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Digital Social Hour
Master LinkedIn Marketing Like Sapphire's Founders I Stephen & Gabino Roche DSH #1306
00:52:42
Ready to **master LinkedIn marketing like Sapphire's founders**? 🚀 Tune into this episode of the Digital Social Hour with Sean Kelly as we sit down with Stephen and Gabino Roche, the brilliant twin founders of Sapphire. These trailblazing...
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- [00:00]
Stephen
Thousands of deals and execution has been the key to success. And he has and found many companies who've been able to do that and accelerate. And he thinks we're, we're on our way to do great things.
- [00:10]
Gabino
To his credit, it took him five minutes to understand our entire business.
- [00:14]
Host
Wow, Kevin.
- [00:15]
Gabino
Yeah, because I remember I was like, oh, this is going to be hard. I don't know if he knows this and blah, blah. No, he like completely got it. I was blown away.
- [00:27]
Host
All right, guys, got some twins on today, Stephen and Gabino from Sapphire. Thanks for joining me today, guys.
- [00:32]
Gabino
Thanks for having us.
- [00:33]
Host
Yeah. So for those that don't know what Sapphire is about, could you briefly explain?
- [00:38]
Gabino
Yeah, sure.
- [00:39]
Stephen
I mean, if you were a C level executive, I'm meeting you, the elevator, the elevator pitch would be we help financial institutions launch new funds as fast as 24 hours to be ready to trade. And after trade execution, we can help settle those trades at near real time.
- [00:55]
Gabino
You know.
- [00:56]
Stephen
Now what does that mean? Well, you know, big investment manager wins a pension fund, let's say the Walmart pension fund in the old days before we existed, it could take, you know, a few months, six months, maybe 18 months before they could start trading on it. Now with our tech, it's plausible to get ready tomorrow.
- [01:12]
Host
Wow.
- [01:13]
Stephen
So a big investment manager doesn't want any slowdown. They'll put their, their onboarding through our platform. They'll tell their broker deals or custodians, hey, if you want to be first to trade in this new fund, you might want to look at this technology. So it's quite compelling in that aspect. And then we eliminate some of the issues in post trade. And we do this with 108 patents that my identical twin brother invented.
- [01:33]
Host
Wow, a lot of patents, man.
- [01:35]
Stephen
Yeah, it remembers a data point entered and a document shared for the lifecycle of the fund from inception to settlement. Now we have a lot of big clients that use us. I mean, it's very humbling. You can ask for a bigger win than having your first client as BlackRock and then, you know, to follow that, how can you make it any bigger? Or second client was JP Morgan and then BNY Mellon and so on and so forth. A lot of them have the press releases out on our website. You check it there. We've been in business for about eight years and knock on wood, we have zero churn. Not one customer has yet.
- [02:06]
Host
That's insane. I've never heard of a company with zero churn that's been around that long. Well done.
- [02:10]
Gabino
Just to put a Little color to this because the complexity in actually launching these funds, I mean, we're dealing with global investment managers and they're not just trading in the US and the uk. It's India, it's Brazil. And so you have to deal with the local regulators, the local banks. That's part of this process of why it takes sometimes months. And a lot of this was actually manual paperwork to actually FedEx documents, to kind of get the wet signatures and stuff. So that's part of what we're bringing into bear with the digitization of this entire workflow. And it's not even just a workflow. It's actually. We'll get into that a little bit. What we're actually doing is remembering this data for the industry, digitizing it. And Covid has created an opportunity now to accelerate that because at that time people couldn't go out and interact, so you had to be digital.
- [02:55]
Host
Yeah, that makes sense. And now this was your guy's first startup, right?
- [02:59]
Gabino
Well, I've, I've done a couple other startups before they failed and was a mobile app business that broke even. And honestly, and I say this for anyone who's watching, as an entrepreneur, you could pay. I lost 80,000 the first year in the mobile app business. That's a lot as an individual. This is, you know, back 2012 or something like that. And I learned so much from it. You have to be professionally mature, not professionally immature to admit the losses. And it helps you grow. And I think there's a, there's a. I will encourage people think about this. You go to school and they tell you memorize answers, follow instructions. That's really what's happening, right? You get a test, you get the A. You get the illusion that you're smart. The test is over, you forget everything because it's really a memorization game. And if you go through at high school level, you have the aptitude to do problem solving. And I just don't think sometimes school gives that freedom. You're always just trying to get the A because you're trying to get to college. And so you're focused on the memorization. And so if you have the freedom to fail and not quit and say, okay, how do I pivot? Then you learn. And I gotta tell you, those many failures. And I know we have a short time today. My, my brother knows a story. There was a mobile app business where customers calling me and complaining about something and it was wrong. And, and he told me, you know this, he's, he's a good cheerleader. For me, and he gave me a pitch. But what I had to know and the expertise we'll get to about myself is I know how to build products faster market, you know, there's not much that I will boast about, but that I'm actually pretty good at and, and understanding where you can speak with conviction. That comes with the freedom of failure. Because you've tried it multiple times and everyone gets so afraid of failing because of the F on the test. But it doesn't have to be public. If you have, and you've heard people say this, if you have more macro wins, the micro losses don't mean as much. Right. Because the macro wins. Overcome that. So anyways, that was a foundation. You'll see as we talk a little bit about the sapphire endeavor, like where.
- [05:01]
Stephen
Why we.
- [05:02]
Gabino
I think we were able to make our crack into the finance market.
- [05:05]
Host
Yeah. Did it take off right away the first year, or did it take some time?
- [05:08]
Stephen
No, it took time. It was pretty scary. Probably say the first five years. Scariest time in my life. I mean, I put all my eggs into this basket right here.
- [05:17]
Host
You guys really trust each other.
- [05:18]
Stephen
Yeah. Well, I mean, I think when we left, you know, our schooling years, you know, in college, we took two different paths and careers. I took one in technology sales. He was in product development, mostly in finance. We matured a lot and get our, you know, establish our own credentials and credibility. So when, when I convinced him to take a chance on saving a consortium, which will describe labor later, I said, maybe you'll find an idea on starting a new, you know, entrepreneurial opportunity. And you're asking the question before about entrepreneurship? Well, it's in our blood. I mean, both of our grandfathers are entrepreneurs. My father was an entrepreneur. You know, I dabbled in consulting services while I did my job when I was working at AT&T for about 18 years. So, yeah, I mean, it didn't, it didn't come easy. And if I knew it was this hard, I probably would never have done it.
