Today Markit Group announced that General Atlantic has invested $250 million, valuing the 7 year old company at a whopping $3.3 billion. Founded by Lance Uggla, Kevin Gould and Rony Grushka in 2003 to address the growing need for quality data in the burgeoning credit derivatives market, what followed was several years of unbelievably good execution and disciplined acquisitions which has positioned the company as a critical component at the heart of the trillion dollar OTC derivative markets. The products they provide aren’t considered sexy (something that is often given all too much importance in this status conscious industry) – but their data, valuations, indices, trade processing and other products and services are the plumbing that is key to the continuing operation of many financial markets. They are a great example of creating value by building a great platform and understanding how to monetize data. I had the good fortune to be a non-executive director from 2003 to 2006 and I can say without hesitation that this team is one of the best I’ve ever seen and fully deserve the success they have achieved. (Congratulation guys. Awesome, truly awesome.)
And I am certain there is more to come. Their primary constraint has and will likely continue to be the physical/logistical limitations of growing as fast as they have but each year they only improve and in terms of acquisitions the company they most remind me of (in terms of disciplined and deliberate execution) is Cisco. Besides, General Atlantic doesn’t invest in companies where they don’t think they can make 20-30% annual returns or more.
And yet many (most) people in the ’start-up’/'tech’ scene whether in the UK or the US have never (or only vaguely) heard of Markit. (For example, I counted only about 50 or so tweets referencing the announcement today, less than for any TechCrunch launching start-up…) Why is that? Obviously I can’t say for sure but (in no particular order) would guess the explanation perhaps lies in the following:
not venture capital funded; funding initially came from it’s cornerstone customers, the investment banks, and then later from some very smart hedge funds
focused on the wholesale financial services industry (and not on consumer or media or other mass markets)
key products and services (and associated economics) unknown to those outside finance and even worse generally considered ‘boring’
management team laser focused on execution, not PR (although to be fair they had this luxury not needing to sell to the mass market)
and so folks like TechCrunch and VentureBeat don’t know or write about them (aka “if a startup isn’t listed in CrunchBase does it really exist?” syndrome)
Indeed for me, Markit is a poster child for the cognitive, cultural and expertise chasm that exists between ‘Wall Street’ and ‘the Valley’ (or the ‘City’ and the ‘Roundabout’ to use the less good UK-centric metaphor.) They might as well be on different planets. Indeed bridging this divide is at the core of what we set out to do at Nauiokas Park and was the driver that led Paul Kedrosky and Tim O’Reilly to launch the Money:Tech conference in 2008 (which sadly didn’t survive the financial crisis and quite frankly was met by a deafening indifference by the vast majority of the Wall Street side of the equation.)
And yet, the opportunities available to those who can successful bridge this gap are enormous. Well, anyway that’s what we think. And the crisis in venture capital ostensibly caused by too much capital? I’m going to disagree with Paul and Fred and suggest it’s not too much money overall; rather it’s too much money concentrated with too few investors, focused on too few sectors, who end up all chasing the same deals. So to the LPs out there my message would be: don’t shrink the pool, enlarge the opportunity space. Oh, and try to make sure you’ve got exposure to the next Markit Group.
A couple of months ago, I had the privilege to have been invited to speak at eComm 09 in Amsterdam. I have posted on this previously but recently the video of my talk was posted and perhaps will make it easier to understand my accompanying presentation. If you can spare 20 minutes (there is an additional 10 minutes of q&a at the end) and are interested in understanding how Nauiokas Park defines our opportunity space, please have a look as it is probably the most succinct expression of the worldview we bring to investing and analyzing potential investment opportunities.
And here is the presentation again, in case you would like to follow along as you listen to the video:
Well-built developer platforms are the future of every industry. (-ReadWriteWeb)
Note: Their is a small glitch around 7:40 where the video skips over a few seconds; funnily enough (for the conspiracy theorists out there) this is exactly where I say that had ZSIN’s existed, the extent of the disasters that occurred in the mortgage securitization markets would have been at least an order of magnitude smaller…)
A phrase popularized by the late Charlton Heston in his crusading role as the poster boy for the NRA. But I’m surprised it hasn’t yet been officially adopted by more old economy industry groups as a rallying cry to marshall support to save and protect their dying business models. To the bitter end.
