Meeting Title: Robert x Ihsan Date: 2026-03-05 Meeting participants: Robert Tseng, ihsan saracgil
WEBVTT
1 00:01:42.340 ⇒ 00:01:43.539 ihsan saracgil: Hi, Robert.
2 00:01:46.160 ⇒ 00:01:48.250 Robert Tseng: Hey, is it your son?
3 00:01:48.250 ⇒ 00:01:52.230 ihsan saracgil: It is a sign indeed. Yeah, give me one moment, let me put on my headphones.
4 00:01:52.230 ⇒ 00:01:54.780 Robert Tseng: Yeah, no worries. Sorry for the confusion.
5 00:01:55.250 ⇒ 00:01:58.929 ihsan saracgil: No, it’s not your fault, Google Meets messed something up.
6 00:02:00.060 ⇒ 00:02:01.410 ihsan saracgil: the invite.
7 00:02:02.140 ⇒ 00:02:06.490 ihsan saracgil: But when I joined in, what, you’re frozen. Can you hear me?
8 00:02:06.490 ⇒ 00:02:09.409 Robert Tseng: Yeah, I can still hear you, but I’m frozen. Let’s see…
9 00:02:09.789 ⇒ 00:02:10.699 ihsan saracgil: Yeah, okay.
10 00:02:12.079 ⇒ 00:02:18.279 ihsan saracgil: Because what, what happened was, you did book the meeting, but somehow Google Meets
11 00:02:18.379 ⇒ 00:02:35.729 ihsan saracgil: didn’t include you in the invite. So I joined the thing, and I’m waiting 5 minutes in, and I go look at the invite. It’s like, you’re not there. So the invite just came to me, and somehow you got a separate invite, and I got a separate invite, so it messed up, but yeah, I mean, luckily you’re…
12 00:02:36.089 ⇒ 00:02:41.399 ihsan saracgil: the calendar was available, so I was hoping that we’d do this today.
13 00:02:42.439 ⇒ 00:02:44.919 ihsan saracgil: So, nice meeting you guys,
14 00:02:45.109 ⇒ 00:02:48.589 ihsan saracgil: Do you want to do a little bit of an intro? It’s up to you, maybe discuss through…
15 00:02:48.590 ⇒ 00:02:58.939 Robert Tseng: Sure, yeah, yeah, happy to. So I spoke with Didier, was it last week? Yeah, I got connected to him through a mutual friend. I don’t know if you’ve met him, Stan Yakov,
16 00:02:58.940 ⇒ 00:03:11.730 Robert Tseng: also based in New York City, but just basically friend of Didier. And… yeah, you know, we’ve… I guess, like, what we were… what we discussed was, like, hey, look, you have a really great
17 00:03:11.730 ⇒ 00:03:30.360 Robert Tseng: you have a really great product, now you’re in Snowflake Marketplace. Seems like one of the criteria for some of your clients to really get the customers to get the most out of your product is that they kind of need to have their data in a good place before, they can really, like, get the most out of, like, building
18 00:03:30.360 ⇒ 00:03:54.059 Robert Tseng: On top of it with OpenBB. And so, you know, we’re a data engineering firm first, and so we basically do fractional data work for clients, and my business partner, Utam, is, like, a Snowflake expert, and so we’re really integrated with the Snowflake ecosystem as well, and thought, hey, like, maybe there’s a way for us to do a joint and go to market, where we basically are a
19 00:03:54.330 ⇒ 00:04:12.809 Robert Tseng: either a system integrator for OpenBB, or someone who kind of just, like, does, like, customer enablement, just to kind of get leads that may be, like, 6 months away for you, and speed that up to, like, 1 to 3 months. So, we found that that might be a good angle for us to take with some, you know, a product like yours.
20 00:04:14.030 ⇒ 00:04:31.650 ihsan saracgil: Okay, yeah, I mean, this all makes sense. So we… this is a little bit of intro on our side, so I don’t know to what extent Didier covered this, but… so I’m, actually, like, the latest, joinee to OpenBB, so I’m here for, like, 15 months, like, close to one and a half year, actually, now I just realized.
21 00:04:31.690 ⇒ 00:04:46.630 ihsan saracgil: So I used to be Chief Data Scientist at Visible Alpha. I built their stock product, so we were more of the vendor, essentially, right? So I was doing everything on the data science side. I moved on the product side also a little bit,
22 00:04:46.680 ⇒ 00:04:50.540 ihsan saracgil: But focus was always, like, financial institutions.
23 00:04:50.540 ⇒ 00:05:14.899 ihsan saracgil: But Visible also didn’t do much business with, like, you know, we were owned by banks, but it was mostly, like, the sell side, brokerage side of the business, and a little bit of the investment banking side, so we weren’t so much focused on, like, you know, small, mid-sized banks, wealth management, and all that good stuff, so… We had some of them as clients, but it wasn’t big. On the OpenBB side, what I’m focusing on now is that I pretty much
24 00:05:14.900 ⇒ 00:05:18.230 ihsan saracgil: build and manage the Snowflake side of the business.
25 00:05:18.870 ⇒ 00:05:34.269 ihsan saracgil: I’m hoping that this would… we just basically replicate this with Databricks and all the other ones over time, but Snowflake is the first. I don’t know if Lydia disclosed this, but Snowflake made a small investment at the firm. We don’t even call it an investment. It’s more like they gave us some funding.