- [06:04]
Host
Yeah, I love the honesty. Yeah, it's not an easy lifestyle.
- [06:07]
Stephen
It's not. So like my brother sees his consortium, he gets a reputation. You think his reputation is going to carry after he starts his own business, but he doesn't have the backing of the big companies he used to work for. People are hanging up the phones. People who committed verbally to you are now disappearing. And yeah, it's, it's very humbling. Then you have multibillion dollar conglomerates that'll tell us to our face even though we have 108 patents that they're going to copy our screens, copy our service, pretend they do the same thing. We'll sue them and we'll go out of business. Good luck.
- [06:37]
Host
Because you can't afford it.
- [06:38]
Stephen
Yeah, yeah, you would know the names, but, you know, we. We don't want to go sue. We went with the product approach. And, you know our history growing up. We're all about resilience and, you know, perseverance. So we stuck through it. And I would say, you know, about five years in, we started getting our footing really well and establishing ourselves moving forward.
- [06:55]
Gabino
I think the thing is persistence and perseverance, and I always liken this because people who want to be entrepreneurs, they're enamored with the Instagram experience that they see and people posting their vacations or cars or whatever it is anyways. But the truth is, like, you work out at the gym, you go regularly three to four times a week, and you're. You're suffering to get that chest pump, that shoulder press, that. Those bicep curls. It's painful, it's annoying. You gotta. You gotta do the grind. You gotta do the same thing mentally and even spiritually weekly. And people don't spend time like that. The smartphone creates instant gratification and distraction. So now it's even harder than ever. I will tell you that regularly, I spend at least at a minimum three hours on the weekend, maybe close to four, right? Zone out. I listen to music that's instrumental without words. I don't sing along. And then I just write notes. Like, I journal what I did last week. What story do I want to. I. What story? What story do I want to tell in three months from now, six months from now, a year from now? That helps me plan. And I'm pivoting on that regularly. And I say this because you'll say, hey, I checked the box. I took a course, and people told me to do these things and didn't work because people are memorizing assets, following instructions. And the truth is you have to tailor that stuff as it comes so that, you know, you're meeting the market's needs. And. And part of what. What Stephen just shared and, And I can give my background a little bit on. On how we arrived here, but I say this for any entrepreneur who. Who might be watching is that you may have a great idea, but the altruistic nature of that idea isn't enough to get the adoption. For people to buy your product or service, you have to come to terms with the fact that you have to address the selfish needs of your customers first. So I'll give two quick examples. That's okay. Like that mobile app business. I talked about the funny story where I had my company was listed on a clickbait website, but some kwaity family found us and thought we were like the number two best mobile app company out there. And just long story short, they wanted to create like some theme park ticketing app. I thought it was a bad idea. I refused. I said, hey, you know, it's great, but I don't think we're a fit. And they were impressed because no one says no to them. So they came out with the second idea that they wanted to do a supermarket delivery app. And you know, you could be a waiter and say, hey, you want your egg sunny side up and steak medium rare, whatever. But the truth is, is unless you understand where your customer is coming from, you're never going to make them fully happy. And so I said to them, like, well, you want to create this supermarket delivery app. Which second idea? Do you have relationships with supermarkets? No. Do you have logistics companies to deliver the stuff? No. Well, how do you plan on promoting this? Well, we just. You're. You meaning me. I'm going to design such a beautiful app that they'll just want to use it. And I said, there's nothing proprietary, nothing patentable out there. So what you want to be is as, as a recommendation is a coupon sharing app. Pick one supermarket that you want to target to partner with and scan their coupons weekly. Put a qr, create a QR code and do a guerrilla marketing campaign. Get 50,000 their customers in. After you have 50,000, ask them to do an API with you. And because then you'll say, hey, we have 50 thousands of your customers coming here. There's value behind this. So you're making an investment up front to build the network. And then they're likely to say yes. Now, because you're providing value to their customers, you're just asking for an API. Now you don't have to manually scan the coupons. Then when I said when you get to a hundred thousand, then you tell them you have this idea for the supermarket delivery app. And when they tell you no, because they have their own tech budget, so that's okay. Thousand of your customers interested in this, maybe your competitors will be interested in tapping into this market. And now you create a compelling offering because you have the captive audience, the attention of their network of who they, who they want. And that's where the light bulb goes. Off because people who are building businesses go to let's build the supermarket delivery app, but they're not thinking about the adoption plan. Like how do you arrive there with this, this great idea. You may have to pivot on a probably like what you may seem as a inferior product roadmap, but that's where you bring the value, right? That's actually the plan that we use for Sapphire to begin with, especially the first two years, is to solve a very important problem, to create the scale that we're getting right now.
- [11:23]
Host
And that was out through LinkedIn marketing.
- [11:25]
Stephen
That's separate, that was different, that's accelerated. So you know, Kabino had a great idea to build a mousetrap and we kind of targeted some of the largest, let's say top 100 ish investment managers in the world because they control the most, probably close to 70% plus assets under management. A lot of these entrepreneurs that are in this space that will go to a bank, create the solution, the bank build a solution for this one bank. And in those four walls, it works. You get everyone to sign off on it. It takes two to three years, maybe five years. And then they got half the equity in your company. And now you try to replicate in another bank. The problem is, as you heard me say earlier, my brother saw that things aren't done the same in each bank. So it's almost starting from scratch in another company, going through another approval process in the finance industry. This is by the way, and so it's quite difficult. But if you focus on the investment managers that interact with the broker dealers and the custodians and you bring them value where they start up a new pension fund and they're tied into new revenue. Okay, now you speed up that approval process from these banks that are two, three years, five years to a few months because they want to compete for that business. At the same time, they're incentivized to clean the data and structure the data properly because they want to compete for that business. And now you create the go to market strategy. My brother just gave us an example. Now on the LinkedIn marketing strategy that you asked about, is this more of acceleration? Because in finance, if you want to sell B2B, they want to make sure you have stay in power and your service has to be impeccable. It has to be utopia deliver delivered to them perfection, perfection if they're going to adopt it, right? And that's. Those are the big things we have to overcome. And you know, we don't have hundreds of salespeople to message and meet every single person, every single moment. And just as we were taken off the, you know, the COVID lockdowns hit, well before that occurred, we were already establishing a very strong LinkedIn marketing strategy. And it wasn't even paid ads, it was just organic, which I'm sure you're familiar with, a lot of your, you know, followers are probably familiar with. But on the B2B side, the large institutions in general, almost every vertical, haven't figured out the game on organic media. And later on, if you do get to paid and you can maximize what the best performing content is and do a paid market, there's no other place in the world that you can target your exact customer profile, get their name, job title, company, employment, you know, whatever level you want to look into, region, any other platform than LinkedIn.
