Ep # 123: Automating 70% of Common Deal Tasks with AI ft. Derek & Tim (Co-founders, Socratics)

[00:00:03] Adil Saleh: Hey. Greetings, everybody. Folks, like, it it's been, like, 35 days since we had, one episode. We were kinda busy out in out in London for SaaSter, Europa, and, you know, it just, got planned, the very last moment, and, you had to miss a lot of episodes. I was, it was so hard for me to wait, for for this episode because, it was, one episode that I was really looking forward to because talking to a Fintech business that is, going for a scale for a huge addressable market when it comes to, Eun know, deal making, when it comes to deal execution for VC firms, private equity firms, investment management firms. I mean, we we come across a lot of start ups that are working with these, you know, these firms. They have this problem, a lot of times. So, you know, today, we have, Derek, who serves the product and design guy. He's more of a cofounder and a CPO, at Socratics. That is that's also, like like I mentioned, it's it's it's a productivity platform for VC equity firms, that help them execute their deals faster than ever. So this is what we heard and what we learned about, about, about Socratics. And, we alongside, Derek, we have, the founder and CEO, of Socratics, Tim. So thank you very much, both of you guys, for joining, and, you know, I appreciate you you guys taking the Tim, and it's gonna be a real conversation. I've got some points, that I wanna discuss, because a lot of these startups working with these songs, they are listening to this episode, and, you know, they have, I've definitely wanted to fix your brain. Great. [00:01:37] Derek Boman: We're happy to be here. [00:01:42] Adil Saleh: Perfect. So, looking at your background, Derek, like, as a CTO, of course, it was meant to happen, like, product guy has to be a product guy. So you cannot it's it's something that because everything starts with product in a b two b, whether it's Fintech, whether it's, you know, core legal tech. We've we've we've come across a lot of, platforms. So you being a product guy, who initiated this idea? I'm sure, Tim has some, intuition about I didn't an experience backed by this. So, if I ask you as a product guy, as a cofounder, what has, your contribution being, in in the inception of Socratics and how it all began? [00:02:22] Derek Boman: Yeah. I'll just give a brief intro to myself. Again, thanks for having us on, and then I'll let Tim take it away. The original idea for Socratics came from Tim, so I'll let him kinda talk about the kernel of where it all came from. But for me, I was prior to cofounding, Socratics with Tim, was really looking for the next piece of my journey. My background is in product management and user experience design and particularly in the financial services space. I'd spent Tim the last two stints of my career, Fintech Eun Companies, Growth Stage, Venture Back Startups in the retail banking space. And I like to say that I spent the last decade helping people understand their money, which involved looking at their financial data and in order to provide them insights and, advice on what they might do next. And that was those 2 startups were targeted at American consumers. And now I feel like I'm doing the same thing at Socratics just with businesses and helping them make sense of their money and make better decisions, in this case, around deal making. But Tim and I hit it off really, really well, and we've been on this journey together now and really, really excited about where it's gonna go. So I'll let him kinda take it away and talk a little bit about Amazing. Where the idea came from and, yeah, the whole start of it. Right. [00:03:53] Adil Saleh: Yeah. Please go ahead, Tim. [00:03:54] Tim Eun: Well, thanks, Derek. Thank you for having us on the show. Appreciate it. Just a little bit about my background and how we started. It's a very interesting story. I started off, in in finance and working in in mergers and acquisitions and private equity, for many years. And, you know, so I have a lot of experience in that space. And right during the financial crisis, I decided to leave. I was on the road to be a public company CFO. We had just executed a, $16,000,000,000 public merger to merger that I had I had led and and but, you know, this was not for me. And I I I was much more entrepreneurial as an immigrant. And so I came to Silicon Valley, and I started to invest in a bunch of companies at early stage and then joining a bunch of them. And so I've been involved in the AI space in many ways, since early 2010 ish. We were, in the background. We had a lot of machine learning going on and so on, But we always thought of it as a tool. And the last company so I'd I'd gone through and led a lot of venture backed companies. And back in 22, I'd left my my last software company, and, we just raised a $28,000,000 series c. And and I was like and and I saw there was an inflection point here, where I saw just like the Internet, just like mobile, just like cloud. Saw this thing, the AI thing really jumping in with with with Chat CPT, and I said there's something here with LLMs. I wanna go look into it. So, I started to ask a lot of questions. And the one area that I knew was the steelmaking, the m and a side. And, and, you know, well, after I left my job as, you know, my to help make my wife happy, I started to advise a lot of companies raising money and, and serving as as sort of a private investment banker, right, as financial adviser. In the middle of all this, I'm using ChatGPT to create