26 00:05:34.280 ⇒ 00:05:50.280 ihsan saracgil: We’re looking to get their investment eventually, but they essentially backed us to build and enter the Snowflake marketplace. Yeah. So we have some mutual clients who put that idea into their mind that, look, like, you know, we’re not using this natively.
27 00:05:50.280 ⇒ 00:05:55.420 ihsan saracgil: But this is a really cool product. It’s a strong complement to what Snowflake already does.
28 00:05:55.420 ⇒ 00:06:04.930 ihsan saracgil: You need this in your marketplace. So the way that I’m working now at the small, like, we just launched, right? So it’s been just, maybe a day or two
29 00:06:04.930 ⇒ 00:06:14.130 ihsan saracgil: post, a month at this point. So we’re getting some decent traction, but the way that it works in Snowflake now is that we…
30 00:06:14.130 ⇒ 00:06:34.159 ihsan saracgil: I want to do a lot of partnerships. Partnerships with data vendors and partnerships with service providers like you. So we are a product in the Snowflake native marketplace, but we are also a registered service provider. But right now, we actually don’t provide the service. Sometimes people do come to us, like, some big client said.
31 00:06:34.160 ⇒ 00:06:37.080 ihsan saracgil: Actually more like a data engineering thing.
32 00:06:37.190 ⇒ 00:06:43.880 ihsan saracgil: And since they’re big firms, we said that, yeah, you know, if you guys would like to do it, we might consider it.
33 00:06:43.880 ⇒ 00:06:59.779 ihsan saracgil: But we do know internally that this is not a data engineering firm, so there are ways that I think we can work together, but this is one of the big areas that we want to invest in, right? So, if you think about OpenBB, the way that I see the product.
34 00:06:59.950 ⇒ 00:07:01.410 ihsan saracgil: Is that it’s…
35 00:07:01.590 ⇒ 00:07:17.129 ihsan saracgil: It’s comparable to all the BI tools that you mentioned in there, that you guys basically build some apps for the clients, like XSigma, whatever. But from the demos, you can tell, and I’m more than willing to give you guys a free install, it’s very straightforward, we can decide how you want to do it at the end of this call.
36 00:07:17.570 ⇒ 00:07:21.279 ihsan saracgil: The way that OpenBB works is actually quite distinct.
37 00:07:21.430 ⇒ 00:07:34.380 ihsan saracgil: that this is more like Bloomberg. So if you guys use Bloomberg, Kappa IQ fax that type of products, right? So everything is organized on those products as pages. So instead of pages, we call these things apps.
38 00:07:34.570 ⇒ 00:07:43.319 ihsan saracgil: So apps are very self-contained, and it’s compared to all these, like, BI tools that are out there on the Snowflake marketplace.
39 00:07:43.450 ⇒ 00:07:54.700 ihsan saracgil: This is more like you’re building compact, shareable applications that are fully integrated with your AI on the side, and so it’s not like
40 00:07:54.920 ⇒ 00:08:07.619 ihsan saracgil: for instance, omni type of products out there, like a dashboard with AI on the side, it’s more like you can actually use it directly, like, people are supposed to use Snowflake intelligence and whatnot.
41 00:08:07.620 ⇒ 00:08:08.050 Robert Tseng: Yes.
42 00:08:08.050 ⇒ 00:08:25.579 ihsan saracgil: imagine that it actually has access to its own dashboard. So it can build apps, it can build widgets, and so you can basically have a chat with your co-pilot. So, we’re going to release this in coming weeks or so, it’s like we’re fairly close. So right now, OpenBB Copilot uses
43 00:08:25.640 ⇒ 00:08:44.130 ihsan saracgil: OpenAI Cloud models from Snowflake’s Gateway, but it actually doesn’t use Snowflake tools. So, the next big release we’re doing is that we’re basically… we’re really trying to integrate very compactly with Snowflake, so that when you go to a client, when you’re building… doing the data work, right?
44 00:08:44.280 ⇒ 00:08:51.560 ihsan saracgil: Every piece of data view that you generate for them becomes a widget on our dashboard, but on top of that.
45 00:08:51.740 ⇒ 00:09:05.369 ihsan saracgil: Say that you guys build a conversational semantic view on top of this data for business users. You create views, you create an agent, sub-agent, and things like that. So, in a week or two.
46 00:09:05.490 ⇒ 00:09:09.309 ihsan saracgil: OpenVP Copilot can use all of those. So…
47 00:09:09.990 ⇒ 00:09:22.250 ihsan saracgil: you don’t need the Snowflake’s developer view, essentially. You don’t need to take the data out of Snowflake. So all these tools you build for a client, on top of the data engineering work that you do.
48 00:09:22.380 ⇒ 00:09:25.199 ihsan saracgil: you can just basically turn on OpenBB on top of it.
49 00:09:25.630 ⇒ 00:09:39.860 ihsan saracgil: And you can essentially build it into as many apps as you would like. And it would simply be, like, you know, the clients can essentially use it at Dashboard with an AI copilot on the side. They can also use it, like, full-screen chat.
50 00:09:40.230 ⇒ 00:09:40.760 Robert Tseng: Yep.
51 00:09:40.760 ⇒ 00:09:42.940 ihsan saracgil: Where you ask these questions.
52 00:09:43.390 ⇒ 00:09:52.849 ihsan saracgil: it goes and finds all the data that you need, and it’s using those Snowflake tools. Like, we’re not creating these tools. These are the Cortex analysts, semantic views, and all of that good stuff.
