A Few Good Ideas

Right after college, I left Wisconsin for Phoenix to start a real estate information services company. Maricopa County was the fastest-growing metro area in the country at the time. The concept was to track transactions, sales prices, and owners and provide plat maps, pictures, and ancillary data on a monthly CD-ROM subscription. This was before the internet. Today, this idea is Zillow.

Second, while at Baird, I thought I should be able to talk or email with truckers driving for a company I was researching. I figured a model like eBay could be constructed to connect analysts with experts who did something I wanted to understand better. An example, would be talking to a truck driver of what they thought of the new Peterbilt truck. I called it Brightbamboo.com because of the lattice network of bamboo’s root structure. I thought micro-payments could work. This was in 1997. According to Wikipedia, Gerson Lehrman launched in 1998. That expert network model is now copied in whole or in part by GuidePoint, Tegus, and Alphasense. None of these firms deal in micro-payments. Interestingly enough, today the brightbamboo.com website sells bamboo countertops.

I have already written about how I met with Rob Adler, the founder of CCBN.com which stood for the Conference Call Broadcasting Network. He and I discussed his “Netflix of conference calls” app in 1997. I thought transcribing the calls after they concluded and allowing his clients to download a PDF of the transcript would be a good idea. This is precisely what CCBN did and many others now do today.

Then, in 1998, I launched a website that offered free content written by me for college graduates on topics such as how to get a job as an analyst, my work experience and the day-to-day life of an associate, writing a good stock pitch, and other related topics. Many offerings do the same today from Wall Street Oasis to Wall Street Prep. The magic here was not my content, it was that the platform allowed for the posting a new content with in-line graphics without needing to know HTML. Pyra Labs launched Blogger.com in 1999. In this instance, I had zero idea that I had something at all and that it was the platform I built that had value, not my content. Google bought Blogger in 2003. Now high-end newsletter apps like beehive and Substack are very successful.

I was zero for four on new idea launches. Either I didn’t understand the value proposition and the trends, or I didn't have the knowledge to execute at scale.

But with age comes wisdom, so I am very confident in DoTadda Knowledge, which launched a month ago. I know the pain we solve, and we solve it better and more elegantly than what is on the market today. I live with that pain every day as a professional buyside analyst, which is processing and analyzing public company call transcripts at high volume. My past failings that turned out to be home runs when done by others give me confidence in my instincts. Our early metrics show my instincts are correct so far.

My next post will be my annual letter to the team, advisory board, and fans. Follow me, so you don’t miss out.

Best,

Drew