pitchbooks and and so on and create content and get a good start on a lot of the those activities, and I realized, oh my gosh. This is helping me out so much. There's gotta be something for financial models because that's a pain point, and I haven't been an analyst in in, like, 15 years. And so I know how to make a model, but I don't really know how to make a model anymore. So I called a bunch of my friends in in banking and private equity, and and I asked them. I said, there's gotta be something you're using. Right? Because you can't be doing the same thing I did 20 years ago on Excel, and and and they're like, Tim, nothing has changed. But we know something's coming. And if you build it, we'll love to look at it and buy it. So I started to really look into the idea and look into pain points and started building a Tim. And that's when we really started to the idea started to get traction. Derek really took those ideas and started to productize them, and we talked about over, I think, close to 200 some potential customers and and design partners. We really got a sense of the problem before we came up with a solution because I think starting with a solution is a bad idea because then every, you know, every everything becomes a Yes. A nail and the solution is the hammer and that's a bad place to be. So we're really trying to understand the problem. And I saw know, a few smattering of folks trying to work in this space, but most of them were point solutions. And I said, I got one other tool. I have Excel, PowerPoint, now ChatGPT. I I just want the job to be done. I want a financial model. I want an offer memorandum. I want a pitch deck. This gotta be an easy way to do this because it's not that hard. Right? And so, that's what we did. We created a way to, you know, and we've been iterating over the 9 months, to to do that. And built brought on Johan Joseph, who is a former partner in financials led the financial services practice for Grant Thornton and, on the consulting side, and also brought on David Zaretsky, who is, who is the the deputy dean of the of the McCormick School at Northwestern University on the electrical engineering side. And these guys are very well experienced. They know what they're doing. They're they're they're doers, not just managers, and so that's what you need in the beginning. Right? So everyone's just building, talking to customers, and we have a great design partner. I don't wanna let the news out yet, but they're phenomenal. They wanna work with us. They know we don't have the full solution yet, but they're working with us. And, and so we're very grateful to come here. You gotta have a lot of luck here besides experience, and we've been lucky. And but I think the biggest part about it is application side is early on AI. Right? But we believe we have the Tim. Mhmm. And we believe we have very experienced folks who could hang hang out and make sure we survive and iterate consistently talking with customers. And, and I will say this. In this specific space of deal making, meaning private equity, investment banking, private credit, and investment management, you can't just have 2 guys from Google and Facebook come in and build an app. You really gotta understand the problem. You have to network Yes. Your level. So, we have we're so fortunate that from my background, we're able to have guys like Dave Sherwood, who's a former executive committee member at at Lehman Brothers and ran a private equity fund. We have, we have folks like, like, Phil Barnett, who is, who who ran Financial Institutions Group for Morgan Stanley and Bank of America. We have, Yobe Benjamin, who's a friend of mine. He's He's a former CTO of the institutional client group at Citigroup. And so and Tom Gregson who, ran evaluation for in New York for PwC's transaction advisory. I mean, we have some phenomenal people, and we can't make guys. And having those guys gives us a special weapon in the back pocket that when they make a phone call people pick up, they wanna talk to us. So we're able to have 1 we're one call away from a CTO or a head of banking or or the managing partner at Private Equity Fund who'll pick up because of our pedigree, because of our background, because of who we have and who we know, and that we're able to have good conversations and have them interested in and I would say, based upon talking to a bunch of folks, I've never seen 95% of people plus who say, Tim, when's your where's your demo? I wanna see it. I wanna play with it. When's it ready? And they're pushing us. And so we feel like our business side is so far ahead because there's this need. Right? And I I feel like we're really hitting a need Derek, and everybody knows it's coming. And nobody, you know, nobody's ready to build it, I think. And so I think [00:09:59] Adil Saleh: Eun know, the best part I see is is, and and and you're trying to build a product that people are desperate for. It's not that, you know, you have the right customers. You have got the personas. You have the people, companies we see that are right fit. They're desperate for it, and that's that's where, you know you know, the opportunity lies. Like, you gotta make sure that, you know, you have these people working with you as design partners, and they're as desperate to get the product as you are. And now with having someone like Derek, you know, getting in in into the execution, into the work, and having a product experience, Well, how how how big it was, that Shelley was, Derek? Like, I know that these these folks are not so tech savvy. They're they want to have a