53 00:09:52.980 ⇒ 00:10:01.160 ihsan saracgil: So, it uses those things, but it builds your dashboard for you. So, if you’ve seen this, what Perplexity is doing nowadays.
54 00:10:01.380 ⇒ 00:10:10.259 ihsan saracgil: it’s… yeah, it’s like such red herring, like, there’s this white coding stuff that people are doing, there’s like, oh, like, we recreated Bloomberg, but you’ve.
55 00:10:10.260 ⇒ 00:10:10.770 Robert Tseng: Yeah, that’s.
56 00:10:10.770 ⇒ 00:10:12.840 ihsan saracgil: Yeah, it’s like, it’s a complete shitshow. It’s all.
57 00:10:12.840 ⇒ 00:10:13.970 Robert Tseng: Yeah, it doesn’t matter, yeah.
58 00:10:14.180 ⇒ 00:10:24.370 ihsan saracgil: Yeah, and on top of that, you know, all your dashboards and all your visual assets, your apps are created on the fly, there’s no standard, there’s no theming, none of these things are shareable.
59 00:10:24.400 ⇒ 00:10:43.689 ihsan saracgil: So, the way that we think about OpenBB workspace is that, so, now you can use OpenBB Copilot, powered by the Snowflake Intelligence, and Snowflake tools, and Snowflake data. It connects you to build these applications, and in one of your client banks, they can share this application across thousands of people, essentially.
60 00:10:43.690 ⇒ 00:10:52.219 ihsan saracgil: Right? So it’s like, it can start with some power user, and it could just grow into an enterprise-level thing. So it’s not so much, like.
61 00:10:52.430 ⇒ 00:11:03.570 ihsan saracgil: let’s get a BI tool, it’s more like, let’s build apps on Snowflake, right? And it’s very modular in that way. So that’s how we think about it. So for all of this to work, obviously.
62 00:11:04.000 ⇒ 00:11:13.289 ihsan saracgil: The client needs to have good understanding of your data. Building apps on Snowflake is very easy. It’s… it’s… sorry, OpenBeeb is very easy. It’s all about the data.
63 00:11:13.500 ⇒ 00:11:17.370 ihsan saracgil: Yes. Right? So the way that we want to partner with you guys is that
64 00:11:17.960 ⇒ 00:11:33.989 ihsan saracgil: we can give you a free OpenBB, okay? And it should be going two ways, right? Like, we want to be able to refer our clients to you from time to time, when they… because sometimes they basically come into us, like… like, Blackstone is a good example.
65 00:11:34.500 ⇒ 00:11:38.890 ihsan saracgil: They want the product, but they’re… a lot of their means are actually data engineering.
66 00:11:39.030 ⇒ 00:11:51.389 ihsan saracgil: Right? So, I think we want to get to a level where we feel comfortable just referring those guys to you, saying that, look, here’s a system into, like, a data engineering firm that knows how to work with OpenBB quite well.
67 00:11:51.520 ⇒ 00:12:04.139 ihsan saracgil: hire them separately, we know each other, we work together with them, and so on and so forth. Like, that’s a referral that we can give you. But, you know, to be perfectly, perfectly honest with you, we don’t have a lot of these things at the moment, because this is very new.
68 00:12:04.140 ⇒ 00:12:23.779 ihsan saracgil: So some people did ask us about this, so I do expect that as we get some adoption, this question will come often, and we’re more than happy to give referrals to you. And the way that I expect you guys to use us is that we give you a free install, and, you know, no pressure. At the end of the day, you do your data engineering.
69 00:12:23.780 ⇒ 00:12:35.000 ihsan saracgil: But when it comes to, let’s build those deliverables, you can… you should give OpenBB a try, right? Like, you know, you have options like hacks and other kind of tools.
70 00:12:35.000 ⇒ 00:12:48.379 ihsan saracgil: If the client is looking for a more agentic experience, more like an app-like experience, a shareable experience, like, all that stuff that you will learn as soon as, you know, you start interacting with the product, if you think this is a good fit.
71 00:12:48.460 ⇒ 00:13:03.440 ihsan saracgil: you know, you make us a referral, and we can think about, like, if you want to monetize this through referral fees and stuff like that, we can discuss those things, but at the start, I think it’s just an issue of, like, we want to… we want you guys to have this in your arsenal.
72 00:13:03.440 ⇒ 00:13:14.470 ihsan saracgil: show it, promote it, but to the extent that it makes sense, right? Like, you know, if your client… like, I had a discussion with First National Bank of Omaha. It’s the kind of a client that sounds like.
73 00:13:14.470 ⇒ 00:13:15.030 Robert Tseng: Yeah.
74 00:13:15.030 ⇒ 00:13:16.050 ihsan saracgil: your alley.
75 00:13:16.050 ⇒ 00:13:18.170 Robert Tseng: Similar to what the lead list that we’re working through, yeah.
76 00:13:18.710 ⇒ 00:13:28.589 ihsan saracgil: Yeah, yeah, exactly. So for them, for instance, it did sound like they have the anti-engineering issue. It was a little bit all over the place. They told me that, look, they want to build an application that looks at these five things.
77 00:13:28.630 ⇒ 00:13:42.400 ihsan saracgil: So I built a version of that, not the production level, but, like, something that, look, if you build something like this, this is how it’s going to look like in OpenBB. So I did, actually, a shoddy version of what you do, right? Just for demo purposes.
