is the company that we were spun out of, which is another portfolio company. Then there's something of a very important charitable entity called the Elevate Prize, which is an enormous charity, which has done amazing things. And then there's us. So we're one of like six or seven things that are in this entity. But to be clear, like there's no one from CFN, or a sister company that is on our board, or sees access to any of our information. And we actually have an independent board of another two local entrepreneurs from Boston here, Bob Davis, who was the CEO of Lycos in Highland Capital. He's the chair. And Bill Green, who was the CEO of Accenture. And he's an EMC's board, Pivotal's board, and still on Dell Technologies, SMP's board, and a well-known entrepreneur executive. Frankly, a great mentor of mine for a really long time. And many of the EMC guys knew him well. But also more specifically, we are acquired by law to keep broker deals' information separate. The SEC requires us to do that. So there has to be separation. So this is one of the big misnomas in the industry. The flip side of all this is given our heritage and what we've already done, any future client gets the benefit of us having one of the biggest insurance companies in the world running their operations day to day with billions and billions of dollars, hundreds of billions of dollars of assets, and hundreds of billions of dollars of assets in the biggest independent and most successful independent broker deal in the industry. That's the benefit, which has already has critical mass in the industry and one of the biggest companies on that entire chart, which no one understands. Actually, Alex, if you bring that chart back up, I want to ask you a question about that. I mean, as I look at this, this data inside of each of these, these are all SAS applications, they're point tools, there's data locked inside of each of these. You got it. And so that's got to be a huge problem. Oh, we talk about in this industry is data, data silos, I think the silos are constricting innovation, you know, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. Do you solve that problem? Yeah, I mean, how do you solve it? Yeah, I know, and this was one of our biggest learnings. And when I joined and it is somewhat the foundation of the company and we named it, we called UDF Unified Data Fabric. Because this is a very- You've got to have an acronym. Yeah, of course, you have to have one. And you know I love the word unified from my past lives, right? So the Unified Data Fabric is super important. It is really the foundation of our company. And one of the biggest challenges is this entire industry. And one of the things that makes us most unique because those point solutions on that chart, none of them actually solve the data problem. There's not one. It doesn't get data locked inside. They've got to lock it inside. They have their own little silo and they take a little piece of it and they don't, and if you start by solving the underlying data problem, so what's the underlying data problem? An underlying data problem is if you're a client and then client of these advisors, then you know, you have a house. You may have some cars. You may have a summer house. You might have a stock bond, mutual fund, insurance, annuities. You got all different types of asset classes. And all that data is disparate and mostly wrong. Because at any given moment, what is the share price of Salesforce at this instant across the world traded in ADR through other exchanges and if there's a stock split, how does it get propagated around the world? So your average advisor sitting in their office, they can't actually add up what your net worth is at any given moment. It's impossible. Once a year, actually. Yeah, and it's wrong. The moment they give it to you, it's wrong. And by the way, they probably spent our survey, say, 17 hours, five hours, four hours, every time they create that for you. So we do that in a single click. So I think anybody can relate to this. I mean, young people, you're not there yet. You're probably messing around with Robinhood, making a few investments. You got a 401k, but once that gets big enough, that's right, having kids, you're like, okay, I got to get my act together. I got to maybe get a wealth advisor. So what happens is you sit down with that individual, if once a year, if you're lucky, maybe twice a year, you're talking the phone every now and then. And basically what they'll do is to say, okay, when it's a model with a bunch of assumptions, when are you going to retire? What's the stock market going to do for the next number of years? What's our allocation mix? And then before you sit down at that meeting, you'll get an email or a Funko say, tell us what's in your 401k that we don't manage. Tell us what's in your crypto account that we don't manage. What's in your B of A account, whatever it is. What's in your private investments? And then you send them an email with a number, which is static. And then they sit down and say, okay, here's the dashboard and that doesn't change. It's not dynamic at all. And then if you ask them, well, what about the insurance policy that we bought? So you go, I'll get back to you on that. So that data is not there. You have fingertips. And so you guys provide that service so that it's full visibility. So it's not so much, yeah, it's the broker dealer back in, but it's really the advisor that you're servicing. Yeah, so that's why the name of the company, although we sell to the broker deal, let's be clear, who pays our bill is the broker dealer. But the name of the