clean, minimalistic, very, I would say, old school designs, limited steps to take, actions to take. How did you, how are you still working on on the on the UI Eun side of, of the product, like, core SaaS experience? How are you guys what kind of challenge you're, you're coming to us? [00:10:57] Derek Boman: Well, I was very one of the reasons I was very interested in joining up with Tim is that he wanted to bring on design at the very, very beginning. Someone that could lead from product design and and product, which is not every startup starts with a designer on the core team. And, part of what we talked about early on was that the user experience on this was gonna be really, really critical because of the new form factor of that’s still frankly being developed of “how do humans interact with AI?” You know, Chat GPT brought a new form factor which was the chat way where I in natural language, I can speak with a computer instead of just talking in code or in our world of investment banking. A lot of like formulas, complicated macros, things like that in Excel, additional kind of programming and things where how might we streamline that by simply speaking the language of humans. And so that was kind of an insight that we had early on that we think is going to spread through the application layer of every kind of industry and rethink of how might you interact with it in a much more natural, much more person to person type of way. And so as Tim talked about, we spoke early on with dozens, hundreds of people in our space to really understand that problem because it's really important to us to diagnose before we prescribe. Understanding the problem and then applying a a solution on top of it. We don't wanna just build something in AI because that's the hot thing right now. We fundamentally believe that there is a technology unlock here that didn't exist before. Like Tim said, a lot of things in our space have not changed in a long, long time. You know, using Excel, using PowerPoint, using this old tools and, this kind of relationship type business. But there's a reason why you hear stories about investment bankers working 80, 100 hour weeks, staying up middle of the night. And what are they doing in the middle of the night? They're moving words around on a PowerPoint slide or they're going cell by cell and checking every single thing line by line. Well, what is AI and LLMs particularly good at? It's crunching large amounts of data. It's summarizing content. It's looking for errors and identifying anomalies. All of those things allow our target customers to be much more efficient if we can provide a solution which allows them to not spend time on that really tedious grunt work type of stuff. And then rather spend time on something that's much more value add, like spending time with their customers or finding new deals for their firm or something that is going to be, you know, much more, much more valuable than frankly, you know, checking a 100 page PowerPoint to the nth degree and looking at it, you know, for the 80th Tim, that's where we wanna play is if we can make them much more efficient, we can have big impacts on their business because they're they're not wasting time on that stuff. [00:14:32] Tim Eun: Yeah. Let me add to that. Mhmm. I was a user. Right? I was the guy who did everything from an analyst all the way up to the head of corporate development and a managing director. So I've been through all the different stages. Now I'll tell you the one thing that they don't wanna do is learn another SaaS platform. So where's that drop down? How do I add that account? Nobody wants to do that. That's what prevents a lot of people from using this stuff. And so, being the former CFO at the at the other other place, at another software company, I looked into automating a lot of the financial, but it just took too long, took too many people, took too much money. We didn't have time. I said, said, it's just faster. If I hired somebody, just go build it for me in 48 hours, 30, you know, whatever it is, right, versus waiting a week or 2 or 3 weeks to implement something, learn as fast. So this is why I think it's important that we're AI first. That with the chat box, there's no need to know drop down menus, no need to go to the menu and search for it. Just write down what you want and we deliver it. Right? Like that. And if there's a problem, it says it like a human. It brings it up because we've trained it the right way. And so I think that's very important that if I have a lot of time Tim I'm working 80 hours at 2 in the morning, I don't wanna go find it. I wanna write the thing, and I've been trained to do it, and I want to answer my question. [00:15:41] Adil Saleh: Okay. It's like an agent. Like, we have, like, CRM. Like, they have, like, bad agents, like, conversational AI. It's more like AI chat box. So it's like an agent, so you can communicate. You can share your problems, and it'll it'll go fine, as you have trained. I've done all the machine learning in the back end. That's cool. So, I mean, Tim, talking about the go go to market motion, like, how do you forecast it stating right now? Like, are you gonna be targeting more enterprise, customers? Because a lot of them, they'll come up with some requests that you'll have to custom build for them or maybe you'll have to do some because they're big enough. They're divided globally, operation wise, as well as, you know, different, use cases they're doing it at scale. So, what we have one thing that, that we discussed a lot is, like, you still have to deliver while you do