- [13:50]
Gabino
Right.
- [13:51]
Stephen
Everybody updates their profiles because they may want to get another job or they want to have validity if they're going to speak somewhere, et cetera. LinkedIn is a place to do that. And their ad campaigns allows you to target that audience very specifically. You couldn't get that anywhere else. So once the big companies figure that out, the small companies are going to be priced out of LinkedIn.
- [14:08]
Host
That's what happened with Facebook.
- [14:09]
Stephen
Yeah, exactly. So we took advantage, especially during the lockdowns. Nobody knew how to work, you know, LinkedIn as well as we did. We got a lot of visibility and people to hear our thought leadership, messaging and, you know, you probably know this, we will speak at, you know, conferences and a lot of these conferences. Everything is, you know, Chatham House rules, they're not allowing any filming or anything to leave. But we negotiate in advance of these conferences, at least for Gabino or myself or speaking. We're going to film that section of it and take our piece. We'll blur everybody else out, everybody else, but we'll repurpose it on social media and campaigns.
- [14:42]
Host
Wow.
- [14:43]
Stephen
So all the investment on there didn't die. And the message we gave, even if the audience wasn't there, is tenfold when we're able to do it on, on social media. So the campaign has worked quite well. And it's, and it resonates because LinkedIn is kind of boring.
- [14:55]
Host
It's very boring.
- [14:56]
Stephen
If you sit around, my board used to argue and say, what is this? You know, you're trying to get followers like you do on Instagram, et cetera. They didn't get it. So guys think of it like the 1980s, you know, so there was 13 channels. What happened when a commercial came on? You walked away or you turned the channel. Okay, but if you're making me put an ad every single time on LinkedIn and I have to talk about what my product is and what, you know, you should pay for it, this and that, people will stop following you, they'll tune out. So we, we, we, we're about informing or entertaining in, in our approach.
- [15:29]
Gabino
Now that goes, that's the other thing real quick. And you've said this before, people follow people. Yeah, they don't really necessarily follow companies, although there are exceptions and you tell a story and I think we've been very open about our journey and even our struggles and the hustle. I mean even to arrive here. I mean, was it. I went to Orlando, St. Petersburg, London, Dublin, London, Las Vegas. Now then I go to New York and in Boston back to New York. So like that's a grind, right. We're going through it and, and I think we try to share like sometimes it's not about the product, it's just, hey, I'm, I'm heading here and we take a picture of the skyline or you know, I take a picture out of my, out of the plane's window, the kind of show, I mean there's some pretty nice shots. I tell people, don't, don't close your window shades. God's got a beautiful canvas he's painting. But this draws people in because they can relate as opposed to just a logo. And then, oh, here's an approved, here's.
- [16:23]
Stephen
The other thing a lot of people don't get. They get approved marketing message or PDF that they give and hand out at the conferences. Nobody wants to see something that's all selling on there and, and, and if you, everybody should be saying the same message and sharing that one slider that we have, we think it's great. Well, guess what? These platforms are very smart. They know when it's spam and they're going to downgrade your thing and nobody's going to want to follow it. So it's the antithesis of what normal marketing is. Marketing. You know, Gary Vee and, and Hermosi and all these guys they talk about marketing ends up ruining things over time.
- [16:54]
Host
Yeah.
- [16:55]
Stephen
You know, and you, you want to go against the grain. So that is the anti marketing for the upstart company. You want to, you know, you, if you do an organic cig, it has to be something that's informative, entertaining. And I think, you know, we had a pretty good monopoly for a while on LinkedIn and people are now starting to catch up and they'll ask her buddy over here, Mike, and what he's doing and how you doing? And so it's pretty humbling experience, but I think it helped separate us and get the visibility.
- [17:20]
Gabino
And we got a small shop. It's like two, three guys that put this together while we're doing our business.
- [17:26]
Host
Yeah.
- [17:27]
Gabino
And we're making a dedication with this. So it's definitely helped the LinkedIn part. But there's the other part that you were asking about, the adoption strategy. So branding is important to get our message out there. LinkedIn has been very critical to that and the way we've done it actually has been very key and we get constant feedback that everyone's saying it's top notch. But still for the regular entrepreneur, for the adoption plan piece, and what we've done in our case is our targets are these banks. How do we transform them? Stephen alluded to it in his explanation of, like, how the process kind of works today. I point to, to smartphones because smartphones are not that smart. They point to the cloud and there isn't, you know, three versions of Steven's LinkedIn profile because there's three of us here. There's one version of the cloud. We all reconcile that and the industry, although they'll argue otherwise. I know because I worked with all these major institutions. I saw their data and, and, and Steven quickly said it, but I don't think people who are watching me appreciate this. He talked about consortium. I got to see several banks data together. I used to think, I used to work at J.P. morgan and I thought the world worked like J.P. morgan. And then I got to see the data from all the other major players on the street. And I realized it's a little bit of a cluster. And what's happening here is their customers, such as BlackRock and others, right, that are, are, are doing business and trades with them, are not just trading with one bank, they're trading with all of them. Right? And, and if they win, the Coca Cola pension fund, the Walmart pension fund, the IBM pension fund, they're trading on their behalf, Right. They're resending that information to every single one of those firms that they trade with and everyone that they custody or bank with. Okay. And the, the pitch that I made is, and the learning I made was, okay, how, how about we create this repository in the cloud? This is the altruistic idea, by the way. So, so the idea that I wanted to come out with that, that supermarket delivery app piece was why don't we create this repository where people can real Time, the customers can real time reconcile their data and all the banks that do business benefit from it and the customers can self serve it. So you can't have better information than your customers identifying that it's Sean or Stephen that can trade on these accounts. And here are the data points, the tax forms and everything validating it real time. Because right now the firms are working more. Not right now. Some of them, some of them are working with us are still working in a batch process. We're doing Excel file exchanges, it's point in time and this. And they still have Mainframes and Windows 95 and multiple departments and they bought multiple banks and they duct this, this duct tape this stuff together and they got, they're plugging the, the