company is advisor 360. That's not an accident because we serve the advisor. And this is one of the my greatest learnings in this industry is in this industry, unlike most others, where like historically when we sold IT or software or VMware or whatever, to these enterprises, you serve the enterprise. That was the user and the customer. It's the advisor that has the power because the advisor in this industry has the relationship with the end client. And that relationship is usually important. So for most of this industry, if the advisor moves firms, the clients will go with them. 99% of the clients go with them. So this technology, it's very important to get them hooked on, to make them productive, make them understand how they can be more productive, how when you have that meeting, it's productive, how whenever time they call, you call them, they at their fingertips, they have all the information. And only if you solve this data problem first, can you offer that value of purpose. So how do you solve that data problem? You have all these today, that chart has all these independent data elements. There's no coherence between those data elements. So what do you do? You just grab all those and stick them into a big enterprise data warehouse. So tell us about how you solve it. Some of this is just the genealogy of the company. So we've been solving and working getting better and better to solve the problem for literally 20 years. That's how messed up this is and that's how long it's been messed up. We have hundreds of data feeds that come in every day. We have built out a huge amount of algorithms. Everybody else calls it machine learning, it's just algorithms, right? But, you know, it's chat T-B-T. Yeah, chat T-B-T. Well, we're going to use that too, but I don't want to give up on you. We're doing it, it's theCUBE. Yeah, that's just a powerful tool. And it's just another tool, right? It doesn't solve world hunger, so let's not make it, there's not going to be full unemployment because we have chat T-B-T. It's not putting it in the hall of fame yet. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. So we have hundreds of data feeds that come in every day and just assume they're all wrong because they probably are mostly wrong. And so we have a set of algorithms that automate figuring out, oh, well that feed was down or that flat file came, half of it came, you know, that exchange was down yesterday for some reason and it goes through all this and weaves this information together in a way and we're really good at this. That's one of the things I've learned. Like we're really good. Because as we turned on our second client, we found all sorts of problems they had for like a hundred years. So that they didn't even know about. It's hard to know, right? So we fixed all that, but we're really good at it. So that's our foundation. So on top of that foundation of data, we have this team that basically automates these processes, right? And then at the end, there are people that actually reconcile these differences and we're getting better and better at automating those processes. So we just keep eating that up the stack and automating more and more of those processes. So we have a very large team that cleans and reconciles data on a daily basis. And then where does that data go? It goes into, well, in separate repositories for each of these broker-doodlers because we're required by law to do that. And so that becomes the UDF. And on top of UDF, this is where our value proposition comes, on top of the UDF, we pour three portals effectively. A home office portal for the broker-doodler, that's their workflow, the advisor portal, which is for the advisor and the advisor's office and a client portal. And because the data is ubiquitous and seamless for assets, classes, and insurance investments and banking, you can get a seamless experience across all of your capabilities. So if you trade, your reporting's correct. If your document, if you open an account and the account flows straight through the fidelity, right, and a single sign-in, sign-on ceremony straight through, your reporting is updated automatically. If you go into Yodelay and you add some checking account, it's brought automatically back into your view, we call it a household view. So we take all these feeds, we cleanse and reconcile it, and we organize it, not how transactions occur in the industry, which is how most of the industry operates, but organized by you, your family, your household. And God forbid, there's a divorce, we partition the household, and that happens a lot, unfortunately. So can I get access to it as the end client? Yes, you see it, you see that. When you log into your client portal, you see your household. And it's organized, all that's together. So it's not just, I mean, it sounds like you've done the ugly, nasty work at the back end with the data. It's not just sort of a pretty interface that you've laid on top of it, like we're seeing so often in the storage industry. Correct, we're not a veneer, right? And there's a lot of people that don't, so we solve the hard problem first, which is actually part of the attraction if you tie back why I'm here. As an engineer and a technologist, what's your competitive mode? Well, ours is, this is a fricking hard problem. It's a really hard problem to get this data right and we're really good at it. On top of that, then we can build our software and deliver those services to you in a seamless way, driving advisor productivity, driving advisor CSAT, and therefore allowing for greater client experience, therefore more assets come onto