The Exchanges

Q So most recently, you have been going viral on and off with these new product launches. Can you talk about the recent product launch?

A So we just lost agents for investing. Um, and what that helps you do is to essentially automate any type of workflow in your brokerage account. That could be a trading strategy, that can be money movements, that can be alerts you want to set up to some regard. And it really moves the way you even just like interact with the platform away from just like clicking buttons to just expressing intent. And how we think about it is that it kind of helps people to really kind of move up in the, in the sophistication. You know, like one example we always make is there's a lot of people who have a decent understanding of that you could generate some income using covered calls on your portfolio. And that's like high level what they understand, but now to actually go find the right contracts, see what the income potential would be, et cetera, that's where it starts to break down. And so people just like start freezing because now they have to educate themselves and it's going to be really hard. Um, with Asians, you can literally just be like, okay, look at my portfolio. Um, show me if I could do, you know, five grand a month income potential on it. Um, let me just like, let me see what's there. And then it scans the portfolio, shows you Um, you know, opportunities for, for, for cover calls and income potential behind it, and then you can just like activate it and it runs as a workflow. And …

AI assessment note: “So we just lost agents for investing. Um, and what that helps you do”

Q terms of you in your role, Co-CEO, founder of Public, Sorcery is sponsored by Brex, and they're all about performance, and so as you think about performance for yourself as Co-CEO, who are, I think performance really has to do with who you surround yourself with, or who you admire, who you are mentored by, who are some of those people for you, and how do you keep yourself motivated?

A So Janneke and I have a little bit of a circle of, like, other founder friends, and a few of those are further along in their journey than we are, and so on, and I think that is always, first it's great just for advice and so on, to have other founder friends that, like, in similar situations, similar size companies, and all that kind of stuff, or even further along than you are, um, because I think that's immensely important and helpful, but there's also a sense where, like, You know, I don't know, you're sitting on your buddy's private jet, and you're like, fuck, there's always another level. And so there is always this, like, man, and so you get, if you always get, like, uh, uh, exposed to, like, your friend's successes, you know, um, on the one side, you're obviously rooting for them, and you're happy for them, but on the other side, you're also always a competitive being, and you're like, argh, okay, gotta work harder. Gotta work harder. Yeah.

AI assessment note: “Janneke and I have a little bit of a circle of, like, other founder friends”

Q I want to go through the evolution of public over time. Um, we're very clearly, and you've very much embraced this in an AI world. So what was it like early on? And did you think you were going to expand this much out outside of the existing categories you were going after? Like, where do you feel like there was extra opportunity to, to like grab?

A Yeah. I mean, so when we started public was Like the first, like, you know, investing app with like a social feed. And I think a lot of people still know us as like, oh, you're the social investing app, right? And stuff, but now, but now social is dead because it was basically cannibalized from AI. Um, seriously, but, um, but like, that's kind of where it started. And we had this like thing of like, okay, we, like we knew in order to build something serious, we had to first have expanded to my asset classes. And so we kind of spent the first Four years just building all the different asset classes, fractionalizing all those, building this like internal, you know, system, which was like, you know, we call the holding system. It's like a ledger that enables real-time money movements, potential asset classes. If you sell Bitcoin, you can buy a T-bill with it, you know, the second after and consolidate the performance reporting where you have one chart, that's why all the asset classes, which actually quite hard. That's why you, if you open your JP Morgan account, you will not see the chart because of that. Um, and so like all this kind of stuff, um, And, um, and that was like the, the, the, the kind of first half. The second was just like, why do you open the app? And, um, I think brokerage had become a little bit just a, um, a tool to execute trades. And that's, I think through, …

AI assessment note: “we knew in order to build something serious, we had to first have expanded”

Q As the platform becomes more agentic, are you worried at all about any risks and vulnerabilities there? Are you thinking about insurance? How are you thinking about the backstop?