holes in the dam so they're afraid to come off of it. But if your cl, if your clients are self affirming this in the cloud, it's a great on ramp to revamping and doing this digital transformation. All of them agreed, by the way, that we need this type of technology, this market infrastructure, creating the Rails to do this. Not a single one wanted to adopt it. And so the plan was we went to, you know, the top 22 investment managers have a trillion dollars or more in assets, right? Yeah, blackrock being at the top. But you know, they're all, that's public. Right. So you know, I pitched to them and said do you want to do this one time with every single one of these firms? I mean they made me trade with 20, 30, 30 firms and bank with you know, another 10. Or I tell them what do you want one and done do it one time. The network will not only create and establish all those brand new accounts from scratch, by the way, but when the tax form is expired, you know, their tax teams have to go to every tax agent, every custodian, every broker, dealer and set up electronic platforms. What if you do it on a platform like ours? And we already remember that relationship part of the 180 patents that we created. So it automatically. It's not a data lake. A data lake is like a folder. If you park documents in there, you have access that folder. You see everything in that folder. This is, this is direct permissioning to a specific team at a bank, like the credit risk team versus the KYC team. And that was a huge benefit. They say sure. And that's why we've had success. Because every time a new mandates come, like I'm just making up the Steven Said, the Walmart pension fund, if they now are issuing, you know, 200 million and they give it to an investment manager. Investment manager is like, hey, if you want this first trade, you go through Sapphire. Otherwise I can't wait. And by the way, we benchmark it, right? So like for right now, we know with FX spot trades, we can get them set up within 24 hours to 48 hours. If you don't meet that benchmark, you're not going to get the first trade from the top investment managers. That trade's going to go away from you. So this motivates the banks, like, oh wait, wait, wait, wait, how do we get there? Even the tier two banks are saying we want to be like the tier ones. We would like those first trades from those trillion dollar asset managers. How do we do it? So now we're creating an incentive because we address the selfish interest of, of our customers, the banks, by bringing them new revenue while at the same time creating this efficiency play that it was talking about. Now I'm, I'll let Stephen explain the analogy of how we don't just. This is everything, I just described this before you trade, this is all pre trade stuff. And the industry hasn't invested in that. They, they've invested mostly in trading because that's where the money is to be made. And then post trade, because unless you settle the trades, you don't make money because you don't know what accounts to settle everything in. Okay, and the key thing here is I want you to stand. When you trade, there's only an eight digit code. It does two things. It hides that you're trading on behalf of Warren Buffett. You know, Warren Buffett's buying Apple shares today. The whole market's going to move and then you're trying to compete for the best price. So it hides that second thing it does, it hides, it makes the execution faster. Because if the machine had to read Sean's full name, so tax ID address and everything else, right, the price is going to move. Right. So if you have an eight digit code you execute quickly, then in post trade, all you have is some random eight digit code. Do you know it's Warren Buffett, Berkshire Hathaway? No. Right. You got to know all this stuff. So imposed trade, they wind up trying to remember everything in pre trade.
- [23:12]
Stephen
Manual.
- [23:12]
Gabino
Yeah, manual. So part of the. Yeah, it's part of.
- [23:15]
Host
Sounds messy.
- [23:16]
Gabino
So part of what we do in pre trading, the patents that we have, and this is before the machine learning part that we bring in, we create this Rosetta Stone account mapping. So we know every tax ID legal entity, identifier, LI global custodian account number sub custodian account number in Brazil versus India. Right. The every broker trading account number, Goldman versus Citi versus JP Morgan. Right. For ethics spots versus equities, you know, and all the electronic trading platforms. And so it doesn't matter which idea you have, we can reimburse engineer the entire trading relationship and we know exactly what account to settle in that really accounts to. About 70% of the activities in post trade can go away. Because what they're doing right now is the buy side investment managers and asset owners who do the trades. They do something called a reconciliation matching the sell sides on the bank. They do reconciliation. Then they have custodian banks that sit on each side. Right. You have a bank account and if you buy something at the grocery store, they have a bank account. Your, your debit card is your custodian where your money sits and you're exchanging it, they're reconciling, doing matches. You're doing reconciliations four times. If you do it in the cloud one time and you can reverse engineer the account IDs, only one reconciliation has to happen. The banks can all see it, then they can settle the trades immediately. That's where we're going to. And Stephen has an analogy for this, but yeah, let's hear it.
- [24:33]
Stephen
Easy analogy, sure. We have other questions you'd like to get into, but the easy analogy on all this is the industry. Like if you remember the whole Robin Hood Gamestop fiasco.
- [24:43]
Host
Yeah, that was crazy.
- [24:44]
Stephen
Yeah, yeah. So they were trying, they stopped buys and sells of Gamestop. That was mostly on securities lending. But it does lead to this thematic theme that's happened. A lot of the investments have done in post trade because they're reacting to traders. A trader made their money during the day and they're screaming fix, fix. My failed trade, my crash trade. Because something happened in operations. And so they have all these thousands of people in post trade to try reassemble things. And the way they're treating it is like they're trying to reassemble a crash plane to go fly at its destination and land there. But if they just invested in the pre trade before the plane took off and just put the right security precautions in place, you wouldn't have to deal with planes. And that's where the value is that we bring in here. So we start in pre trade, we create the memory and then we eliminate 75, up to 75% of those issues in post trade just by doing our stuff in pre trade. And then when there are issues we can re. Expose the information like my brother was talking about. The H digit code. We already mapped it. We know exactly what it is, where it belongs to, who. Who it's for. You can assemble it quickly in post trade and settle that trade in near real time.
- [25:45]
Host
Yeah, it's a proactive approach.
- [25:46]
Stephen
Right, right.
- [25:47]
Host
You mentioned Buffet. Did you guys see he sold all his stocks the other day?
- [25:51]
Stephen
Oh, we were traveling, of course. Yeah. Up.
- [25:54]
Host
Really sold everything.
- [25:56]
Stephen
So what do you say? What he's buying now?
- [25:58]
Host
I don't know. He stays pretty low key. I feel like he doesn't really announce that beforehand usually. Right?