management, which is the fuel that funds this entire ecosystem. Happy end client, happy advisor, more assets, broker dealer makes more money, delivers better service, and that's the virtuous cycle. Do people ask you like, okay, tell me about the architecture, what's the data platform look like? Do they get it? So we get, well, the broker dealers do, the advisors don't, right? So the broker dealer. Yeah, they don't care, they just want it to work. But I can't, what's back there? So it sounds like you've got a multi-instance? So yeah, so it's semi-multi-instance, right? So it's mostly based on .NET because there's a lot of SQL and stuff built on top of this. More and more, all the new stuff, the last two years of, two years plus have been in Python, right, and now currently hosted on-prem, but DR to multiple sites, and then the next clients are all Azure based, as I talked about. So, but most people don't really care about that. What I get a lot of questions about is InfoSec is really important. We have a huge investment there because we have our clients data. So we are, you know, we're SOC2, we have all the HIPAA requirements, et cetera, et cetera, all built around to our platform. So we deliver an enterprise-class service. So that's really, really, you got lots of questions about that. And we're proving it scale. This is one of our competitive advantages against like 99% of those people in that chart. And there are very few that are approved their art scale. So lots of questions about architecture, security, scalability, availability characteristics, metering, monitoring, these are all enterprise-class services that we build on. And we were kind of joking about chat GPT before, but at the same time, the last 100 days have been pretty amazing what's happening here. And you mentioned Python, it's the sort of language of the data science community. How do you see using AI? Is it just to affect automation? Is it to do better prediction? Because the prediction is today, it's a bunch of Monte Carlo modeling, which, you know, we all did in college. It's like, okay, that's nice, but it's, you know, but so how do you see using AI in the future? No, I think this is super important. Some of our partners like InvestNet do a lot in this space, and so we're partnering with them on this. They've made a lot of investments there. And so, you know, a lot of what we do is, you know, we'll partner, we'll build, we'll acquire, we'll use our appropriate to create the right solution in the market. You'll see more automation on our data flow, for sure. Right, so you see more robotic automation in terms of how we cleanse and reconcile data. It's a really important part of our strategy. Just get better and better at that. And there's a lot of innovation there. If you look at where the industry is now, it's a lot of discussion around, you know, what's the Nespex action for the advisor to take, okay? Now, we have two to three million households information today, a huge amount of data, that wow, now it's like, okay, well, how do you bring this value? How do you bubble up this value? What can you glean? What's the best practices for an advisor, right? And then how do you combine that information with other public information about, well, job changes or life changes, births, deaths, job change, economic data. And how do you bring that together to create insights for that advisor or their clients? And that's what we're moving to, right? Because a lot of the basic Nespex action stuff is already being done by other people, but we have this wealth of information about these households and the nature of the household. So we're like the top of the pyramid of the understanding of all of those assets. So we see the application for things like GPT and other things. Now, remember, we need to partition this data because we need to keep it separate. So it's constrained about what you can do, Leo. So we got to be very careful about that. But as we were talking about, I mean, you know this for 50 years, we've been automating processes in the technology industry. You're talking about automating insights. Correct. Which is different. That's sort of putting the data first, putting the data at the center. Correct. And thinking about maybe it's embedding the business process inside the data or layering it on top. So it starts, this is very important. And this was frankly a lot of my learnings the last three and a half years almost now, I think. It has to start with the data. Like historically, we've always started with the workflow or the software. It's like, no, no, you start with the data here, right? You start with the data, solve that and then you can pour the software on it. But then you need to know the workflow. So it's really all of those. You get the data right, then you understand the workflow and there are different personas. There's a home office persona. There's the advisor persona. There's the advisor's assistant, which is usually important in this whole model because they do a lot of the work. And then there's the client, the end client. And each of those workflows and characteristics are really different. Like a simple thing that we've learned is like the white space requirement for the end client is super high, but the advisor is a B2B user and they don't want a lot of white space. Like get that white space out of here. I don't want it to be pretty. I'm not an iPhone. Like, what are you doing? It looks beautiful. No, I don't want beautiful. I want big and dense, right? So you need to understand the persona, but it starts in your lap, right? The personas are very different, right? And