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Open source interviews #20 - Didier Lopes, founder of OpenBB

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00:00 Like OpenBB, I love it.

00:02 I've used the Bloomberg terminal before.

00:04 I've been a trader and it costs $25,000 a year

00:08 to use this and get this investment research.

00:10 And you make all that free for everyone.

00:14 This is incredible.

00:15 So I really want to hear your story,

00:17 how you got started, your background

00:18 and how we got here today.

00:21 That sounds great.

00:21 Thank you so much for the kind words.

00:23 And yeah, please, let's have like, you know,

00:24 a good conversation. You can ask questions and i'll be happy to reply and yeah totally totally

00:30 absolutely and i already started recording this actually so you know we can we can kick it off

00:34 if you'd like to talk a little bit about your background and then the early days of yeah yeah

00:39 yeah so my background um well first of all of all, my parents are Portuguese.

00:46 I was born in Switzerland.

00:48 That's why I have a French name.

00:49 When I was young, like 80 years old, I went back to Portugal.

00:53 My parents basically moved to Switzerland for better financial conditions.

00:57 And then they moved back to Portugal because pretty much all my family was there.

01:01 I ended up doing a bachelor in electrical and computer engineering.

01:06 my family was there i ended up doing a bachelor in electrical and computer engineering and then i did um a exchange program at udelph because i wanted to try you know to go to another university

01:13 so i picked like the best one that my university had relationships with and i really enjoyed that

01:18 experience like outside with like english english speaking country my english was was very poor at

01:24 the time and so when

01:26 i came back you know with the exchange program over i was like you know i don't want to finish

01:30 my master's here i want to do it in a better university and i really liked london as a city

01:34 because i felt like it was like beautiful and i saw this university like imperial college london

01:39 which was like one of the best in the world and i was like you know what i'm gonna try to do my

01:43 program there and like push further and yeah i went there i did a master in control systems at imperial and then i stayed

01:52 there doing software engineer learning python and machine learning on my spare time and yeah that's

01:56 a bit my background so like nothing nothing related with finance really um at least at the

02:01 beginning uh thanks so much for sharing this. And yeah, nothing related to that point,

02:06 although you lived and studied in hubs of investment and money.

02:10 And so how did you get your first,

02:12 how did you take your first steps in finance and investment?

02:15 And how did the project start?

02:16 Yeah, so I was really excited about the field of machine learning and AI.

02:22 And so soon I realized that I need to learn Python to get into this field.

02:26 So I went really into Python.

02:28 So I became like studying it, doing open source projects and sharing my journey on LinkedIn.

02:34 And one day I got this message from a previous mathematics teacher of my university in Portugal.

02:40 And he was like, oh, I see that you've been like doing a lot of cool stuff in Python.

02:50 I'm working on my PhD thesis, which is around data science in modeling and forecasting of financial time series.

02:52 And do you want to help me write the code behind this?

02:55 Because I'm not a code person.

02:57 And I was like, this is amazing.

02:58 This is like literally what I need.

03:00 I need to have like a more like a project that is more complicated.

03:04 But there's like an objective behind the scenes.

03:07 So I said, yeah, like, let's do this.

03:09 And at the time, like, you know, I read books like Rich Dad Poor Dad.

03:13 So, you know, that the only true way to build like, you know, generational wealth is through investing.

03:18 And I already had like, you know, a couple of years of working experience.

03:22 So I was like, you know, this is a good time for me to start learning about finance.

03:25 And that's kind of where the whole finance thing started.

03:28 First from these writing the code behind the PhD thesis project,

03:32 and then to doing investment research on my own,

03:36 basically using my own capital to invest.

03:40 Amazing, amazing.

03:41 And I'm curious what those first days using your own capital looked like.

03:44 And I know a lot of stories of people, you know, who were like in between academia and industry and became professionals and entrepreneurs in finance. And this is one of the best tools ever in terms of like efficiency and how you can optimize your workflows and save like so many hours.

04:13 Investment was horrible.

04:15 Like I started spending just evenings first, but that was because I didn't know a lot, but as soon as I started understanding everything that moved the markets, you know, like sentiment analysis, like Reddit, like Twitter, you know, insider trading, like options,

04:31 fundamental analysis, I started going from spending evenings to spending full weekends.