78 00:13:42.970 ⇒ 00:13:46.979 ihsan saracgil: patched it together. Yeah. It’s not a production-level thing, right? But it works.
79 00:13:47.090 ⇒ 00:13:53.929 ihsan saracgil: They saw this and say, wow, this is a really good experience, but we don’t have the data. And then they said.
80 00:13:54.080 ⇒ 00:13:59.769 ihsan saracgil: since we don’t have the data in Snowflake, we’re using this in Power BI. So this clearly looks like.
81 00:13:59.770 ⇒ 00:14:00.130 Robert Tseng: better.
82 00:14:00.130 ⇒ 00:14:06.530 ihsan saracgil: product and Power BI, but if I don’t have the data in Snowflake, I’m not gonna go to Snowflake for this.
83 00:14:06.900 ⇒ 00:14:12.139 ihsan saracgil: You see what I mean? Like, they were really impressed with the end result, but the issue was that.
84 00:14:12.140 ⇒ 00:14:12.730 Robert Tseng: Yep.
85 00:14:12.880 ⇒ 00:14:16.820 Robert Tseng: Yeah, they don’t have the data engineering. Like, that piece was missing. Yeah. So…
86 00:14:16.820 ⇒ 00:14:21.100 ihsan saracgil: This would… this could have worked if we worked together to say that, look.
87 00:14:21.230 ⇒ 00:14:29.069 ihsan saracgil: This firm is going to do the data engineering piece, and we’re going to work closely with them, and this is what your app is going to look like.
88 00:14:29.340 ⇒ 00:14:31.229 ihsan saracgil: Buy them both, right?
89 00:14:31.400 ⇒ 00:14:43.380 ihsan saracgil: we have seen… and we have seen, like, other situations in which the client had an already a commitment in a certain BI tool. So, like, in those situations, for instance, like, you guys can show it.
90 00:14:43.450 ⇒ 00:14:55.959 ihsan saracgil: But we don’t have an expectation to dislodge an existing enterprise be ideal. I think this makes more sense, like, especially as you go through your clients. If they don’t have
91 00:14:56.090 ⇒ 00:15:16.089 ihsan saracgil: legacy BI solutions in place, and if you basically get them to commit to Snowflake meaningfully in the data side of these things, we position… we want to position OpenBB as, like, don’t take data outside Snowflake. You invested in data engineering in Snowflake, build analytics on top with OpenBB,
92 00:15:16.090 ⇒ 00:15:32.069 ihsan saracgil: We’re change… we’re gonna change our go-to-market, like, pricing strategy and whatnot, fairly soon. Like, we do what traditional SaaS firms, all of these firms do, like, completely transparent. Like, you know, if you know hacks, pricing, and whatnot, happy to hear your thoughts, but, like.
93 00:15:32.070 ⇒ 00:15:32.430 Robert Tseng: Yep.
94 00:15:32.430 ⇒ 00:15:43.299 ihsan saracgil: No one posts a price, it’s all over the place. You request a custom code, and they tell you something. So I’m basically looking at, like, third-party aggregators to tell me what these people are charging.
95 00:15:43.320 ⇒ 00:15:44.790 Robert Tseng: So…
96 00:15:44.960 ⇒ 00:15:56.389 ihsan saracgil: at the end of the month, we are planning to go to market as saying that, look, not only we have this product, right? But it’s also the only BI tool that I could see on the marketplace.
97 00:15:56.840 ⇒ 00:16:15.380 ihsan saracgil: that has a transparent pricing that you can buy, even a single license if you want to, right? So you don’t want to go for enterprise. Like, let’s say you go to your client banks and say, do you want to build this sort of app? You don’t want an enterprise deal. No pressure. You can do this with Streamlit for free, but Streamlit is…
98 00:16:15.510 ⇒ 00:16:26.649 ihsan saracgil: a techie tool, right? It doesn’t scale. If you want something professional, one notch above Streamlit, maybe OpenB… you should look into OpenBB.
99 00:16:27.180 ⇒ 00:16:27.500 Robert Tseng: Yeah.
100 00:16:27.500 ⇒ 00:16:42.210 ihsan saracgil: We’re going to be very transparent, and that’s how I imagine that we can work together, like, you know, we can assist you building these applications if you build… bring the leads to us, and if the client is comfortable with it, because we know how to build apps better than everyone.
101 00:16:42.450 ⇒ 00:16:57.129 ihsan saracgil: But we assume that the data is there. If the data is not there, no way to do it, right? Because you can’t… you need to share the data with me, which they don’t do, but they will do it with you. That’s why I understand your business model is, like, you’re on the ground working with their data.
102 00:16:57.130 ⇒ 00:17:04.099 ihsan saracgil: So, if you have OpenBB, you’re in the best position to show these things. You can always let us know.
103 00:17:04.099 ⇒ 00:17:11.610 ihsan saracgil: and share the lead with us, and we can assist you building the app. But it’s still your motion until
104 00:17:11.660 ⇒ 00:17:18.219 ihsan saracgil: we basically tell these people that, look, do you like what you’re seeing? Great! Let’s get you an OpenBB, and…
105 00:17:18.220 ⇒ 00:17:32.729 ihsan saracgil: it’s going to be super transparent, and all these things that you guys build in their account should be immediately transferable if they get a license. We will work on that piece. So that’s my spiel. That’s how we’re thinking about OpenBB and Snowflakes. I’m going to stop here.