so you can get confused. It's like, well, let's make it beautiful with the home office. Are you kidding me? They want dense work, simply tracked, like come back, stop in the middle. Like they're business people. Get that all the stuff out of my way. Right. The tiniest font that I can see. Like we're not a big screen. Yeah, that's it. Alex, bring that chart back up. I want to ask Rich a question about the competition. So I guess in a way, these are the competitors, but there's a lot of homegrown stuff going on too, right? Correct, very important. The homegrown stuff, what do they do? Do they fill their gaps with some of these point tools? So who do you compete with? So in some ways, everyone and in other ways, no one, right? The biggest competitor is probably the status quo of things that they built themselves because there's a lot of legacy systems that they built themselves historically. And so then the next pivot away from that is they'll go to the parts bin, right? The early formation of the universe here. Yeah, show that again, Alex, because I got a follow-up question. Like I'm trying to figure out who we do. So they'll reach into, like, you know, a sky needs to help a digital onboarding or a refinitive to do some trading, and they'll go to the parts bin and look for a piece. So they'll buy a tool or a widget for something. And then they'll try to weave it together. And you're the consolidator of all this. And so we're basically the platform. So you stick with our planet? Our planet thing. Are you Jupiter? Is that what you're trying to do? So we aspire to be Jupiter. So if you look at this, this is like the early days of the solar system where there's lots of matter and the final configuration of the solar system has yet to be formed. And so the question is, are we Pluto or are we Jupiter? Yeah, you don't want to be Pluto. You don't want to be Pluto, Pluto bet. And data has gravity. So we could consolidate, you know, but the challenge in these accounts is they really, a lot of the accounts we talk to, they go through their own analysis of build and buy, right? And more and more, they're realizing they can't really build. This is reminiscent to me of the early days of Salesforce. So I don't know if you remember this, but back when I was at Sun, I took over the Salesforce. And I'm looking at my P&L and I see 60 people working on building out a CRM for my sales team, 60. And I took over the Salesforce and we had to grow. And I'm like, well, kill that project, give that to Salesforce and hire 50 sales guys and give them a $3 million goal. I grew the revenue by probably $200 million dollars. And I shifted my investment from building a CRM, which I get minimal benefit to getting feet on the street selling things. That's one of the key moves we did to get sun-growing again. Get out of the things that we're not good at and focus at where we're great at. These financial services companies are selling financial products. Go sell your financial products. Let me view that. It's interesting that it's happening, you know, whatever, 20 plus years after the tech industry, I mean, you sell with email, with CRM, you know, with HR, with service management. You know, there's a different mindset in financial services though, right? I mean, it's more entrenched. They're IT shops, essentially, you know, they're actually pretty good IT shops. As you know, they're really sophisticated. Do you think they're ready for this? Are you selling to senior managers who get this? Yeah, so that's great. So we sell to large scale broker dealers. So we're aimed, and this industry is getting highly fragmented. Most of those people on that chart would sell to individual RIAs. So we don't sell that. We specifically do not sell to RIAs. We sell to aggregated, aggregations of advisors, right? So whether they'd be roll up RIAs that have 1,002 RIAs, we'll target them, or insurance broker dealers, you know, banking broker dealers or independent broker dealers, which have 1,000 or more of advisors. That's where we target, right? Those entities are going through this analysis of, well, what are we really good at? And what they're learning more and more, it's hard for them to acquire and retain talent, because fintechs are sprouting up everywhere and sucking the talent out of all these big companies. So even some of the premierest companies in the world, like a Goldman Sachs, is finding it difficult to retain top technical talent. We are a pure pay technology company outside of Boston with how many schools do we have within 50 miles of us? I read an article the other day, I forget where it was, I got to go find it. On stop trying to close the talent gap, you're never going to get there. It's almost like, remember Nick Card, his IT matter, it's sort of coming back to that. It's like, look, we're entering a new era now with AI, utilize that where you possibly can, but stop trying to be like the best IT shop in the world. Focus on your, I mean, it sounds so straightforward, but you would think that financial services is one of the last bastions of hanging on to IT. So you see this pattern, we've seen it multiple times in the industry. Another key proposition from us is we're a critical mass now, right? So we're approaching 800 people, 500 plus people in development, like 500 plus people. We're the biggest of the big now and we're now a critical mass on development. So when you look at our roadmaps, the amount that came out last year was enormous. This year is mind blowing. So it's our next crank of that wheel. Leveraged that in R&D investment. That is our superpower. We're super focused in