04:36 And the thing I was spending time on is things that, like, even now in the terms when you

04:40 think about AI and stuff, all of that could be automated.

04:43 Most of that was actually data retrieval.

04:44 I was, I had, like, always. Most of that was actually data retrieval. I had always a lot of dashboards open.

04:48 I would take a screenshot, put it into a document,

04:51 write down something about it.

04:52 Taking a screenshot of that ticker

04:55 and putting on the document from the different dashboards,

04:57 that process was always the same.

04:58 The only thing that I've done was go in there,

05:00 refresh the page, choose a different ticker,

05:02 refresh the page.

05:03 And it's just like, why?

05:04 Do you know what I mean?

05:05 Like, why can't I automate that?

05:07 The only like insights,

05:08 the only extra part is what I'm adding

05:10 on top of that information.

05:11 Yet I still lose 80% of my time

05:13 doing all the manual work.

05:15 And then I look for solutions

05:17 that allow for this.

05:18 And there was like really nothing.

05:20 There was nothing that allowed you

05:21 to automate like your investment research

05:23 as much as you wanted.

05:24 And furthermore, as I was interested on machine learning and AI, There was nothing that allowed you to automate your investment research as much as you wanted.

05:31 And furthermore, as I was interested in machine learning and AI, I wanted to really have access to the data and play with it.

05:40 And it was also another nightmare because I either had to find the perfect data provider that all the data are in either, or there wasn't anything else. I had to read the documentation of data provider X and then read off another one Y,

05:46 and then they had some cross-correlated data. And then I would be like, okay, which one do I use

05:50 now? And then if I want to look at the different asset class, the way to interact with the API is

05:54 completely different. And that was really, really frustrating from a standpoint of view, like having

05:59 an engineering first approach. So yeah, that's kind of where the old pain point started.

06:06 Absolutely.

06:07 And you just described, I mean, there's this pipeline, right,

06:09 to retrieve the data, put it in one place to analyze it,

06:11 and then drive insights and get the signals you care about for your job.

06:16 And so now when you faced this super real problem that everyone else faces

06:22 and OpenBB solves, what was it like to just announce to the world, hey, like, there's this problem and, you know,

06:29 let's start solving it and let's start an open source project about it?

06:32 Yeah.

06:33 So I'm going to be honest.

06:34 I didn't think that much into it because, yeah, I never thought about being in the position

06:40 I am today.

06:41 And that's the truth.

06:41 I never, like, really thought that I'll be, like, behind the business.

06:45 I'm a builder. Like, I just like to code. I never like really thought that I'd be like behind the business. I'm a builder.

06:46 Like I just like to code.

06:47 I like to code.

06:48 I like to solve like problems.

06:49 Like, I don't know, one of the first,

06:52 as soon as I learned coding in school,

06:55 like I think the next,

06:57 like on Christmas or something,

06:59 I did like a recipe program for my mom

07:02 to basically manage the recipes.

07:03 And like, I like to use coding to help me

07:06 find solutions to problems and in this case was it was literally that i didn't really think about

07:11 you know oh i'm going to open source these and then going to get some funding not at all like

07:15 i i started basic actually that is interesting because i started writing down what my pain

07:20 points were and i started understand that a lot of people had the pain points I had as well and the reason I understood that is because I used Reddit to learn about

07:28 investing and when I read like these massive Reddit posts on due diligence on Tesla the most

07:34 of the things I could see is like the first screenshots from multiple data sources and then

07:39 I was thinking like these these these posts is outdated next week and if you look at different

07:43 tickers the person has to spend the exact same hours.

07:45 There isn't anything taught to me.

07:46 So I started writing down notes

07:48 in terms of what my investment research was like.

07:51 And then I had like a notes

07:52 and then I looked for an GitHub

07:54 for an open source project that I could build on top

07:56 and there wasn't anything.

07:58 So I just had like notes on a notebook

07:59 for like most of the time

08:01 while I was improving my knowledge in finance.

08:03 And then this was during COVID, during Christmas,

08:06 and my flight got canceled to visit my parents in Switzerland.

08:09 So I had a full week on my hands in London that I was not foreseeing.

08:14 And I was like, you know what?

