Pivot To Survive

When you had this idea and you thought, well, there's going to be a lot of data here that I can mine in the SEC reports and filings, what type of deep and impactful insights were you hoping that kind of data could provide?

Yeah, honestly, the first product we went after, I’m somewhat embarrassed to share this, but this is the truth. We actually started to track IPO data because when I left in March of 2000, as you recall, everybody was going public and it was a hot market. But three weeks after we got started, the market went in the other direction and things quickly fell apart. In many businesses, they start off doing one thing and they realize there isn't quite the market fit for that.

And the term pivot. We weren't calling it pivot back then, but we were calling it survival. And so we were fortunate enough that part of what we were tracking out of the IPO filings was compensation data. Because in what they call, an S1 registration statement, a company has to disclose that. And that's where we saw a lot of interest in that data and that's kind of how we pivoted and started to say, we're going to go deep in this area. And then, try to build the business around that. Fortunately, it's worked out

Well, so let's expand on that. You started Equilar in March of 2000 just before the dot com bubble burst and I would imagine that must have been pretty challenging. Can you share with us what it was like during that time for your fleshing company and how did you get through all that?

Yeah. What was it? We had a young baby, so Isabel was just adjustment more. We had a mortgage, my savings at the time halved in a matter of weeks, everything that could go wrong went wrong. And then, we raised a million dollars thinking that we would be able to go out and raise and make a much larger round. Well that much larger round ever happened. So we were forced with what we had to figure out a business. There are many days where like, okay, are we done? Do we give up, do we just say just kind of write it off. So it was three years of not getting paid. We were fortunate enough that we had enough savings to make it through. We were all making sacrifices, but we were able to figure out how to monetize what we were doing and had some great customers that, to this day, many of them are still so we just worked out well.