- [26:03]
Stephen
Yeah, no, he doesn't.
- [26:04]
Host
Yeah, that dude's really smart, so that kind of spooked me a little bit. We'll see what happens.
- [26:08]
Stephen
Yeah.
- [26:09]
Gabino
Yeah.
- [26:10]
Host
Kevin O'Leary spoke at your conference last year, right?
- [26:12]
Stephen
Y.
- [26:13]
Host
What were some big takeaways from that?
- [26:15]
Stephen
Well, you know, it's. It was an honor to have him there. Obviously, he's, you know, notorious for Shark Tank and entrepreneurship and. And he gave some nice words for us over there, and it was kind of like a nice setting we had at the nasdaq.
- [26:29]
Gabino
Nice.
- [26:30]
Stephen
You know, kind of like leading to what could be our future ipo, maybe. Yeah, we'll have to see. But he was quite impressed about what we've been doing, and we asked him. He wanted to take the opportunity to speak there. We had Melissa Francis there hosting the event as well, and answer some questions, you know, with our mutual clients. I happen to be attending. And he did. He did. He did a great job. He talked about thematically, like, the biggest thing, which I'm sure you. You. You talk about with a lot of entrepreneurs is execution. You can have a great idea, but if you can't execute, it's meaningless. It's a dime a dozen. Ideas are all over the place. You got to figure a way to execute. Obviously, Gabino has figured a way to execute on the product. Right. Execute so well that we have nobody currently leaving the product. Right.
- [27:17]
Host
Yeah.
- [27:18]
Stephen
And he recognized that. He gave us a good kudos right there on that theme, because he's saying he's seen thousands of deals and execution has been the key to success, and he hasn't found many companies who've been able to do that and accelerate, and he thinks we're. We're on our way to do great things.
- [27:32]
Gabino
To his credit, it took him five minutes to understand our entire business.
- [27:37]
Host
Wow, Kevin.
- [27:37]
Gabino
Yeah, because I remember, I was like, oh, this is gonna be hard. I don't know if he knows this and blah, blah, no, he, like, completely got us. I was blown away, honestly, like, genuinely, because I know there's the optics and the, you know, this celebrity status and people think, no, he, he's.
- [27:50]
Host
There's something else about finance.
- [27:51]
Stephen
Yeah, he does.
- [27:52]
Gabino
Yeah, he, he does. And he got our business in five minutes, which isn't easy, I would say.
- [27:55]
Host
But I'm still trying to understand it.
- [27:58]
Gabino
But, but the execution buyer wanted to say is even though the brothers here, there's a whole team. And Stephen alluded to Mike Travers, senior director of marketing and, and, and, and, and he's been phenomenal. And, you know, I, I go back to my chief Product officer, my cio, and Michael Brandy, Isha Kawaja, and Kelly Downing, who's my UX person. These are the, the founding employees and many more. The execution part. And I, I say this because there, I've observed some other entrepreneurs, right, And I would say my brother and I have a good portion of the equity, you know, and, and I think friends and families and employees are the group, but including ourselves, like the chunk in terms of the ownership structure. And then we have our lead investor and some of the institutions that are involved. But the, the part here is, is there's nothing I don't ask anyone in the company that I wouldn't do myself. I used to code, and I'm not the best coder, but I understand it. And I'm not saying everyone, every CEO needs to do this, but I think there's, you know, people laugh at me because we're in the business of this perfection thing and we do talk about something. Suffering the details is what I talk about it. Because unless you suffer the details, you will not be perfect. And that's just the nature of our business. You got to understand all these data points to map them, right? And you'll be surprised. There's like tomato, tomato situations, right, where someone will spell, you know, fx space swaps, F underscore swaps, fx, concatenated swaps. It's the same trading instrument, just spelled differently. Three ways our platform maps it or someone's lazy and they just say CDX, which is their 13 credit trading instruments. But a particular customer only means six when he types that, not 13. And so we translate those things. Those are suffering details, but like getting in the trenches, working with your teams, you know, maybe not being the highest paid employees just because you run the company, because you're building something bigger and ensuring that you take care of them. There's been times, you know, there were six times we almost went bankrupt, but Those days are far behind us. Okay, before Series A. Yeah, Prior Series A. But, you know, there was a. There was a Bake off where we only had 15 employees against a company who had 15,000 employees.
- [30:09]
Host
Geez.
- [30:09]
Gabino
And we won every single Bake Off.
- [30:11]
Host
What's a Bake Off?
- [30:12]
Gabino
Well, they test our product next to the other.
- [30:15]
Host
Oh.
- [30:15]
Gabino
And we invented, like, you know, I literally invented this. This new, new process. And by the way, we. We have workflows. And I want to be clear to people like. Because these firms have made their own investments in their own. Their own technologies or other vendors, you cannot pitch an idea and say, yeah, just rip out the kitchen sink and now use us. And that's a huge to do. Right. So what you want to do is be interoperable. At least if you're in this business of SaaS Technologies, where you can, like, be an overlaying architecture that works with existing legacy solutions, whether with other vendors or otherwise. And then. And you make these components optional, it makes it easier for. For them to adopt. But anyways, in this Bake off, right, like we were talking about, the team had to build. I mean, we only have, at this point today, six salespeople. We're like 90 employees.
- [31:05]
Host
Wow.
- [31:05]
Gabino
And it's our customers and, you know, our track record in terms of the revenue and stuff like this is happening because our customers are promoting us. They see the merit and the substance behind this. But when you have conviction and you know that it's not vaporware, and your customers can stand behind it and because you suffered the details, and you can look at your employees in the eyes and saying, we are building something real. Our customers love it, and we are winning. It's a story that, I mean, galvanizes things. I always. I love history. And I've said this analogy before, but there was a. There's a famous battle between Julius Caesar and Pompeii. And Pompeii outnumbered his men three to one. They would be swarmed, and they should have been slaughtered. Yet Julius Caesar won.
- [31:50]
Host
Wow.