08:16 I know Python. I'm very efficient at Python.

08:19 I'm going to build a solution that solves this problem to me.

08:22 And so I started building it on that first week and I got

08:25 so excited about it. I kept building on it for the next two months and I had a full-time job.

08:30 And so it was really hectic at the time. I even remember my girlfriend at the time, my wife,

08:36 that she was kind of sad in a way that we didn't do anything because I was just so happy about what

08:42 I was building and so excited about seeing it coming together and then um and then one day I did the same as I did my past open source project

08:51 which is I just posted it on LinkedIn the thing is I learned so much from people on Reddit that

08:56 we started watching a movie and I said like you know I'm gonna put these on open source and now

09:01 I'm gonna chill a bit we started watching a movie and then I was like oh I want to post it also on on on reddit because i learned from these people and they

09:07 might find this interesting and this was like on a random thursday evening i didn't even think much

09:11 about it you know and i and i put it on reddit and then we went viral we went viral on on reddit

09:16 uh and then someone mentioned put it on acro news went viral on acro news and vice magazine did a

09:21 post about this like the next day or something like that and so none of

09:25 this was like planned you know it was like all very like natural and i didn't even the code you

09:30 can see the first come it's like that code was not prepared to scale at all like like literally at

09:35 all even like the pip install you know that you are used to with the requirements of the txt it

09:40 didn't even have all the packets because like i didn't fully tested it i was like you know this

09:44 is for me.

09:45 I'm going to prove it over time.

09:46 But there's not like a high bar because it's only for me right now.

09:50 And it turns out that like more people were in the same situation that I was

09:55 and they were actually like, you know, not just, you know, saying, oh, this is cool.

09:59 I'm on the same boat as you.

10:00 But I want to, you know, other pull requests.

10:02 I want to create like a feature request i

10:05 want to join a group where we can steer the direction of the project and uh yeah so that's

10:10 how i kind of came into this old like you know oss ecosystem first um yeah i love it that's such

10:16 a phenomenal story thank you thank you for saying wow and how did those first months then first

10:22 weeks and months look like once you got all this traction, all these people looking to contribute and build with you?

10:27 Oh, I loved it. I loved it. Like it was it was so cool.

10:32 It was very hectic in terms of like the amount of hours that I had to spend with a full like nine to five job like until late night.

10:41 But it was so much fun. Like we started like a Discord group where we were like talking

10:47 and we were having fun.

10:48 We were building features.

10:50 Like someone would come in after like an evening

10:52 and build like a super cool features.

10:54 Someone came in.

10:55 I remember this one is one of the ones that I remember first

10:58 because it was someone that I've never spoken up to that point.

11:02 And one day I wake up and this person added the pull request to the full

11:06 Forex menu.

11:07 And for me,

11:08 that was really impactful because first it was like a full asset class that

11:12 we didn't have.

11:12 And I never trade.

11:13 I never traded Forex.

11:14 So it was like a full new different asset class that I never traded.

11:18 And it was someone that wasn't even on this part.

11:20 And this person just liked that the tool was interested to using it for,

11:24 for equity research

11:25 but he was also looking into forex so he felt like you know i want both of these uh worlds in

11:30 in one place and i mean that's i think when i was like you know this this can be huge you know what

11:36 we are building is actually like can be a generational product you know um yeah that was

11:40 like and we kept on on shipping who kept on building the group kept on uh on

11:45 increasing there was like a lot of prs and most of the team we have today actually came from those

11:50 times which is like super exciting that is that is incredible wow and like at that point i reckon you

11:59 once you understood okay what we have here is you know magical like uh how did you approach then the motions of okay

12:06 there should be a company behind it we should like yeah grow the organization yeah um so

12:14 yeah how do i how do i put this we didn't really think about that um i was just i was just building

12:23 a i was just building a product that I found that I needed for my investment

12:27 research. I never expected that there would be an interest to build a company around it.

12:32 But that's also because I think I was a bit naive, I would say, that I wasn't really into

12:37 the founders, CEO, enterprise world. And so for me, it was like, I'm just building this

12:44 solution. And then I started realizing the potential when I started getting approached enterprise like world and so for me it was like you know i'm just building this solution and then

12:45 i started realizing the potential when i started like getting approached by people and like

12:49 actually we started looking into i remember the first time it was probably before one one month

12:55 before uh jj from ss capital reached to us that i'm i um i shared a link to one of the main

13:02 maintainers james, about a bounty.

