It’s Time Asset Management Teams Had a Productivity and Collaboration App Built Just for Them - Part III
Welcome to my final blog post in this series: It’s Time Asset Management Teams Had a Productivity and Collaboration App Built Just for Them. This is part three.
As I finish up this series, I would like to write about my inspiration for DoTadda and where it comes from and why I assembled a team to build it. Well, first my inspiration came from my own frustration and just wanting to build a better system to save myself time in my job as an equity analyst. I always want to make my investment process better, more insightful, and much more efficient. I remember the days of the legal pads where I kept my notes. I would often ask myself “What was I thinking about CAT last cycle?” I would have to rely on memory rather than a statement of record.
Second, I always wanted to build something that was more than a better Excel spreadsheet.
Third, my motivation is boosted by others in the space, past and present, that launched new tools or thought leadership for investment management practitioners.
Here is a concise list of some of those companies and people I admire that provide this inspiration.
CCBN and Street Events
CCBN and Street Events brought conference call streaming, replays, and transcripts mainstream. I credit CCBN with the first major leap forward in the asset management productivity space with their conference call transcript service. One has to remember that the internet was pretty new and few understood its potential for the industry. We were still getting press releases by fax machine when CCBN and Street Events launched.
CapitalIQ
Next is CapitalIQ, which brought financials with links into Excel models for data transparency. CapitalIQ was another innovative company that I used in my early career. FactSet and Bloomberg were fast followers in the data transparency realm, but CapitalIQ started it all. CapitalIQ is now part of S&P Global.
BamSEC
Today, I admire BamSEC which makes SEC filings easy to search, download, compare, export, annotate, and much more. BamSEC delivers immediate value to users. I use BamSEC every day. At DoTadda we aim to do the same...deliver immediate value. BamSEC was recently acquired by Tegus, the expert network company.
Daloopa
There is also a relative newcomer, Daloopa, which is a service that makes updating financial models a breeze. They use AI to automagically update your existing Excel models with the latest reported results and they do it without a mechanical turk bottleneck. Additionally, Daloopa’s data is fully auditable and transparent. This is a huge pain point solved for most analysts who manually hand key model updates. Daloopa has a really bright future, in my opinion. Daloopa is another solution I use daily.
Colossus
The Colossus website and podcast. This is Patrick O'Shaughnessy’s podcast on all things business. Deep dives, insightful interviews, amazing guests, and it’s all for free. Every time Patrick interviews a SaaS founder or seasoned investor, I get excited to listen to his podcast. Patrick is an expert interviewer and I hope one day to be on his pod.
Howard, I think is a comedian first, bicyclist second, golfer third, and investor fourth. It turns out Howard is an excellent investor with an amazing insight into the fintech space. His podcast Panic with Friends has amazing guests that teach and entertain. Howard founded Stocktwits and invested in Robinhood and Koyfin, which makes him a must-follow in the fintech space.
The DoTadda Team
Fourth, and most importantly, my motivation comes from my team. We are only four people and DoTadda is a side-project, night hustle for all of us. We meet after work once a week to discuss accomplishments, our feature roadmap, bug fixes, and so on. I you are wondering; all of these blog posts are written on weekends. The team constantly brings new UI, feature ideas, and new tech to improve DoTadda and they make me really excited to ship what we have in store for 2022.
Thank you all for reading this blog post. My name is Andrew Meister. I have been a career equity research analyst for 27 years. I’m a co-founder of DoTadda to help asset managers gain total control of their data. If you want to reach me, contact me on LinkedIn or follow me on Twitter @DrewMMeister.