- [31:51]
Gabino
And the number one reason why. Never mind that both were phenomenal generals, Was superior military tactics. It is because Julius Caesar was so much more inspirational to his men. They were willing to go to the ends of the earth for him. And when you infuse this excitement with people, and I joke with my brother, because I do spend a lot of time with a lot of the employees. I try to meet every single one of them and know them by name. I don't know how scalable that will be as we grow and we're not looking to be humongous, but I look at it as like I'm trying to put energy into them and not be frivolous, make them feel like they're the only person in the room and what they're doing matters. And I'd rather, instead of hiring armies of mercenaries who are just looking for a paycheck, I say to them, you're coming with valuable knowledge, you're bartering your time, the money I'm giving you to bring expertise and to build this wonderful thing that we're doing that we're going to transform. I want to put a ring on your finger because this is a marriage. My desire is to keep you happy here. And there's always two things you can ask any of my employees. I always tell them is, you know, what do you selfishly want in a good way because I'm your customer service rep, and what would make you leave? And if you're, if you plan on leaving, I only ask you one thing is to give me a chance to fix it. Okay? And I will say there's been occurrences and I fixed it. And they were very happy because the idea is to show results. I said, but I will be upset if you do leave without giving me the chance to fix it. Right? Because then, you know, I want to give you those opportunities. And I will tell you, like, one more little side note, like, you can work at these large banks and we've hired people from these financial institutions and they do an operations job that's very siloed, and they think, oh, I'm, I don't know if I'm, I'm that valuable. I don't know that I can actually matter. And, and we, you know, there, there's been, you know, a handful of individuals. I remember talking to them and hiring them eventually and telling that you have phenomenal knowledge. You just haven't been given the opportunity to have the chance to fail at it. And, and you can help me build it. Because this isn't all in my head. I've, I've iterated and failed multiple times. The, the idea around developing, developing software products faster than market is to like, on a two week iterative process, you have a hypothesis of what you're building because it's, we're inventing, right? It's like mixing chemicals from a periodic table and coming up with a new element, not knowing how it reacts. You got to have the customers react to it and then pivot and pivot and pivot. But these guys are bringing their knowledge and creating epiphanies within the company for how we can create this to be a fantastical platform. And it, it energizes them. They're so committed. And I think that's something that I wanted to share here for the entrepreneurs because we can go to the talking points and you can say those words but unless it lands, unless you like make them feel that they're one in your attention, not going to stay. And, and you got to do. It's got watering the plants. You got to do this regularly.
- [34:48]
Host
I like that approach because a lot of leaders will treat their employees as like a number. They're like, what are you producing? If not, I'm going to fire you if you're not hitting these KPIs or whatever. You guys have a more personal approach. That's cool.
- [34:58]
Stephen
Yeah, we have a very low churn of employees in our company, so it's extremely low.
- [35:03]
Host
I could see why. Yeah, you're actually memorizing their names, you know. Yeah, I don't think certain bosses are doing that. Yeah, no, they do you guys think AI is going to really replace like stock trading, day trading, all those type.
- [35:14]
Stephen
Of jobs, lots of trading side of it. I mean it's a lot to consume on. On the information. I'll just tell you from our perspective on what we're doing in the technology, I think the key thing is, I mean the people who are testing Even with like ChatGPT and others, the AI, the machine learning is forgetting the information is not being consistent always. That's because they haven't mapped to a certain piece of data. You know, uses example all the time. He talks about if I say the word two to you.
- [35:39]
Host
Yeah.
- [35:39]
Stephen
Or to the A.I. doesn't know I'm saying T o t w o T o o doesn't you need it to map to something so we can understand it consistently. So in our side, when we were talking about our technology, we've mapped all that data for all these financial institutions and we create placeholders for clients who are not on that may potentially engage with those mutual clients. So that if we did, and in some cases we do have some elite machine learning capabilities get deployed onto our technology, it maps to that data mapped infrastructure. Right. Okay. I know consistently if I'm going to do this algorithm that I need to map to this, you know, golden source of truth moving forward where people are just going to chat GPT and sourcing the Internet, that data may not be consistent. What's information true today can change tomorrow. If you go to Wikipedia, that happens all the time.
- [36:25]
Gabino
All the time.
- [36:26]
Host
Yeah.
- [36:26]
Stephen
So it's not consistent enough. And that can happen with trading and people's opinions and the sentiments out there. I mean, eventually I think the AI could get smart enough to get the overall sentiment and the drive of where the markets would move. But I think it's a ways off 5, 10 years at, @ minimum before they can look at that. But on the operations side, you know what we do, it's supporting the traders. We see it this way. You need to have something that's a golden source of truth in order to consistently have a, you know, reliably spit out the right information. Otherwise it's bad information and bad information out.
- [37:01]
Gabino
Yeah, they think AI is this present you receive and you unbox it and it's ready to go and you gotta nurture it. Now I think again, I just wanna emphasize a lot of firms think of us as a workflow platform between creating this market infrastructure. We provide workflow for the purpose only if you don't have one, because many already do. And two, to map the data accurately. It's really about that golden source of information. Right. So that we can clean the trades when it goes to post trade. And, and so right now you may be servicing us because you're setting up accounts or doing KYC or doing legal agreements, but it's that golden source of information. It's important. And I'll give you another example. You say the word fund in our industry and you'll say to a Blackstone, they would mean general partnerships, limited partnerships, special purpose vehicles. These are different legal entity types. You say Blackstone to affirm. I'm sorry, you say, I'm sorry, you say the word funds to affirm. Like BlackRock and others, they may mean trading sleeves. Okay, Those are not legal entities. But in the data that's being read, it says the word fund. The context is missing. The beauty of what we do is because we, we are going from the point of inception when accounts are created and you're onboarding them for the first time. We map that data structure so we know the taxonomy, the oncology and the user, the traditional user experience, the lazy, in a good way user experience of these people who've worked in these jobs sometimes 20 years and they call something a certain way. They will not adopt a new way because they have to meet a standard. In fact, the finance industry is filled with a plethora of standards. ISO 2022, now there's ISO 2025 fix, which is now the latest version is called latest you have is the common, common domain model. Um, and even then within a firm, they don't even fully adopt it across all their technologies. Right. And so how do you, you can rush to say AI is going to do this. And this is why I think Stephen's hedging on the number of years, although I think the technology is rapidly expanding. In AI, it's super, super fast, super, super smart. But in order to be effective and because you need perfection, you have to have that data mapped. And so there, there are banks out there that say, hey, we have the most data we going to do. We're applying this AI because on pet projects internally, it looks promising. But did they do the push ups outside of the four walls of their firm because they understand the data their way? Do they understand the way their clients need it in order to be effective? I think we know the answer to that because that's why Safire has this opportunity. Because we can sit outside of those firms, we're providing that infrastructure, those rails between the firms to do this one and done thing, because we have mapped the oncology taxonomies so that we can get this end to end. And that's where the air is really accelerating for us. So this is where in one instance, for one transaction at 150 accounts each. 150 accounts had 300 documents.