106 00:17:32.940 ⇒ 00:17:33.300 Robert Tseng: Trust.
107 00:17:33.300 ⇒ 00:17:34.450 ihsan saracgil: Hand it over to you.
108 00:17:34.790 ⇒ 00:17:56.099 Robert Tseng: Great, yeah, no, thanks for the overview. I think it’s, you know, I think we’re aligned on a lot of your vision for, kind of, how you position this, like, Agentic workspace versus the traditional BI tools. You know, I mean, we’re a partner of Sigma and also Omni, which is kind of funny that you brought up Omni. So, we know Omni’s kind of environment very well. We do a lot of… we gotta do co-deals with them, so…
109 00:17:56.100 ⇒ 00:17:58.199 Robert Tseng: Yeah, I mean, it’s just…
110 00:17:58.200 ⇒ 00:18:21.740 Robert Tseng: Both the good and the bad, right? The bad is on the pricing side, like, they’re always pushing us when we’re selling Omni, like, hey, get those clients into 2-year contracts. We’ve never been able to sell a 2-year contract. I think traditional BI SaaS licensing is kind of just dead, like, no one wants to pay for that. People are thinking, well, applications should get easier and easier to build, what I’m paying for is really just, like, this premium on token costs that’s, like, being locked in today.
111 00:18:21.740 ⇒ 00:18:46.610 Robert Tseng: it’s been really hard to get them to, like, actually to sell their pricing. So, I think the way that you’re approaching it, with kind of… especially built on the Snowflake ecosystem, your bet is, like, if clients or customers are already going to invest in the Snowflake system, then you’re just going… that’s already sticky enough, and you can… that allows you to sell single-user licenses, and you can start to kind of, like, kind of experiment with pricing in a more
112 00:18:46.610 ⇒ 00:19:10.260 Robert Tseng: transparent way. So, totally on board with that. And, yeah, I mean, if I were to just kind of take that example of, like, the bank of Omaha, and so, you know, that’s a very common situation we walk into, where it’s like, we want to adopt this tool or process, but it’s prohibitive because we’re stuck on Power BI. And, like, that’s a nice feature, but it feels like it’s… they don’t really know how to
113 00:19:10.260 ⇒ 00:19:28.670 Robert Tseng: like, navigating an organization to kind of propose to them, like, hey, let’s get off Power BI, invest in data warehousing, that… that’s the conversation that we’re… that we’re… that we are often in, and I think we can definitely help you kind of push that along. So,
114 00:19:28.670 ⇒ 00:19:52.629 Robert Tseng: yeah, I think, like, you know, even if we took that, you know, deal as an example, if we can kind of come back and help you be like, hey, look, like, here’s a team that’s kind of helped, multiple organizations move from a Power BI situation over to kind of a Snowflake first. Like, let them talk about kind of the wins that they were able to get for them, whatnot. Like, we’re happy to kind of come back in and
115 00:19:52.630 ⇒ 00:19:57.010 Robert Tseng: try to make that… make that pitch to switch, for the, for the switch to… to Snowflake.
116 00:19:57.430 ⇒ 00:20:22.329 Robert Tseng: And, the last slide I have is, totally agree with you. We think that the application layer, I mean, is… you guys have a really great product, and I’m sure you’d be able to build that out, so I think you… I think you, identified where we sit pretty… pretty well. I think, yeah, we’re just there. Again, Omni has a similar concept, to be honest, which is like, okay, they… they get clients that want to switch over to Omni, but they’
117 00:20:22.330 ⇒ 00:20:46.719 Robert Tseng: data’s not in a good place, and so we end up kind of either… we usually platform them in Snowflake, but we’re pretty agnostic and go into all the data warehouses. But in order for Omni to work, they need to set up semantic views. And so, they call it topics, and for us, we’re really involved in there, kind of doing these, like, topic sprints, where we’re working with, like, kind of business stakeholder heads and different clients, helping them set up the topics.
118 00:20:46.720 ⇒ 00:20:53.720 Robert Tseng: So that the kind of querying is actually, like, useful. Otherwise, they just slap a generic, like, kind of, like, you know.
119 00:20:53.720 ⇒ 00:20:54.260 ihsan saracgil: Yeah, yeah.
120 00:20:54.260 ⇒ 00:20:55.710 Robert Tseng: model underneath, yeah.
121 00:20:55.710 ⇒ 00:21:07.659 ihsan saracgil: Can I ask a clarifying question? So, for these topics and whatnot, like, for these other products that you guys use, do they have their own layer that you guys need to learn, or do they use in whatever Snowflake throws at them?
122 00:21:08.230 ⇒ 00:21:11.070 Robert Tseng: Yeah, so we prefer Snowflake because,
123 00:21:11.070 ⇒ 00:21:17.329 ihsan saracgil: That’s what we want to do, that’s what I’m saying. We are, like… let me just finish the thought. The reason why I asked the question is that
124 00:21:17.610 ⇒ 00:21:19.670 ihsan saracgil: I am very mindful
125 00:21:19.850 ⇒ 00:21:28.559 ihsan saracgil: We are on the record, so I don’t want to say, why am I doing this, but you can kind of tell. We are very mindful not to create our own tools.