things for scale. So is it possible with, with what with kind of motion that you are going through right now? [00:16:34] Tim Eun: Absolutely. You know, I think one the good thing about having a design partner and I will say this. Whether you're a very large Goldman, Morgan bulge bracket, or whether you're a 3 man shop in Seattle or somewhere else, a lot of your deliverables in this industry of the deal industry, whether you're in private equity or whether you're in investment banking, is mostly 70% pretty similar. You still need to do research on a company. You still need a financial model. Right? You still need some insights from the data. You need to do due diligence very easily quickly, and you throw people at it. Right? And so from our perspective, let's focus in on all of those needs that you guys have, that all of you have, whether you're a private credit whatever it is, when you're dealing with private data, and there's the Internet, there's the the phone interviews, there's the internal memos, there's in things like PitchBook or Capital IQ Financial Information, why are they all separate? They should all be combined together, and they should all work in a very similar format. I mean, a lot of this stuff is very do now I will say this. It's It's not a 100% solution. We can get to about a 70 to 80, 90 over time, but you will also need the last 10%. But from our perspective, the reason we have a design partner is that we can have a 1,000 features we could do that we all need. Right? I want them to tell us, And this is why it's very we're so lucky to have these guys. They will lead us towards, this is what I need. And then we'll talk internally and say, let me see the hierarchy of your need. Right? And then work it on the highest value and then work our way down, and then have conversations, continue our customer discovery with additional people and people already in a in a conversation or new people just to check whether that makes sense or not. Right? But most of it, because I was a practitioner, I kinda get what they're looking for. And so in in in my experience, a lot of times, it's not always what you think. It's not always intuitive. What you think you need is not always the way. So I think part of it is, of the 70%, the biggest question is gonna be I think everyone will agree that on the 70%. It's it's the prioritization of the 70%. And that's where the design partners having 2 or 3 design partners is gonna be really helpful to do they match with what they say? And does it make sense from my side? And then that's how we work together to make sure we're we're we're moving very quickly. Now, again, I think from a go to go to market motion, you gotta be very focused. So although we have all of these different use cases folks doing it, we're focusing on small, medium sized investment bankers. Right? That's who we're focused on because they'll give you a credit card to pay. Right? They will work with you, and they don't have time. So so though that's not Yeah. Right? [00:19:01] Adil Saleh: Yeah. They they they want more business. That's why they need to, like, prioritize the high value cast and improve their productivity. [00:19:08] Tim Eun: And so I think, you know, that's not the entire market. It's a small part of the market. But that's the market we're gonna start on, and that's the market that will prove our product out. And once we do it, we're gonna go upscale and go broad, across, and up. But I think right in the beginning, from my experience, at at an early go to go to market, it's that scalable, but you gotta work with your highest pain points and the guys who will work with you. [00:19:30] Adil Saleh: No. I mean, you gotta need it before you scale it. That's a regular Boman. Because all the PLG, product led sales, product led growth, that's just a myth in the first, I would say, in the 1st 2 years. And in your case, it might be more because, these this industry is slightly different. It's more like legal tech. So what about data security? You know, in the US, it's quite lenient, but in Europe, it's it's all messed up. So, how you're, you know, mitigating the security concerns of, of your customers starting up. [00:19:59] Tim Eun: I'll let Derek take that one. I've talked too much. [00:20:03] Derek Boman: The you're right, Adil, in the working within financial services, that's absolutely critical. And that's one of the first things that any of our customers are gonna ask us about is, okay, these are very private deals. We're creating confidential information memorandums. There's a reason why it's called has confidential right there in the name. The these deals are highly sensitive, in their nature and the the data needs to be protected. And so we take that absolutely very, very seriously. And so building on a technology stack, which is that that's built in from the get go. So working with our cloud partners with the data storage and how we are going to secure that data, make sure it's encrypted, all of those things so that our customers feel comfortable that that's happening. Now in AI, there's a an additional new challenge to that as well of, hey. We don't want any of this information leaking into the data the training set. We don't want it getting out to a competitor or anything like that. So we've been very deliberate in the LMs that we've tested with, that we've chosen to work with. That it's either something that we can host locally and we've used a lot of, open source models, which there are abundantly available, which is amazing that that such an open source community is developing