13:06 What was it?

13:07 It was like a program that they give you 250k to work on a project.

13:11 And I said it.

13:12 I was like, you know, this would be cool so that, you know, we could have a bit more like time to work on this.

13:18 So I didn't have like my, you know, nine to five job and I could just dedicate my life to this.

13:23 Yeah, you were still working a full time job.

13:25 I was yeah, I was I was I was still I didn't even think about it

13:29 because I didn't know that there was like a commercial opportunity

13:31 around around the project.

13:33 And then we started talking with OSS Capital, Joseph Jacks.

13:37 And then I realized that, you know, actually, like the amount of eyeballs

13:41 and traction that we have is not something normal.

13:44 You know, it's something that you have when it's almost in a way

13:47 like people are looking for a project because they need something like that.

13:52 It's not just social media following because they find

13:55 fun or something. No, this is out of need and developers contributing. It's actually

13:59 spending their own personal time to help build this product. It's actually a big

14:03 thing. It's not just, you know, it's not just, you know, a thumbs up and thumbs down.

14:08 It's spending their own time to learn the infrastructure of the code to build it because they believe in what he's doing and he solves the problem for them, too.

14:14 And that's when I started realizing that, OK, this can be huge.

14:18 And when, you know, OSS Capital talked with us about raising a round to build the company. I was like, so you're

14:26 telling me that I get to do

14:28 the same I do today, but I don't have a

14:30 9-to-5 job and I get to put all the time

14:31 and I can hire the people that already work

14:34 on the spare time? I was like, where do I sign?

14:36 Do you know what I mean?

14:38 Exactly. That's like a

14:39 dream story. You can't

14:41 get any better.

14:49 That's amazing. and at that point uh probably your role your job your everyday life it became you know it changed right or did it how how did you

14:55 navigate this yeah yeah so yeah yeah so when when we raised um quite a few things changed um so

15:03 one well one of the things first of all i had like a three

15:06 three month notice period uh because that's like the rules in in europe so for the next three

15:11 months it was like i was kind of in this situation where i was like is this actually gonna happen is

15:15 this like real you know like it just felt like surreal that we were getting funding and i would

15:20 go from being a sensor fusion engineer to actually like you know leading a company but like as as the time went by i started like getting more motivated and and uh uh started

15:30 talking with the people that were uh uh building the um the project already on open source capacity

15:35 i started talking with them about like you know we're building actually a company around this

15:39 we're gonna get like a designer we're gonna have uh people that are more focused on the product

15:43 we're gonna have like a financial department and things like that.

15:46 And it started getting like more material.

15:48 And I almost felt like the nine to five times that I was spending on working for another

15:55 company, I started spending it in terms of like creating a company and my spare time

16:02 was still on building.

16:03 But like the nine to five became of, okay, how are we going to make a company and my spare time was still on building, but like the nine to five we came up, okay,

16:05 how are we going to make a company?

16:06 And also I've never at that point read books, like, you know,

16:09 I don't know, the I Growth Handbook from Eli Thiel

16:12 or Naval Ravikant's books and like books that help you

16:16 be better like CEO or even though to manage a company.

16:18 So I had a lot of catch up to do.

16:20 So I've been doing that for, you know, the past,

16:22 like now almost two years because I was so

16:25 like not into this world before that I had a lot to catch up on if I wanted to do a good job

16:31 at leading a company and yeah that time was a lot about like learning you know talking with people

16:37 that knew about this and so that I could learn from their experiences and yeah it was a lot of fun though

16:43 absolutely that's that's great and

16:46 thanks for sharing this and you know people can expect when they get started that they need to

16:50 invest all this time uh to bring themselves to the position to be able to uh to manage uh and

16:55 to work with uh their group of people that's uh that's incredible and now i'm curious at that

17:02 point and you know all the way to today as well, the commercial, you know, interest for this, the pull from investment professionals and the monetization path, like, you know, the opportunity space is there all along.