126 00:21:28.560 ⇒ 00:21:39.860 ihsan saracgil: Yes. And make sure that we just use what Snowflake tells at you. Like, do things on Snowflake. I don’t want… like, our engineers always come up with things like, oh, like, we can make semantic views easier. Yeah. Don’t!
127 00:21:40.200 ⇒ 00:21:40.880 Robert Tseng: No need, Don.
128 00:21:41.260 ⇒ 00:21:50.479 ihsan saracgil: Don’t create it, you know, just… it’s Snowflake’s problem. We want people to use Snowflake’s stuff, learn that, you’re a Snowflake solution engineer.
129 00:21:50.480 ⇒ 00:21:53.140 Robert Tseng: Yeah. This just works here, that’s all you need to know.
130 00:21:53.300 ⇒ 00:21:53.910 Robert Tseng: Yeah.
131 00:21:54.070 ⇒ 00:22:19.020 Robert Tseng: Yeah, that we… I mean, for us to scale, like, we want that. Otherwise, the maintenance on building a custom building that each time, going through, like, our own hosted infrastructure, like, we can do that in situations, but that’s not what we want to do, because we’ve seen that it takes just so much longer for us to maintain, and the performance is not much better. Generally, like, the businesses we’re working with, you know, these credit unions, wealth management banks, these aren’t, like, super complicated businesses.
132 00:22:19.020 ⇒ 00:22:41.660 Robert Tseng: anyway. So, like, we don’t really need the custom infra. We can just… we want to be able to build everything on top of Snowflake, because they have the full suite of tools out of the box. That’s why we chose to go pick Snowflake as our ecosystem to invest in as well, so I think we’re aligned. Like, yeah, just don’t reinvent the wheel for things that don’t really need to be reinvented.
133 00:22:42.310 ⇒ 00:22:45.839 ihsan saracgil: Okay, sounds good. So, I think we are aligned on a lot of these things.
134 00:22:46.190 ⇒ 00:22:54.710 ihsan saracgil: So what do we want to do next? So, the easiest thing that I can think of is we can have you install this app.
135 00:22:54.880 ⇒ 00:23:09.659 ihsan saracgil: Yeah. So the way that… what I had in mind, just being conservative, right? Since this is new and we need to, like, get into habit of working together, you can… we can put, like, a time limit on this, just to, like.
136 00:23:09.660 ⇒ 00:23:22.399 ihsan saracgil: I’m… the reason why I’m suggesting a time limit is to give us a sense of urgency, so we can do, like, you know, not create something like, you know, if you do it 6 months, then we’re gonna wait 5 months and do something the last month.
137 00:23:22.400 ⇒ 00:23:22.730 Robert Tseng: No.
138 00:23:22.730 ⇒ 00:23:40.050 ihsan saracgil: So, but also, don’t make it, like, stressful, like, we can put one month, two months, something like that, like, something reasonable. We give you free, like, I’m gonna give you guys a free, private offer. Like, they’re not set up yet with, like, a standard plan, like, that’s what I’m trying to change.
139 00:23:40.050 ⇒ 00:23:48.279 ihsan saracgil: First, like, we… so what… and happy to hear your feedback on a lot of these things. I think we will find these things incredibly useful. Yeah.
140 00:23:48.280 ⇒ 00:23:56.040 ihsan saracgil: What I have in mind for the end of the month is that we’re going to create a standard plan that is per seat-based, but
141 00:23:56.240 ⇒ 00:24:03.450 ihsan saracgil: like, a transparent public thing that you can just basically go buy with your small plate credits or something.
142 00:24:03.450 ⇒ 00:24:09.050 Robert Tseng: And you can buy as many as you like. If you’re a single guy, just want to get it, you can grab it, right?
143 00:24:09.050 ⇒ 00:24:14.429 ihsan saracgil: We want to launch that piece, and then maybe offer, like.
144 00:24:14.840 ⇒ 00:24:33.760 ihsan saracgil: not enterprise, but, like, I want to get something for my team type of deal, and just basically reserve the contact us for custom pricing for, like, for someone who wants to say, look, I want to go all in on OpenBB. So, the way that… the only thing that is set up today, the way it’s gonna work is that I’m gonna make your account
145 00:24:33.800 ⇒ 00:24:38.599 ihsan saracgil: With your identifier, a private offer to you for $0, with a time limit.
146 00:24:38.780 ⇒ 00:24:45.060 ihsan saracgil: unlimited seats, like, that’s how we want the enterprise thing to work. Like, I don’t want to charge for a seat in general.
147 00:24:45.160 ⇒ 00:24:52.209 ihsan saracgil: In enterprise deals. Like, we’re gonna do a per-seat thing for people to be able to grab a seat or two, right? You know, usage…
148 00:24:52.210 ⇒ 00:25:05.539 ihsan saracgil: based, like, I don’t know what’s your experience with it, but, like, user space pricing for someone who just wants to work with this product for, like, 2-3 people is too complicated. So, that’s what I feel like the seed space actually makes sense.
149 00:25:05.540 ⇒ 00:25:08.620 ihsan saracgil: But when it comes to, like, our kind of engagement.
150 00:25:08.740 ⇒ 00:25:23.990 ihsan saracgil: I’m not, like, we’re not touching seats at all. I’m just gonna make an offer to your account directly, unlimited seats. You can install as many as you want. We don’t look at your query, none of that stuff. So you guys have it. We just put a time limit so that we have an urgency to work together.