around foundation models, which is great. But we've also looked at, how can we use an LLM that is that that makes sure that the our client's data is not going into training data or is not being shared back to the the core providers like an OpenAI or something like that. So we're very deliberate about that because that's we don't have a business if we don't protect that data. [00:22:06] Adil Saleh: Yeah. Okay. So, I mean, of course, you let let's say if you have, like, 5 different customers, they have 5 different, financial data points, and you cannot, like, of course, you cannot accumulate them for your own machine learning training or to train all, you know, apply any sort of data science models, on that. You gotta deal them separately. Like regular SaaS companies, they are also, like, they're concerned about this, the customer data. Like, if I'm a customer data platform or a data analytics platform, I need to make sure that, if I'm here to train my data, I I cannot do, like, overlap all these, data models, across different customers. So the it's the data sharing is is gonna be concerned. So you guys are soft 2 compliant, like soft type 1. You're thinking Well, [00:22:53] Derek Boman: well, some of those certifications take some time to to develop and and to get to that particular level. Now that's our ambitions, but we're also very early on right now. So we'll work with our customers. We'll work with them to meet their security requirements. And those types of, certifications are great. They signal a lot to the market, but they also take some time to get to. And I'm sure we'll get to a point where we have all of those certifications, but we're also you know, we're we're very early on. We're a startup. Right? [00:23:28] Tim Eun: Yeah. I I I point. This is actually, you know, Socratics, what he's saying. We don't have a business unless this is the the mentality that we brought. There's no business unless we secure the data of our customers. And, in fact, it's even more stringent than just between companies. It's between inside the company. Right? So deal teams can have access to each other's deal team information. So I have one team here with the analyst maybe on this team and that team, but he cannot have access and bring that data into this one. Right? For antitrust issues, for for, for security lots of 1,000 insider trading, 1,000 reasons. And even with an investment bank, your sales and trading, right, investment management, and here's the advisory side. You cannot so for us, we're going down to the level of deal Tim, where their administrator is saying, I can only proactively give, right, access. I can I have to do it in advance to certain type of people? I can't just say to their group, cannot be done. Right? So it's to that level, that that we have to build our platform from the bottom up with this mentality. And this is what a lot of people who don't know the space will will will mess up because they're not building it from the ground up that way. So we built it with that mentality of building, and that's very, very important that that it's done that way. Now with the with with I think for us, when we're negotiating these data assessments, remember, it's not just between 2 companies. There's also third parties like the SEC and FINRA and those guys involved here as well. So there are rules involved where we have to spend a lot of time and money with our lawyers to to to make sure that we're on the right side of a lot of these agreements without being overly broad. And this is an emerging area, especially with the training stuff. So we spend a lot of time and money, and that's a lot of it will be our traits because of how we apply it, and we had to get our customers across the line. So it's you have to take their feedback. There's no business unless they agree to what you do. So I think that's very, very important in how you structure your company. From the beginning, you better build it that way. [00:25:19] Adil Saleh: Yes. Yes. It's the infrastructure that you need need to make sure Eun people may not thank you today, but it's for tomorrow. Cool. Cool. So talking again on, I'm asking for my friend. He's, he owns a VC firm. In the next, I would say, 5 to 7 years, it's gonna have, like, a really, really big portfolio. But right now, they're working with a handful of companies. They started last year. So how do you like, how does this, this platform work for, a a VC firm that has, like, multiple companies, multiple Indian investors on board, and they're investing, like, they're investing, like, every year, like, with with different rounds. Like, what kind of, making that they, they might be, doing and how this this platform can, can try help them prioritize those. Because, of course, like you mentioned, you're going, small and then you're going upmarket. When you're going small, people at these small firms might be thinking about doing more with less, you know, optimizing a lot of their time and, you know, of course, cost, bandwidth, resources, all of that. So for a small VC firm, if Eun just build the case for us for our audience understanding and my understanding, that'd be so great, Tim. [00:26:31] Tim Eun: You know, I'm gonna let Derek that's tough a lot. I'm gonna let Derek answer it because he knows as much as I do, and he's the product guy. I'm a let him answer that question, if you don't mind. [00:26:39] Adil Saleh: Yeah. Please go ahead, sir. [00:26:41] Derek Boman: So venture is, an interesting adjacency to our business where they manage portfolio of companies, and they'll do a lot of the