It’s crazy to think that just a few years ago, I spent the majority of my week in a cubicle, working as an investment banker. Like other bankers, I spent my time pouring over company filings, reading market research, and building financial models. Rather tedious work. But, it wasn’t all bad: I met one of my co-founders Matt Hogan through a multi-billion dollar deal we were both working on.
Slogging through dense paperwork and earnings reports, Matt and I would always joke about having an assistant to perform all the tedious tasks so that we could focus on what actually matters: understanding the company’s business and strategy. Safe to say, our firm didn’t give us any personal assistants. Our wishful thinking did spark the beginnings of an idea though -- wouldn’t it be nice if investors had some kind of personal analyst?
Obviously, we couldn’t just hire a person to sit and run numbers for us all day. So I decided to instead start a folder on Google Drive and filled it with financial models that we could share with our friends and use in our blog posts. After sharing the models on our blog, we soon began to receive thank you messages and requests for more models and features. We started thinking, maybe we’re not the only investing nerds out there.
So I asked the most talented engineer I knew, Brian Dentino if he would be interested in helping us build a “robo-analyst” that could do help us scale up our little side project. Brian accepted the challenge and Finbox was born.
In the years that have followed, what was once just a small folder of financial models has become a full set of investor tools that includes a powerful stock screener, idea generator, and fair value estimates to name a few. Along the way, we also created the largest repository of valuation models and risk metrics available on the web. Through our partnership with Standard & Poors Market Intelligence, the gold-standard of data providers, we now cover over 60,000 companies globally. Millions of people have used our ever-improving toolbox and we couldn’t be any happier that we’ve been able to help so many investors. Hopefully, we can add you to the list.
Cheers,
Andy Pai
Co-Founder of Finbox