our R&D and it's been my first two and a half years or so is just perfecting that development engine. And we're right under precipice of really just being unstoppable, frankly, in that regard. And that's because we've hyper-invested in R&D because we saw with massive anchor clients and we hyper-invest there. So we offer that capability to all of our future clients. Again, we run the first or second biggest insurance company in the world and the most productive independent broker dealer in the world already. You, next client, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, get the benefit of that. Who can afford that investment? Who can afford the $120 million year investment in R&D just to build this infrastructure out and support it every year? Yeah, so that's, I mean, that's the no brainer. That drops right to the bottom line. But now you go to the top to your point. You got, that's so, what's weird about us is we're a little company by comparison but we need to sell like SAP or Oracle or Salesforce. So we're like at the top of these companies and you know this play, right? It's digital transformation play. And that's an executive sell at the top of these organizations. The good news is that's what I've been doing for the last 20 years. I mean, the prior version of digital transformation as you'll remember this was server consolidation. And a lot of that was driven by virtualization, right? I mean, here we go again, right? It's the same story again, but that's an executive sell around business transformation. And that's really about, how are you gonna spend your dollars? So when I ran sales at Sun, am I gonna spend it in building a CRM? Or am I gonna hire more salespeople? That's the business call. And that's our proposition at the top of stock. And we're really good at it. We drive advisor satisfaction proven. We drive advisor productivity proven. And we drive productivity in your home office and we allow you to comply with the law better because we've built in compliance for your trading and your operations. So you can make money. You can save money in your operations and you can stay out of jail just like we've been saying. Yeah, so you free up capital and then they can put that in other aspects of their business, which is really to go to market. Correct. Great story. So what's the future hold? Where do you wanna take this thing? Yeah, so I mean, I think this year is really about three things. Delighting our existing clients and we're just getting better and better at it. And that's a lot about continued execution on a roadmap and we're super excited about that. So it's just building a great engineering culture and just getting better and better at that and retooling it and continue to do that. That's the first objective. Roadmap execution continues to open up our TAM, et cetera. So just keep doing that, delight our clients, roadmap execution and then go build the business. And so this year we're heavily investing in our go to market and we've never done that before because we really need to figure out our product market fit and now we figured that out. We figured out that the next clients aren't gonna take the whole thing at once that we need a classic software guy, land and expand strategy, enter these accounts around five specific plain pain points. By the way, it's the same play I ran at Sun when I took over sales and grew them in three quarters. They hadn't grown in years, five sales plays, very targeted known pain points, the way people buy and certain those accounts, land expand to a few of those and just get that flywheel going on the sales side. And now we're starting to think about, you see that industry as being so fragmented. How do we think about inorganic growth? And so we did our first acquisition right at the end tail end of last year. Oh, who'd you acquire? We acquired the technical asset, technology assets of agreements express and they had some very interesting technology around custody and clearing of assets, connectivity. Today we heavily partner with Fidelity, but many of our future clients clear with Pershing or Schwab or others. And so they had a core technology asset that would give us connectivity to these other clearing firms. And that's super important because the clearing firm basically is where the asset is held. So we don't hold securities, right? The broker dealer can't hold securities. They need to be held by a custodian and that's a legal entity. So getting pipes to those are really important. So we're going to integrate that, those technology pipes into underneath our existing platform to give us connectivity, not just Fidelity, but to others. And so that was a technology buy aimed at increasing our TAM because the available market to us expands radically when we connect to Pershing, our TAM more than doubles in that segment. So as we think about inorganic activities, there's technical plugs and now we're starting to look at the industry again because you look at the formation of the solar system, like Jupiter got really big. There's not a lot of asteroid belt around Jupiter. Why? Because Jupiter sucked it all up, right? So now we're thinking about, okay, well, how do we grow our client base? It's one of our main objectives. So organically, we're working on that, looking good. How about a year ago? How could we radically increase the number of clients we have? Then once, and this is what we learned at EMC is, well, once we have a lot of clients and we have these other assets, can we cross sell them? And we're really good at that. We know how to do that. And that's, by the way, this is one of the