17:15 You knew it. At what moment did you start focusing or not in having those conversations and arriving at what could be like a package or the pro solution uh just curious to

17:26 what extent in product development and in your day-to-day that became a part versus just building

17:31 with a community as you always did um so i'd say probably recently we started talking about more

17:38 seriously about monetization um up until then it's been a lot about and this is by the way this is one of the

17:45 things that i really liked about joseph jacks from ss capital and all of our angels everyone was

17:51 aligned on the vision there was there's not one investor that we have that like called us and said

17:56 like you know you need to start generating revenue by by you know the next three months because

18:00 otherwise i just it just wouldn't make sense like we're trying to build like a multi-billion dollar company and so we try to do every step that would make us closer to to

18:10 achieve that goal and starting to generate revenue early on is just a distraction for what we're the

18:16 dimension of what we're trying to build generating revenue like early on we just killed the community

18:20 and not make sense from a perspective of like like you know where we want

18:25 to be so that's like what we focus on and i think we've been on that path for now like almost yeah

18:30 one one year and a half where we're gonna be like building the product we like now a suit of like

18:35 three products uh each for the like use case but we're really trying to build like an ecosystem

18:39 where they can interact like very well together for for investment research and now that you know we've been like

18:46 almost like um yeah when you're an alpha into this we're starting to think about okay now now we need

18:51 to to start thinking about like the commercial journey uh this product that we're thinking about

18:55 is the open bb terminal pro and what what the commercial journey would look like what what type

19:00 of monetization do we expect and the reason why we're monetizing is not for the sake of

19:04 monetization is because that allows us to reinvest that capital into building a better open source

19:09 product and that's why the the open bb terminal pro is actually going to be based off the open

19:14 source open bb sdk which means that you know the community will get pretty much all of the

19:19 advantage of the the core of the open source platform and all the data access endpoints.

19:25 It's just that the pro solution is going to be like, let's say, a more professional take

19:30 for small to medium enterprise with like more collaborative features like, you know, API

19:35 keys management, like more security.

19:38 And those are kind of like, you know, more professional features, but you can still leverage

19:42 pretty much everything the same on the terminal application that we have available today.

19:48 That's perfect.

19:49 And basically, you know, to the business,

19:52 the organization being more sustainable,

19:54 to more investment into the community and improving the product.

19:57 And of course, those professionals that have those extra needs,

20:00 they will get service too.

20:01 They will get exactly what they need.

20:03 And so it makes sense for everyone.

20:04 And it must be a great period to kick everything in this direction. And of course,

20:09 the OpenBB terminal, it's free to use. The SDK is available for everyone. And then recently,

20:13 you released the OpenBB bot, right? Where on Discord, I can get alerts, I can get investment

20:18 analysis, research, everything I need. So tell us about this. And this is free as well.

20:21 everything I need. So tell us about this. And this is free as well.

20:26 Yeah. So, so that one is actually a kind of a, it was a very early on strategic take that we don't want just to build like an

20:31 application.

20:32 We actually want to build like the infrastructure for investment research.

20:35 And for that, we need to build an ecosystem. And so,

20:38 cause these all started, I think early on,

20:41 because the community was talking about integrating like a shop on the,

20:44 on the terminal.

20:46 And we started thinking about, I actually started to think about how I interacted with my colleagues and friends about my investment.

20:52 And like we would be like chatting on WhatsApp or Discord or Telegram about investing.

20:58 And I was thinking, OK, let's say that I had a shot on the terminal.

21:02 Like if me and my friends have a group on the telegram,

21:05 why would we all leave to keep the discussion on an application? I get that you would want that as

21:10 a company behind the application, because you want those users on, on, on your terminal for

21:14 some metrics that you are tracking. But from a user perspective, it just doesn't make sense.