similar due diligence, similar valuation assessment, and things that, our target would do. And so we we think there there is a market there for our products. Certainly, we talk to any of those individuals. We talk to them as we've been having fundraising discussions and so on. However, our core primary use case initially is going to be on the transaction advisory side, on the M and A side for a small to midsize investment bank. And, as Tim said, we're very deliberate about that choice. And so we'd be happy to talk to any small to midsize venture capital firm as well. But just know that that's not our initial beachhead that that we've chosen to focus on. And they may have some particular needs or some things that are somewhat different than the customer discovery we've done to our product set or our feature set as it exists today in our product. And, that's just part of product management is knowing where you're gonna focus and where you're gonna expand to. Now Yeah. Do we want to expand into that market? Absolutely. Private equity is the same, meaning that, you know, we eventually wanna move in there as well. Investment management, other kind of adjacent markets as well, which have very similar, problem sets, but not entirely overlapping. Right? And that's that's critical. Right? That you don't, as Tim said, get unfocused or kind of off your your your product vision too early. Right? [00:28:24] Tim Eun: Yeah. [00:28:25] Adil Saleh: Yeah. I mean, you gotta make sure to I'm sorry. Go ahead, Tim. [00:28:27] Tim Eun: Let me add to that. You know, venture capitalists still need to do a company of research. They still need some later stages, especially on the growth side. They're gonna need financial Boman. Right? They're gonna need to do quick due diligence and some kind of a tool to help them, take all of this data and then answer questions from the from the from the, the due diligence. Right? We'll pull up the right documents to validate it. So so a lot of these things, like I said, 70% of the stuff is still the same. Right? Now we're gonna build it for the investment bankers, the understanding that 70%. So I can see a lot of VCs doing it. In fact, the the the second part, once we build the execution tools, is gonna be the portfolio management is where you're going. Is to say, how do I send this tool over to all my portfolio companies? And it's really easy. It's not really like a savvy you have to learn Salesforce. Right? It's very simple. Upload your stuff, and then there's a standardization of all the financial statements. It does a lot of checking because a lot of these small companies, they don't spend a lot of money on finance and accounting. We'll do a lot of checks for you. Right? Make sure the balance is balanced. Make sure that the right depreciation level of tables are used for each so all of that can be used, and I think what we're gonna see is a lot of folks jump in and try it, not just investment bankers, but, again, to be focused from a pure go to market Boman, we're focused on investment bankers, but I could see private equity. I know private equity. So VC is gonna jump in and say, can I use this? Right? So so clearly for for their portfolio reporting, to because, honestly, this whole portfolio reporting, these operations up, is just an added cost. Most of them don't this Boman, they don't wanna spend, but they have to. So I think in the longer run, in the medium term, we're gonna be able to get rid of a lot of this stuff and and really drop down the cost 30, 40% for a lot of these firms. [00:30:08] Derek Boman: There's an interesting point Derek, about pivots within startups as well. Like, we we always wanna be open to discussing a pivot internally as well where if that became a primary use case for us, would we pivot into that? Yeah. We'd certainly consider it right as well. That is is it something we do sooner rather than later? Yeah. If the market told us to go there or if Derek customers materialize and we and they wanted to work with us, they tried it, they loved it, then yeah. Absolutely. That you need to be flexible. You need to be scrappy and, open to those types of conversations. [00:30:49] Adil Saleh: And based on what Tim said, like, 70% of these use cases are absolutely overlapping, and you can really make it a self serve model when it comes to, you know, onboarding these, you know, these customers initially. Of course, once you're done with the development part, once you launch the initial version, you'll learn about onboarding steps. And, are you thinking about, you know, making the onboarding seamless? Like, what kind of, because that's a very critical point that we discuss, a lot in our podcast, like the onboarding experience, as as a CPO. What do you think? Like, are you guys building any kind of model or any standardization, on some of the quest you know, all these cases that are similar? [00:31:30] Derek Boman: We want the the user experience the first time user and that, what we're working in the industry that we're selling into. It's a b2b sales type of model. There's a certain amount of due diligence. There's a certain amount of, like, security reviews, negotiations and things that have to happen where the there's a certain amount of complexity that will come with the deal, which as Tim said, no peep having people on our team that know the space, that can connect us really well, is gonna be absolutely critical to to win in this space. So while we can make that first time user experience really, really seamless and that onboarding really, really good, we also recognize that