Leigh A. DrogenFounder and CEO

At least that's not my signature

Tech and Finance, two very different worlds

My quantitative DNA plays huge role in my philosophy

Started Surfview Capital in 2008

Social media + finance created a massive opportunity

Open philosophy, ideas not identities, community

StockTwits = unstructured data, Estimize = structured data

Howard fired me, I'm grateful

Been fired from every real job I've ever had

2,300+ buy side and independent analysts

We sell data

Agnostic towards identities

Focused on slicing and dicing based on corpus

Moneyball for earnings estimates

Rank and rate analyst on Accuracy, many other statistical levels

The first ones through the wall get a little bloody

Is accuracy or representativeness more important?

Building premium layers

Rank and Rate, Sort and Filter

Save filters, get alerted when something matches

Select Consensus

Further quantitative measurement

Big things coming soon

It's messy, lot of mistakes

Would not have started Estimize if I didn't have conviction

Your idea is the least important part

It's all about execution

Hustle is far more important than skill or intelligence

You have to do alchemy

Keep your company alive long enough to see it work

Make people believe, team, VC's, friends, family, everyone

Be able to admit quickly when you don't have a necessary skill set

Put your ego down, ask for help, give help on a regular basis

Always be recruiting, always

Recruiting walks > meeting rooms

Understand who you're hiring, age mismatch can be a problem

How will they react under pressure, can you go to war with them?

Tried to outsource front end, massive failure, process is key

January 2011 ran out of money after 95K seed

Jesse held it together

Found Brian on Angel List

Brian made a bet on us

He had Leverage

Brian brought in Adam, we had a team

Raising A round was hugely different from Angel Investors

Disappointed in San Fran

Had to go learn

Found people who helped

Its not a conversation. Make people believe

Blitz don't spread it out, one massive dot no lines

Avoid the Whale

Life on the buy side is structured, startup is chaos for your life

People know what's coming, you need to be delusional

This process is emotionally exhausting

Keep yourself in the game at a high level

Thomson and Capital IQ have massive innovators dilemma

Start open or exclusive?

Buy Side guys predictably irrational about transactional model

People often perceive value with a transaction associated with it

Build a moat of as many contributors as possible