21:18 I just want the data to come to me. Plus when you're on your phone, it means that you are

21:22 outside your house and you can, you know, track, track that data, you can pull data that, you know, interacts with the platform. So for us,

21:29 the OpenBB bot is the strategic thing, is to have the OpenBB bot to be like an extension of what

21:35 the OpenBB terminal is capable of. And because the bot is agnostic to the UI, because it relies

21:42 on like this common interface, can deploy to you know on

21:45 telegram on uh discord on slack and any other shutting shutting platform and so yeah the bot

21:52 is fully free for individuals there's a uh just a paid tier if you want to host it on your server

21:57 and that's more because you may want to do like auto posting so every time it auto posts like the

22:02 sp500 or you know you may want to create like uh we call

22:06 it a billboard feature where when the charts is displayed across the entire channel for users you

22:11 can control what's the top banner say so you can say you know there's going to be a webinar next

22:16 week like attend here and so you can use that to you know increase your um you know exposure and

22:22 uh yeah i'm i'm really excited about the bot personally

22:26 because I use it a lot when I'm outside the house

22:28 to look at tickers,

22:30 to track a watch list of tickers that I'm interested in.

22:33 Like the banks, I am tracking currently the banks.

22:36 And this is like yesterday I was looking

22:38 and they were like all like minus 10%.

22:40 I was like, you know, bam.

22:48 Curious to ask you from you know maintainer perspective and with the community sort of like opening prs and extending the product in all sorts of ways

22:52 uh have you ever faced a scenario where maybe it wasn't aligned with a roadmap to merge a specific

22:59 uh request or this hasn't been a problem or expect to be and how do you manage that process give

23:06 clarity to the community where we're working towards we're not yeah yeah it's yeah it's it's

23:13 tough sometimes because you know you only have so much resources and uh i think that a lot of like

23:21 open source like contributors sometimes feel feel entitled to have their PR merged

23:25 because they worked on it.

23:26 And I get that.

23:27 I honestly, I get that.

23:29 So one of the rules that I was very clear within OpenBB

23:33 is not, for instance,

23:35 I don't like the tracking of the pull request

23:38 from creation to merge

23:39 because I don't think,

23:41 sometimes that doesn't reflect the strategy of the company.

23:43 So that's a wrong metric to track.

23:45 What I do like to track is the PR opening and the comment from the OpenBB team.

23:50 And that comment could be anything.

23:52 That comment could be from saying, we are reviewing this right now and we're going to integrate it like as soon as this ready.

23:58 Or it could be this doesn't align with our roadmap currently.

24:01 We don't have the resources to work on this, but we will look into this in the next one two months sorry for the delay you know but that's really important is

24:08 is more important the transparency that you have with the community than actually the decision

24:13 because then they when they understand and and because we are really like transparent or at

24:18 least i'd like to think that that's how the community perceive us um we can say what we

24:22 are working on right now and this is why your PR won't come in right now.

24:28 That's excellent.

24:29 Thank you so much for sharing this insight.

24:30 And yeah, people can take note of this highlight.

24:36 Has there been, you know, I mean, the superpowers that you enjoy as an open source project with

24:42 this community, tell us about some of the ways that maybe,

24:46 you're looking to run new experiments in the future

24:50 just because you're open source.

24:51 And then what are some of the things we might expect?

24:54 I don't know if you'd like to share

24:56 probably some things coming up.

24:58 And I'm curious personally,

24:59 at what point if ever I would be able

25:01 to actually hook everything up to,

25:04 so through the trades and whether any of this is within scope.

25:09 Yeah.

25:10 Yeah.

25:11 So, yeah, in terms of like the open source community, yeah, my experience is great.

25:19 Like, it's great.

25:20 There's no, like, I think it would be really hard if I was to managing a company that is closed source now, because I'm just so used to getting feedback on it rating fast.

25:30 And sometimes the innovation comes from the community. But most of the times it comes from our engineers outside their working hours.

25:37 So the best features that we've been releasing, they come from someone working on them on the weekend and then coming on the Monday and having a proof of concept to show to others.

25:48 And for instance, we, last week we launched the interactive charts and interactive tables.

25:51 The interactive charts was someone from the, our team that they didn't find like a proper

25:56 library and they were, they didn't like the matplotlib because it was like a static output.

26:01 And so they, and they didn't find a solution for a Python visualization tool that's suited to what we

26:08 were looking for.

26:09 And so they built an open source library on the weekend.

26:12 They started building and we're going to release it, I think, still this month.

26:16 Make it really open source.

26:18 It is already, but we're still cleaning up the code a bit.

26:22 And so they made that.

26:23 And then this was only for sharding.