A Yeah. The way we look at agents right now is we essentially separate the reasoning from the execution. Um, which means you spar with the AI to figure out what the workflow should be. What's the strategy? What's, what's a trading strategy you want to, you want to come up with? Um, it helps you build that trading strategy. It's literally writes the code to do that in the public account, but once you prove it, it is a deterministic model where that can't deviate. And so therefore it has no, um, it has no hallucinations. You know exactly it's going to do what it told it to do and so on. And we think that is very important Number one, obviously just for the safety of the user, but also for people who just build trust with these systems. I don't think people are ready to give their money to Open Claw and say, make me money now, please. You know, like, I, I think we're far away from that, and, um, you know, there's a reason why everyone wants to have a little Mac Mini, because they want to have these things operate in a, you know, isolated environment that is away from their own data, away from their own money, etc. Um, so I think we're actually far away from that, and, um, and so, This, the separation is how we've approached it, and that takes it from this, like, oh, agents futuristic concept you can't trust to something that can work today with serious, for serious potential, you kn…

AI assessment note: “we essentially separate the reasoning from the execution... it is a deterministic model”

Q I have a couple questions about this, but like, has that, and I guess, has the reflection on that, and the understanding of the business strategy within all these different connected pieces, has that just kind of naturally evolved, or were you thinking about different levers to pull as you grow? Like, how did you think about constructing all of this?

A So, we have a few high-level principles in terms of just building stuff, like one we always talk about is, um, um, It's, uh, simplicity, not simplistic, and so like the sense of that you want to have a simple experience that has a lot of product depth to it, so it can't feel complicated and so on, it can't feel like a tax form and you log into your shop account or something, but, um, it's, uh, something it needs to be simple enough that you can understand it and use it and whatnot, but it can't be simplified, because if it's simplified, um, that means you're taking Uh, um, product depth away in order to simplify it. And that's what you've seen a lot of consumer fintech do, but that takes sophistication away and so on, and also just like control and so on. So like, that's like one of the pieces just from like a high level principle perspective. And then generally speaking, I would say like, yeah, I mean, as you build the company, you learn things. I would say most cases I would argue, like if you find founders, it will tell you that they had the perfect vision from day one. I think that's bullshit in most cases and that you learn over time. And things change. I think our, the story of level up for us is a good one where, um, you know, when we launched the company, we were much more on this mindset of like democratization, public for everyone, you know, no, no, no. Um, then we we…

AI assessment note: “as you build the company, you learn things... you learn over time.”

Q curve, right? You want to stick to the higher class assets. If everything becomes tradable and it's running. How does that impact the market? And do you think that's going to just undermine everything in general, or is there going to be a real shakeout where it's nope. We're all, we're all just, we just trust the higher end market versus all the gobbledygook that's being done on the sides.

A Generally speaking, I think that thing, that's, that's more things are tradable. Again, there's a nuanced thing around what is actually tradable. Is this, like, is this stuff that is, like, related to building wealth, or is it just fun? And yeah, I mean, there's tokenization, there's stable coins now, and yeah, and like with tokenization, again, like, I think there's a sense of that, like, you have to separate the technology of a token being a wrapper for something. And the blockchain being just a piece of technology that you can use to trade something, and, um, um, the, you know, like the actual value that it provides, like, if I, like, when I hear people say things like, oh, you know, if you tokenize stocks, like, they can trade 24 seven. Yeah. I'll be like, That doesn't make any sense because just by wrapping it into a token doesn't mean it's ready for seven. Like, come on. Like also like, don't pretend like you don't know that. Like, you know, it's like, it's just a fucking rapper, you know, let's be straight, you know? And so there is, is this aspect of like, Hey, like you can have 20 for seven markets already, but it's not a question of if it's a token or not, it's a question of liquidity. Right. So like, if you look at the overnight market, which is blue, something, something, I forgot the name of it right now, which is like, it's like the, the biggest venue that, um, es…

AI assessment note: “you have to separate the technology of a token being a wrapper for something”