151 00:25:24.220 ⇒ 00:25:34.779 ihsan saracgil: Let’s start there. You guys get it, start using it, and if you want, we can get on a call with our chief product engineer to help you with the onboarding.
152 00:25:34.800 ⇒ 00:25:45.979 ihsan saracgil: It should be very straightforward, like, you know, once you go through the README, there’s, like, a bunch of admin comments that you need to run to essentially say that, look, this is my workspace, like, this is my warehouse.
153 00:25:46.050 ⇒ 00:25:56.299 ihsan saracgil: this is, you know, I’m enabling these, these, these services to OpenBVF, and here is the database that I want you to work with. Like, that’s it, like, 3 steps. You do those things, and you’re done.
154 00:25:56.300 ⇒ 00:26:19.590 ihsan saracgil: So, it should be for someone like your partner, like, I don’t… you know, you called your partner a snowflake expert, so I imagine someone like that should be able to get this in, like, under an hour, but it’s actually really good feedback that if you guys try it, and you get stuck and don’t understand what are we saying here in this README file, just let us know, we can just quickly get on a call. If you guys use Slack, let’s create a Slack channel so you.
155 00:26:19.590 ⇒ 00:26:20.450 Robert Tseng: Yeah. You can do this quick.
156 00:26:21.180 ⇒ 00:26:34.469 ihsan saracgil: Okay, I can invite you to that one, so that’s easy. So we give you guys an app, you guys try it, start maybe putting some examples together for yourself. At any point in time, just feel free to give me a call.
157 00:26:34.570 ⇒ 00:26:42.190 ihsan saracgil: like, how we do this, how we do that type of these things, like, if you… you guys are trying to build some apps. I can share some apps with you.
158 00:26:42.360 ⇒ 00:26:42.720 Robert Tseng: Yeah.
159 00:26:42.720 ⇒ 00:26:53.889 ihsan saracgil: If you guys have Snowflake public data, like, it’s free to get it, and I’ve been building a bunch of things on it. Yeah, so I can give you guys some, some apps in there, so we actually don’t have yet
160 00:26:54.200 ⇒ 00:27:04.339 ihsan saracgil: account-to-account app sharing. So, every app is inside the account, you can share it inside your own account. Like, I can’t share an app from my account to your account.
161 00:27:04.390 ⇒ 00:27:19.789 ihsan saracgil: But there is a hacky way to do it by… because there’s, like, a database, a backend of this app, that basically stores, the… the configuration of these things, so we might be able to do it, like, basically show you a hacky way to just give you a bunch of apps so you see, like, how it’s done.
162 00:27:19.790 ⇒ 00:27:26.520 ihsan saracgil: But let’s just spend maybe the next month or two doing a little bit of a training for you guys to get a good handle on it.
163 00:27:26.570 ⇒ 00:27:37.920 ihsan saracgil: If you guys would like to do the same for us, like, I don’t know how this works, actually, in practice, because you work with client data, and we don’t need to know if you’re not a client, right?
164 00:27:37.920 ⇒ 00:27:54.439 ihsan saracgil: So maybe we can have a session at some point to talk about some, prospects of yours where you think OpenVB is a good fit, and you can educate us about what are you guys doing, what data sets to use, what kind of apps you guys have in mind, and stuff like that, and we’re more than happy to,
165 00:27:54.690 ⇒ 00:28:03.319 ihsan saracgil: basically give you guys pointers, or even, like, you know, if you think that something’s gonna come out, like, we can… like, I don’t know how this would work.
166 00:28:03.590 ⇒ 00:28:14.070 ihsan saracgil: can we be added to your account as, like, a consultant to work with things with you? But not in client’s account, but to your account? Like, when clients work with you.
167 00:28:14.070 ⇒ 00:28:14.500 Robert Tseng: Yeah.
168 00:28:14.500 ⇒ 00:28:18.909 ihsan saracgil: How does it work? Do you get added to their account, or do they share data to you?
169 00:28:19.700 ⇒ 00:28:23.259 Robert Tseng: We usually get out at the Bears, but, you know.
170 00:28:23.260 ⇒ 00:28:23.970 ihsan saracgil: Yes, you’re.
171 00:28:23.970 ⇒ 00:28:26.249 Robert Tseng: I think it’s gone both ways before.
172 00:28:26.950 ⇒ 00:28:28.019 ihsan saracgil: Okay, yeah, so begin…
173 00:28:28.020 ⇒ 00:28:28.350 Robert Tseng: Yeah.
174 00:28:28.350 ⇒ 00:28:33.629 ihsan saracgil: you know, we will follow your guidance on how to do these things, right? Because sharing data,
175 00:28:34.470 ⇒ 00:28:50.580 ihsan saracgil: when we’re not part of a lead, doesn’t make a whole lot of sense, but you guys should maybe just think about, like, if we want to… if you want our help to build an application, for instance, right, where our domain expertise is a little bit more, how do we do this?
176 00:28:50.580 ⇒ 00:29:08.950 ihsan saracgil: So, we can just basically install data to you, but, like, you need to share the data to us, or add us to your account, not the client’s account, to your version, somehow. So, we should think about those things. I don’t know what the solution is, but, you know, we can help if we think… if we think that, like, there’s an opportunity for us to work together meaningfully, and so on.