26:24 And then our front end person saw that and he was like, oh, I can change the code a bit. And so they made that. And then this was only for sharting. And then our front-end person saw that

26:26 and he was like, oh, I can change the code in React

26:29 to make these four tables.

26:30 And they did that.

26:31 And then the LLM proof of concept

26:34 that I shared on Twitter a few weeks ago,

26:37 that was one of our product managers on the weekend

26:39 doing some experiments.

26:41 And then we have Derek,

26:42 which is someone from the community

26:43 that's been using auto

26:45 gpt on open bb so like there's no way i feel like you can do that without having an open source

26:50 project or at least i've not seen that level of like innovation happening outside of open source

26:55 like ever and that's just like it's just really hard to compete that and just like people really

27:01 believe in what what they are doing and they see like the tool. Another cool one that we just talked today on the All Ends meeting is an Excel plugin.

27:08 One of our engineers, like he used to work in banking for like four years.

27:14 And so he understands the need for Excel.

27:17 So he experimented on a weekend.

27:18 And Monday, you know, he sends a video to everyone.

27:21 And he has like an Excel plugin that retrieves data from the SDK on Excel, like seamlessly.

27:26 And I'm like, you know, this is so cool.

27:27 Like the innovation kind of, you know, comes a bit from, from internal, but also externally, like running like side projects that then end up going into the roadmap.

27:36 And we need to understand, you know, or to actually, you know, create that launch, like what's, what's a good, like quality level to push this, this out.

27:44 Um, but but yeah in terms

27:45 of you mentioned like even trading execution so one of the hard parts i think about open source

27:51 then is that is that as good as much as this is a good thing of innovation sometimes it's like too

27:57 much and everyone wants to stretch you in their own way because they perceive the software in in

28:02 a certain way and they want to push it to a certain way.

28:06 So being able to trade on the terminology is something that a lot of people have been asking since day one.

28:13 But I feel like as much as I'd like to get there, I don't think now is the right time.

28:17 I think that we first need to focus on being the best at doing investment research.

28:22 And there will be a time where we can add the trading execution on the terminal.

28:27 But right now, that's kind of a distraction for us.

28:31 And I don't want to dilute our value proposition, which is actually performing financial investment

28:35 research.

28:37 Absolutely.

28:37 That's excellent.

28:39 I agree.

28:40 You have to stay focused.

28:42 And of course, the community understands this.

28:45 And I love what you said earlier about both, you know, the employees of the company, the contributors, the community having this space to follow their impulses and run experiments with the product.

28:57 And you don't see that in closed source. It just doesn't happen. And that is the the huge superpower right there how do you how do you

29:06 spend your time today um what is it what does it look like uh yeah um usually in the mornings i

29:13 have meetings uh now i moved to the u.s so i usually need to catch up with the uh it's crazy

29:19 because i went from um going to bed like you know at three four 4 a.m and working and waking up at like 9 to now waking

29:28 up like at 7 a.m and going to bed like you know at 1 or so because the schedule I was living in

29:34 Portugal and then I moved to the U.S. and so mornings I usually dedicate to spend time with

29:38 talking with the people from the team so whether it is like product meetings, marketing, creating content, design, you know, yeah.

29:48 Or usually just like overviewing day to day mostly.

29:51 And then on the afternoon is more focused work.

29:53 So if I need to write like, you know, a strategy document, if I, I've been coding a lot for the webinar last week.

30:00 We pushed the app out and the web like the new website and so i got to pair program

30:08 a lot with one of our front-end engineers our main front-end engineers there and so that was really

30:12 fun for me and that's what i i used to do like in the afternoon and the and the evenings so that was

30:16 a lot of fun because for me it was like a new technology i'm kind of a python uh uh like yeah

30:22 fan and i've never really gone into the web stack and going now it was like you

30:26 know this is actually quite fun you change things and you see that or they reflect in real time

30:31 then you know it can be sometimes a bit painful because the box you know needs to be a bit more

30:34 aligned on the right or on the left but it's fun. I love it and another superpower is that you can

30:40 get to broadcast all of this and help other people learn as well and experience the product

30:45 because the code is open and you can do that yeah you can do that with with closed source and uh

30:50 yeah moving i guess from europe to to the us as a as a founder it it shifts your your time

30:56 you're just in case with something healthier i guess or more normal yeah

31:00 that's incredible the company the size, what is it today?

