Week 19 report - 2024

First word: Time.

I don't know how time flies so fast when you're doing a startup. You wake up Monday morning, you get back from work, and it's Friday night. Damn.

Anyway, exciting news! TalkToDART has been upgraded to another level. We've been testing people from finance backgrounds, specifically from the equity field, and came to realize that retrieving or generating desired data is just not enough to make a sticky product. Even though we've hacked together v0.4 of TalkToDART for people, it hasn't attracted much attention because of its weak value proposition.

Second word: Workspace.

Imagine trying to build a bookshelf by yourself. What would you need? A hammer? Wood? Those are all correct answers. But the most important thing is to actually have a place to put those materials together, and that is a workbench. But you also know that workbenches have evolved as more advanced tools have been introduced, right?

In the software landscape, this concept is normally called a workspace. At Pado, we decided that a new type of workspace for financial researchers was needed. We hacked an awesome agent for financial information on Korean companies that have disclosed filings. But the overall experience while researching was not considered. I mean, we gave them an awesome tool to play with, but they couldn't fit that together with their existing workbench.

Decoupling the research process was nice because we could get a thorough understanding of how most financial researchers work. But just providing on-demand financial information about companies wasn't enough.

Third word: Philo.

So, we're now hacking together an upgraded product called Philo. Philo is an AI-native research workspace for financial researchers who pore through corporate data, both qualitative and quantitative. Philo aims to become their go-to workspace when it comes to conducting research.

Fourth word: Sophia.

Then, what happens to TalkToDART? Good question. TalkToDART will actually have a decent name now. We are now going to call it Sophia. Sophia will be at your fingertips while you use Philo. For example, if you need a list of Apple's bonds in the form of a table, voila, Sophia will take care of that for you.

Last word: Philosophia

By combining collaborative work done by the researchers themselves and chores completed by Sophia, we could actually help people achieve great things! We're going to start out with finance, but in the end, we hope to expand to academia (but Jenni is doing so great, so it's going to be tough!), user research, and so on.

We aim to make Philo the Jupyter Notebook + AI for finance. Wish us luck.