- [39:57]
Host
Jeez.
- [39:58]
Gabino
And each of those documents got pre filled. 90% of the information was pre filled.
- [40:02]
Host
Wow.
- [40:02]
Gabino
It could be a word document, could be non standard. Standard. Okay. That doesn't happen unless you've done those push ups that I talked about. That's honestly how I spent the first two years everyone told me could be. You're wasting time doing this mapping. It's a cost of doing business. But I told you the experience in this consortium where I saw the data wasn't the same between the firms. I knew that that would just hurt us in the long run. And so that also is what hurt us a little bit in terms of the initial growth when the first five years were a little shaky right till our Series A, but it now is paying absolute dividends.
- [40:34]
Host
You guys had a good series A, right? 18. What? 18.7 million.
- [40:38]
Stephen
Yeah.
- [40:38]
Gabino
Yeah.
- [40:38]
Host
That's impressive.
- [40:39]
Stephen
Yeah. No, I appreciate it. I mean, everybody thinks it's great at raising money, but it just means you owe money to people.
- [40:45]
Host
They don't talk about that part.
- [40:46]
Gabino
Giving away equity, you got to get.
- [40:47]
Stephen
A lot more money to pay that back and then some. Yeah, that makes it worth it, you know, so people brag about how much money they, they raise, but it's, it's.
- [40:54]
Host
A Big way liability, right? Yeah, yeah.
- [40:56]
Gabino
But it fueled the growth to where we are, you know, I would say tens of millions in AR at this point. Right. I think we're, we're seeing that we're reaching a, a point of where we expect a snowball effect. And I think one of the biggest things, and I don't know if you were going to cover this, but you know, last year the US market just moved to something called T&1. So before May of last year, if you bought Apple shares, they didn't have to deposit those Apple shares for 48 hours.
- [41:28]
Host
Okay.
- [41:28]
Gabino
Okay. So it was an instant that also by the way, led to the GameStop issue because they were lending more shares than were available because there was a delay on one trade settle. Right. So that's part of the reason why they moved that regulation. But US market being the largest market in the world is a monolithic market where you set all the trades. It's either in DTCC or the Federal Reserve for Treasury bills, bonds. But Europe is moving the T&1 come 2027 and they have a plethora of countries. Okay. And you're not going to be able, you know, I will say you'll probably hear some arguments, you know, there's been automation employed to do some of this work. But what you need is intelligent automation, not just automation for automation, say, because intelligent automation will know who needs to be permission, these documents, these data points. Right. So that you can get to T +1. If you're doing T +1 meaning selling trades within 24 hours internally, you have to be T0 real time. Right. And, and so now what we're seeing is in the European market because there's, there's a disparate set of countries all with their own central security depositories. They're going to need intelligent automation because some of those places will be a T plus 1. I think some are currently a T plus 3, 72 hours. Right. To settle trades, nevermind 48 hours. So like now what you're going to do, you're going to create a separate manual team for the ones that are selling trades in three days versus two days versus one day. Or why don't you create one model basically t0 within your firm and know when you're obligated to settle trades T1, T2, T3 respectively. Right. And that I think is the opportunity we're seeing, especially not just in terms of AI, to actually remember where all this data is and how do we can actually scale it, but now provide a way for real Time, interaction between firms. Because instead today I'll give you one more quick example. I'm sorry, I'm going into the weeds. But if you bought BMW shares in Euroclear, one of the banks could say, hey, I only. You wanted 20,000 shares, I only have 10,000 shares. When we say a central settlement depository, imagine it mailbox. Okay, so if you, Sean, bought Apple shares from me and you live in Las Vegas. Right. And I live in Jersey, like I told you before, I would have to mail you the Apple shares and then tomorrow you could have sold them back to me. So the FedEx is going to take time to get to you and then we have to send it back instead. We just do it downtown New York. It's a mailbox for you. Mailbox for me. You just take it out of my mailbox, put in yours, you sell it, the next day they give it back to me. Right. That's what a central security depository does. It's these physical assets that you're trading. And so that's what takes sometimes T plus two, two days and so on. But now what we are doing is on Sapphire is providing a real time capability to track the digital obligation of where it's supposed to be, even if you haven't physically moved it. So at least net, you can net it out to know where everyone's got to be on the balance sheet, if you get what I'm saying.
- [44:14]
Host
Yeah.
- [44:15]
Gabino
And allow the things to physically move at its own pace so it gets.
- [44:18]
Stephen
Closer to like crypto, which. Yeah, you know, same day settlement.
- [44:22]
Host
I love crypto more than same day. It's like two minutes.
- [44:24]
Stephen
Yeah, it's like a no brainer. And Gabino talks about earlier, the intelligent automation be funny because everybody's like, oh, we have automation budgets. But the nuances there, is it intelligent? I mean automation could be anything. In the old days, well, old days, maybe like 10 years ago when I was selling, you know, services, they would have a digitization budget. What does that really mean?
- [44:42]
Gabino
Right.
- [44:43]
Stephen
Digitization budget was like taking that piece of paper you have in front of you and put it on the computer. Okay. You still gotta find, in a filing cabinet, double click the thing, look at page 80, find out if there's the right version. That was digitization budgets. People would claim that they are achieving digitization for their company when they're just taking paper. And now there's apps that do that. Right. And that then these manual steps still occur, except they're just happening on filing cabinets in your computer instead of, you know, in The Office. Yeah, it goes the same with automation. Can't just be automation, it has to be intelligent automation. And it can't just be AI unless you have the mapping for that data to a. For AI to be reliable.
- [45:17]
Gabino
Oh, and there's one more thing important about AI I forgot to mention or actually two things.
- [45:21]
Stephen
Right.