177 00:29:08.950 ⇒ 00:29:15.570 ihsan saracgil: And one… next time we meet Blackstone, we will definitely mention you guys. That, you know, if you guys have
178 00:29:16.040 ⇒ 00:29:25.179 ihsan saracgil: Their thing was that, like, they were a little bit frustrated that it’s not, like, public data. They want more things to be added that they’re not keeping up. And they asked us…
179 00:29:25.180 ⇒ 00:29:34.669 Robert Tseng: Snowflake datasets, we could easily just kind of continue to build on that. If they just need more synthetic data, we’ve worked with these types of clients before that they just need to see a lot of, like.
180 00:29:35.060 ⇒ 00:29:45.519 Robert Tseng: It’s a pretty well-invested, like, demo before they can really, like, kind of get… catch the… catch the vision, so, like, we’re happy to… we’re happy to help with that as well.
181 00:29:45.820 ⇒ 00:29:53.909 ihsan saracgil: Okay, sounds good. So next time we meet with them, if this issue comes up, I will just give a referral to you, and we can find a way to work together.
182 00:29:53.910 ⇒ 00:29:54.490 Robert Tseng: Yeah.
183 00:29:54.970 ⇒ 00:29:57.300 ihsan saracgil: Okay, I don’t have anything else.
184 00:29:57.670 ⇒ 00:30:22.650 Robert Tseng: Yeah, I guess a couple things on my side. So, like, you know, I shared a few contacts from a Rolodex. I’m actually… I just landed in Austin yesterday. My business partner is here. We usually kind of co-work here and there every month or so. So we have these, you know, basically credit unions, wealth management firms. These are some companies that we go after in this region. And so, like, the Southwest, Southeast, like, you mentioned, like, the Omaha, there’s, like, a… those are all kind of targets within us.
185 00:30:22.650 ⇒ 00:30:35.380 Robert Tseng: I think, like, I think we can continue to go after these lists together. I think that’s what we… I’ll probably loop in someone. I don’t know who does go-to-market on your team. It may not be you, because I feel like you’re the… Oh, you are? Okay.
186 00:30:35.380 ⇒ 00:30:45.359 ihsan saracgil: Yeah, it’s me. I mean, we have 12 people, and almost all of them are engineers, so as the only non-engineered data scientist quant, I end up being the corporate guy.
187 00:30:45.580 ⇒ 00:30:45.970 Robert Tseng: Okay.
188 00:30:45.970 ⇒ 00:30:46.930 ihsan saracgil: Oh, no.
189 00:30:46.930 ⇒ 00:31:11.739 Robert Tseng: Yeah. Well, I was thinking I was gonna introduce my go-to-market lead, too, where I basically am like, this is a list of accounts, get us into these… like, I basically just want them to book us meetings, and I usually take it from there. So, I might kind of bring him into our channel as well, and he’ll kind of keep kind of pace on, like, hey, you saw these are the people we’re talking to, and then just, like, let you know. Every time we talk to them, we want to have OpenBB top of mind.
190 00:31:11.740 ⇒ 00:31:35.209 Robert Tseng: bring them into the conversation. So, I think it’ll be great for us. We’ll see how, like, how many touches it’ll take for us to really kind of get a deal over the line, but we feel like we have a good… we at least have a warm intro to all of these leads, those five accounts I shared with you, but we probably have a list of, like, 50. And yeah, I mean, I think the exercise is really kind of deciding, from a sizing perspective, like, what are the right
191 00:31:35.210 ⇒ 00:31:58.450 Robert Tseng: kind of, what are the right approaches to kind of go after each of them? So, I think that level of kind of, like, segmenting the lead list, we haven’t done with this, vertical. But, like, I think we’re basically running a similar playbook, because we… we do really well in healthcare, and also in CPG, so I think, like, this, this fin… this kind of, like, fintech kind of,
192 00:31:58.460 ⇒ 00:32:03.030 Robert Tseng: kind of financial services sector is, like, kind of the next one that I’m eager to go after.
193 00:32:03.540 ⇒ 00:32:11.409 ihsan saracgil: Okay, yeah, sounds good. So technically, we are not limited to finance, but that’s where we come from. We know financial data the best.
194 00:32:11.440 ⇒ 00:32:23.790 ihsan saracgil: So, a lot of things that we have done is really optimized for, like, someone using it like a Bloomberg CapIQ replacement than anything else. For the other ones, we’re actually open, and we will eventually do it.
195 00:32:23.790 ⇒ 00:32:33.089 ihsan saracgil: But let’s collaborate on the fintech, just to keep our scope a little bit narrow. The kind of firms that you talked about, I’m looking forward to your feedback also about, like.
196 00:32:33.090 ⇒ 00:32:48.279 ihsan saracgil: the pricing, you know, what would essentially sell to these people? Like, transparency, lack of enterprise deals, flexibility, and all of that. You know, as we work along, like, I’m looking forward to your feedback on these, but we have the next steps, let me create the Slack channel.
197 00:32:48.280 ⇒ 00:32:53.660 ihsan saracgil: I need your… like, we can discuss it on that Slack. I need your account identifier to make an offer to you.
198 00:32:53.660 ⇒ 00:32:54.270 Robert Tseng: Yep.
199 00:32:54.950 ⇒ 00:32:59.599 ihsan saracgil: Sounds good. So, very nice meeting you, nice talking to you. We’ll catch up later.
200 00:32:59.770 ⇒ 00:33:01.219 ihsan saracgil: Talk soon. Bye, son.