31:06 And are there any plans?

31:08 Sorry, go ahead.

31:09 The team size today, what is it?

31:10 And are there any plans for further hiring?

31:14 We're around 20 people now and no plans for further hiring.

31:17 I think we are in a good position.

31:20 I don't think there's any role right now that I think we need.

31:23 We're in a good position to build what we are set to build for pretty much the rest of the

31:27 year, really. And yeah, no plan for hiring, really.

31:33 That's great. You've already mentioned,

31:35 you've shared a lot of golden nuggets here. Is there any additional advice

31:40 that you could share to other founders, to people getting started today?

31:43 Or maybe a mistake to avoid

31:45 if there have been any?

31:48 I think a good advice to share

31:54 is something that,

31:56 like, this is a journey.

31:58 So you have to be comfortable

31:59 with sometimes taking the wrong decisions.

32:02 But honestly, from my experience,

32:05 like making wrong decisions fast is always better

32:08 than holding out too long to make a decision.

32:11 Because also a good thing about the open source

32:15 is that you are able to iterate faster

32:17 and that allows you to build a better product

32:19 in a faster period of time, rather than, you know,

32:21 just closing the scenes and working on it

32:24 and when you're done, you release, and then you're like, you know, I expect this to be

32:27 perfect, but like, if it doesn't ease in the end of the customers, like you don't really

32:31 know our users in this case, you don't really know what's, what's going to happen.

32:35 Yeah.

32:36 One thing that I also like learned is that at the start, like we didn't really have advisors

32:41 at OpenBB and I thought that, you know, I could learn everything by just reading a lot of books

32:46 because those books have like condensed information.

32:49 It's not really like that.

32:50 When you start getting good advisors, you actually start learning that, you know,

32:53 the amount of value that they bring, like to one hour session can be quite substantial.

32:59 If you just go through it and you just have like a random shot to shot,

33:03 the value is not so much.

33:04 But if you actually have bullet points and you want to to get pick their brains on like it's super valuable um and

33:09 i'm just like remember like one of our like latest calls with like justin opman from elastic search

33:15 we talked about storytelling and and and it's important it's important and how it is important

33:21 not just for me to have a story associated with OpenBB, but every employee should have their own story

33:27 on how they connect to a human level to OpenBB

33:30 so that when they tell others, people can relate with that

33:33 and they can support not just OpenBB

33:36 because of the product that we have out there,

33:39 but because of what we represent

33:41 and how they can relate with the problem

33:43 that we had when we started.

33:45 And for me, that's something that, you know, this is so true.

33:48 Like, and when you start thinking about like the products that you support out there, it's

33:52 not just because the product is nice.

33:54 It's usually because, you know, you see how the company operates and you like the people

33:58 behind it, or you like, like the founder or you like someone and you've seen something

34:02 that they shared online and you're like, you know, i like all these things um yeah that's amazing thanks uh thank

34:09 you thank you so much for sharing this and uh you know look here what is it like having you know

34:15 as advisors and investors like billionaires has it kind of like blown your mind what it's like

34:19 yeah it's uh honestly i mean it's crazy going from like listening, for instance, Naval in podcast to talking with him and having him like, you know, as an angel for me, it was like I did a tattoo the next day.

34:32 I think I've never told that story before.

34:34 I did the unicorn tattoo the day after Naval said that he would like, you know, join around because I was so excited.

34:42 I had that I had that call.

34:44 It was like 3 a.m., I think, London time. And i was so excited i had that i had that call it was like 3 a.m i think

34:46 london time and i was so excited i even woke up my wife and she had work the next day or something

34:50 and um yeah because this is like it's just surreal you know what i mean like it's just like

34:55 you see that like these people and you put them on the pedestal and then when you talk with them

34:58 they are actually just humble people they talk with you they don't talk with like from a pretentious

35:03 place nor anything and that's one of the things that i think that most of us think of when you think about like

35:08 these people that are you know celebrities or you look up to you always think about them like you

35:13 know like untouchable but they are like human beings and they are nice people they actually

35:16 care about the same things that you care they just have like a much broader exposure and uh