there's gonna be a certain amount of, you know, high touch, conversation to make sure that we've structured the deal something that they can, be comfortable with. And, that it that they've done the proper sort of due diligence that comes with, like, that kind of b to b vendor assessment type of sales process. Right? I'm sure Tim can speak to that. [00:32:39] Adil Saleh: One last question. As well. Yeah. Anything you add to that? On this, Kim? [00:32:45] Tim Eun: Say that, Waza? Sorry? What do you want me to explain? [00:32:49] Derek Boman: Anything you'd add to that on in terms of, like, customer onboarding or just Absolutely. Saleh process? [00:32:56] Tim Eun: You know, we recently built out a whole front end to this that is 100% focusing on what do these people need. Right? So I'm not gonna get into Tim we release it, but it's made that even a a venture capitalist or even a founder, private equity fund, Morgan Stanley, all of them can will will absolutely need this front end. The the way we deliver it is an easy way that everyone uses the same way, which is called the data room. And I'll leave it at that. We deliver it in the form of a data room, which everybody needs, and then we'll go from there where we deliver product. So it's seamless, and we provide value immediately that we're providing what an Intralinks or or or, you know, or box, whatever they would Eun, we could probably offer that for free. Right? 70, 80% of what they're gonna offer, we offer it for free. And then on top of that is if you need a model, if you need certain things, we can deliver it with people. We can deliver it with, AI and software or a combination of both so that everywhere from the beginning all the way to a monstrous global company can all immediately access it to meet their needs. So we thought about the entire I mean, I I think you win here with UX. Right? You win with with user experience here. And so a lot of what we're doing here on the back end is we're seeding it with a lot of sort of AI first products. But in the long run, we wanna be the place where all the data in the world for a deal sits in one place. Right now, nobody's earned the right to do that. We wanna earn the right to do that. And if there's a better financial model, if there's a better way to do certain things, we we should bring them on board and let them use that, and we'll be a they'll be part of our platform. But at the end of the day, we're gonna be a place where every deal in the world comes to our place to get, number 1, store their data and get deals done. If we do, we win. [00:34:34] Adil Saleh: Absolutely. And it's gonna be completely, like, for a lot of Eun customers, completely self serve. They can simply go in, log in, have their all, their questions, answer the questions and get inside the platform a lot of times. And then if they need any customization, then you have a hybrid touch or sort of a high touch as the as Derek mentioned. So one last question, for both of you guys. If you're sitting, in July July right now and, in 6 months from now, what are you guys, gonna do? One thing that, that that that is worth mentioning and that is going to maybe define the growth of the of the product or, you know, business in general? Is there anything that you're gonna be doing in the next 6 months by the end of close-up this? [00:35:16] Tim Eun: We're we're a 100% focused on on one thing. Is is, getting our working with our design partners, making them extremely happy, getting their feedback, and launching a product that's broad enough to go out and start selling our MVP out to everybody. There's a bunch of people waiting for it. Right? But in 6 months, we wanna launch our product within an within 6 months where it'll be then available to the market, at least a good start where there's immediate value. And so that's what we're working with our design partners is to do that. So, that's the that's the number 1, number 2, number 3 thing that we're working on. Whether you're a product, go to market, customer success, or technology, or engineering, that's the only thing we care about right now. It's rolling out the product, that has been blessed by our design partners. [00:36:02] Derek Boman: Yep. Absolutely. So it's all about working on a a customer centered way, a user centered way as we further develop it. Building a startup is a marathon, not a sprint. And so, we're we're very excited about where we're gonna be 6 months from now because we'll have something in market that we that has met our design partners' needs and that can rapidly, be adopted by our our target, firms. [00:36:29] Adil Saleh: Amazing. I mean, since you already have the design partners, you have people that you're hanging around, the people that need this product desperately. That's that's the only one thing I would say is is your product in this niche. A lot of niches that we we spoke to, your product has to be bigger than marketing. So it's all about UX that you mentioned. It's all about the experience. It's all about, the right amount of, pain points that you serve in the first place for these folks that are 70% of the Tim the same. So, Tim, it was really nice, meeting you, Derek. It was really nice, having you as well. Thank you very much for your time. It was it was a great, talk with you and, you know, getting to learn about about your journeys and about this industry as a whole. It was a great learning company. Thank you very much. [00:37:10] Derek Boman: It's been great. Thanks for having us. [00:37:13] Adil Saleh: Likewise. Have a good rest of the day. You both. Bye. Bye bye.