deficiencies of most of the acquisitions in this whole industry is they never figured out how to do the cross sell. And you look at every acquisition we did at EMC and I was involved in some monster ones, data domain, Iceland, others. We'd buy it to be a few hundred million dollars and all of a sudden it's two, three billion dollars because the sales force was well-organized, very disciplined and we understood how to do a cross sell and up sell and we understood the technology integration points that were key to creating leverage. So acquire some of these assets, grow the number of clients and then bring them in and understand how to do a cross sell and continue to expand our TAM all under understanding of how to really serve enterprise clients, which is our core belief. Palo Alto Networks is a good example. That's another great example. They started network security and then they expanded, they've done acquisitions. ServiceNow is another one that has done a great job of cross selling. I mean, and the integration, it's interesting, Rich, as former storage guys, right? It's like, we always talk about the data, but now you're actually in the data business. Correct. As opposed to the storing the data and protecting the data. Correct. And actually there's some similarity to the data problem when I was at EMC and you know a lot of the startups I ran. There was an underlying data problem which is the fundamental substrate of the storage industry is a disk which is inherently unreliable. Think about it, right? They break all the time. And even flash, which breaks all the time just for the record. In fact, it's somewhat worse, but we can talk about it a different day. So the underlying substrate of that entire industry is the fact that the data is bad. And that whole industry is built on one idea, which is the underlying substrate breaks all the time but we still need to give you back your data. That's really, all the layers of software that are in storage about that one idea. We have the same problem in this industry. The data is wrong all the time, but we gotta make it usable for mortals. It's just a higher level of the problem and it's actually more complicated because there's so many disparate data sources and there are absolutely no standards, none, zero. Most companies are still using flat files they send you. It's really cuckoo, it's so antiquated. So it's a nasty problem. And what got me excited about coming here is like it's such a nasty problem and we're good at it. So that you couple that with understanding the workflow, which the founder, Darren Tedesco, my partner in crime here, he's a deep financial services guy, right? Knows the home office of the broken deal but more importantly, knows the life of the advisor. So you solve this nasty data problem, understand the workflow and then delight them with an amazing user experience. That's the magic, right? Solve it cross-asset, right? Insurance, investments and banking together. Solve the data problem, create these portals, understand the workflow and the persona in each one of those, create a great experience, get them to focus on what they do well, which is going selling their financial products by leveraging our technology. Why would they invest in that? Just give that to us, we're great at it. It's a great story, Rich. Like I say, it's a start, a tech executive who's now sort of gone into a new industry but bringing a lot of the disciplines up and say, every industry is a technology business, every industry is a SaaS business. The question is how you get there, as you say, it's part of the digital transformation. Well, congratulations on getting here. It sounds like it's been quite a journey, challenging one, but actually pretty quick. I mean, kind of through COVID. And now the post-isolation economy, it sounds like you're really ready to scale. Appreciate you coming in. No, it's so great, Dave, great to be here. Great to see you again. It's been a few years and a different vertical, but this is a great forum. I picture my friend Dave and the team, what they do here is remarkable. These interviews, I watch them. I still learn from them. I think what you do is a service to all of us in this industry, which is why when you said, come in, I said, of course. Thank you. I appreciate it. It's such a great story and we love to share. We're all about free content. And yeah, we're doing some exciting things with foundation models and generative AI, taking the whole corpus of CUBE data and making it available for our audience. And we're experimenting with that now, and it's a pretty exciting time. We'll show our 25 again. But it's fun to watch you because you're innovating yourself. Every time I talk to you, you're always innovating, right? And the whole format of the CUBE was remarkable from the beginning. And some of your greatest partners, whether it be Amazon or others, think about, I've watched your journey too, right? Which is, you know, you're all IT infrastructure, and then all of a sudden, you're the number one thing in Amazon, right? Like, it's incredible. So you watched, you stayed ahead of that curve and continued to innovate and leverage technology. And so, but that's the service that I think you provide to the industry. Yeah, thank you. John Curry has been a huge part of that, right? He's always- For a long time. He's unbelievable. Right, he's unbelievable. He's always thinking four steps ahead. I know you guys do a great job. So thank you. Great to see you, Rich. All right, keep it right there. For more content on theCUBE, go to thecube.net and reach out at Dave Vellante. Thanks for watching.