- [45:22]
Gabino
You don't want account numbers to be remembered by the AI, right? Well, for one, it's just, it's sensitive information. There's also personal identifiable information and stuff. So you want to use the AI to conduct an activity like let's say scan a DOC 80 page document for the terms that you need to track and maybe some of the details and then forget it and then do that to the next document, next one. Right. You, you. And, and by the way, also there's memory issues too because the amount of power that has to be used. So the more expansive the activities, you'll see some people like lower the accuracy from 99 to 95%. And that's galaxies apart by the way, in terms of the mistakes that the machine will make. So one of the things in Sapphire that we use is we make, we do what we call a maker checker process. So the AI would be the maker and then we have configuration to allow specific users at the firms to be the checkers. You can have two people, three people do the check before you commit it and then it goes to the network. But then it saves you time because no one has to key it in and try to find it. We just have to eyeball it to make sure it's right. So, so that's one. The second thing is to ensure that you have a private instance of that information. You never want to use ChatGPT because it's open sourced and information goes out to the ether and then you have to try to delete it and there's questions of whether it forgets I'm not chatgpt specifically. It could be Gemini, it could be anything. Right. So this is a general statement. I was not picking on one particular platform. And for the record, you know, right now we're on the Microsoft Azure ecosystem. We partner a lot with Microsoft, a lot of stuff, but. And they've been great partners with us by the way, and they actually put a white paper out on us. But what I will say is to be prudent, you want to also make the AI technology to be agnostic of any model if you have to switch it out. So. Or some models are being more specialized in certain areas. Right. So maybe you will use one for, for like graphics. Right. Another one you would use for interpreting legal documents. Right. So. And that is something you need to employ because there's specialties too with the AI.
- [47:23]
Host
Yeah. What's the main focus for you guys this year? Anything exciting coming up?
- [47:27]
Stephen
Just accelerating growth. I mean we had a announced partnership just back in December with BlackRock's Aladdin which has about 130, 150 so investment managers. So we're going to be working with those, you know, clients potentially looking to roll that out. And we're, you know, we have a couple other cooking, you know, big news items that we, we're on the cusp of announcing but we're, you know, a little bit in the back pocket. We do big marketing events every time we have those big announcements. So we don't want to get ahead of it. But yeah, I mean the thing is, is to, you know, continue accelerating the growth that we've seen in this business and you know, to try to provide a, a clean, intelligent automation of services between these external counterparties in finance. And a lot of people don't, don't even know how to understand it when you hear investment manager, broker, dealer, custodian. Think of the custodian as the bank holding your, your physical assets. The broker is like the guy that lets you trade on the stock market, he's licensed. And the investment manager is like the wealth manager in the corner of that bank, you know, advising you where to, you know, allocate your portfolio. Those are the three major parties that happen in the B2B space that we're working with and they all have their selfish interests as Gabino describes. And we got to address those, those interests. But you know, we have an exciting thing coming out soon around AI, the machine learning components of it. We do keep it separate as a, as an option for our customers to opt in because there's a higher level due diligence before they adopt something like machine learning on a platform. And yeah, I think that's the focus on that, but go ahead.
- [48:55]
Gabino
Yeah, no, I just one on the, the Aladdin thing in general, like order management systems for these investment managers, give them a macro view of where their trading and positions are. That's really, really important. So you know, I think what's interesting here that, that Safari is getting into with order management systems is allowing portfolio managers to get real time statuses that hey, I can trade in India for the Indian rupee versus Brazil and so on in real time. You usually get these batch processes and believe it or not, if India Wants to protect their currency from, you know, being hurt. And so they require to understand when you're selling their, their currencies and whatnot, what's going on. Those accounts come closed sometimes and you don't even know it. Now you're doing a big trade and now it's at risk of not fulfilling because India, you know, in the market closed it on you. Right? So these types of things are very important for portfolio managers are trading, they'll do a block trade and if you don't know what that, you know, a big investment manager is buying a hundred thousand shares of Apple, don't want to buy it 10 times for the Walmart pension fund, IBM pension fund, Coca Cola pension fund. They'll do it one trade, then they allocate it to all 10, right. And so if one of those accounts now don't close, you hold up the whole block. Can't settle that whole trade. So it becomes a problem. This is where we tell them real time, there's going to be a problem here. Don't allocate to that one fund, it has an issue in India, swap it out or resolve the issue in India if you can in real time. Most times you can, you need a little more time. And that's why now we're showing front office benefits here. And it's not just for the investment managers or these asset owners, but it's also for their sell side counterparties because they also pay a penalty for not settling trades.
- [50:32]
Stephen
Right.
- [50:33]
Gabino
With T plus one this is what slows it down if you're not working real time. So that too to me is super exciting because it shows that all this plumbing stuff that we do in pre and post trade helps benefit the money making parts of the businesses on both, you know, the buy and sell side in terms of the AI, some really exciting stuff that I'm working with the team on, we hope to announce relatively soon. But I think it's going to revolutionize how people transmit information because some still do it on email, some through Go portal, some go through another vendor platform and we talk about interoperability. This is a big thing. This is where I will say no one. I can say this confidently. No one spends more on R and D research and development than our team in this space. Most solutions are one trick. Ponies between two parties. Steven just talked about three. We actually handle way more. Those are the three are the most important types of clients we deal with. But there's a whole plethora of them and it requires us to understand how this works for the entire industry. And that's not hyperbole. I'm willing to go to bat on the details because I'm not your typical CEO. Right. I suffered the details. Like I said earlier. The last thing is, to me, the biggest exciting thing is that move to T +1 in the European market and they're going to, they have to be T +1 ready by 2027. That means. And you say, well, that's almost, you know, a year and a half, two years away. No, they got to prepare. So we, we are getting stuff in the works that we're pretty excited about and I think it's going to be a real game changer because when you're talking about the plethora of countries that are involved, there's lots. Yeah. Unless you got intelligent automation and unless you have real time interactions across firms, not just inside your firm, but across firms, you're not going to be able to meet that demand. I'll leave it at that.
- [52:14]
Host
I love it. Where could people find you guys?
- [52:16]
Stephen
And find out more about Sapphire, www.sapphire.com or LinkedIn. That's probably where you see the most of our updated news. So you can find us there as well. Or to be on his personal LinkedIn page, my Stephen Roche's personal LinkedIn page. So, yeah, beautiful.
- [52:30]
Host
We'll link it below. Thanks for coming on, guys.
- [52:32]
Gabino
Yeah, we appreciate it. Yeah, thank you.
- [52:33]
Host
Check them out, guys. See you next time.
- [52:35]
Gabino
Come see you.