An Ontario court has shut the door on attempts to create new web sites to repackage real estate listings using data from the Multiple Listings Service system.
In a ruling released Monday, Mr. Justice David Brown of the Ontario Superior Court said Toronto real estate broker Fraser Beach did not have the right to provide broad public access to MLS data through a web site he helped create while working for BCE Inc. division Bell New Ventures in 2007.
The decision comes after the Toronto Real Estate Board (TREB) shut down several attempts in recent years to create new web sites allowing members of the public to sort MLS data – including an operation started by Mr. Beach.
That the Canadian Real Estate Association would want to protect its MLS data is entirely reasonable, indeed it is a very valuable dataset. However one would hope that they would take this as a wake-up call and start thinking very hard about developing a new business model around this data. One that reflects the modern realities of a fully connected, digitized economy. Perhaps they are. To be honest I have no idea. So acknowledging that this is pure unadulterated speculation, I suspect they aren’t. I suspect like the newspaper, music, bookselling, banking, etc. sectors before them, the main focal point of their efforts is to keep the bloody genie in the bottle. At least for long enough for the old hands to ride off into the sunset and let the next generation deal with it.
It’s a shame really, because on paper – as for most incumbents – not only do they have the most (everything) to lose when the paradigm shifts, but they are also by far the best positioned to maintain a leadership position so long as they adapt (in time.) Inertia, installed base and brand recognition take care of that. Basically they’ve got a strong hand. But time and time again it seems that these kinds of companies and institutions can’t help themselves but to overplay it. Taking another card while holding two Jacks kind of thing. Admittedly it would be hard work for someone to build up a competitive offering to the MLS from scratch, but I suspect not impossible. I don’t know what the public information access laws are like in Canada but if they are similar to those in the UK for instance, a smart entrepreneur might mimic the route taken by Zoopla and bootstrap prices starting from public sales records. And even if they do manage to maintain a data monopoly, they and their member agents will be faced with an increasingly angry client base who won’t readily accept being held hostage by secretive data trolls.
If I were a Canadian real-estate broker, I would be leading the charge to flip the MLS and traditional broker roles on their heads. Having read this excellent post on the future of my profession, I would understand that my customers are (mostly) not looking to do away with me but to get real value from my services and insights and conversely will become annoyed and resentful if they get the feeling they’re just paying a toll to a glorified data monkey.
The way a broker creates value in a world of abundance (vs a world of scarcity) is fundamentally different. Someone forgot to tell the record companies. Let’s not make the same mistake again. Save a real estate broker: free the data.
I thought I’d play a little markets jeopardy with the headline to this post. The question of course is: “what would happen if Google stopped mucking around and just came out and said it?” Said they were going to take their massive dataset, brilliant algorithms and (hire) all the smartest people in all the lands and offer a free service to “do anything anyone anywhere might conceivably want to do.” That should be enough to cast a pall over even the most profitable or promising companies. Sell everything (else) and buy Google, right?
Many of you are of course thinking no, not right: the premise is far-fetched (not to say ridiculous) and even if you accept it in the spirit of the thought experiment it so obviously is, the conclusion – that they take out every other competitor at the kneecaps – is not a given by any stretch of the imagination. And yet, when Google announced that they were going to launch a free property listing plug-in to enhance their UK maps product, the market reacted pretty much as if Google were indeed Merlin the Magician and just by waving it’s googly wand it could take over any market at will just by unleashing its fierce intellect and sizzling technology on the hapless incumbents. In this particular instance, Rightmove’s (the leading UK property portal) shares collapsed on the news trading down 10% on the day and c. 15% in all since the story broke. Now to be fair, having traded as low as 156p at the start of the year, RMV shares have had a pretty solid 2009, hitting a high of just over 600p and trading around 550p before the Google ‘news’ hit the market. And since investing (and especially trading) is not about picking the prettiest asset but picking the asset you think most others will find prettiest, I don’t blame any fund manager for selling first and asking questions later. And I have much sympathy for those that think that Rightmove’s market leadership is vulnerable in the medium term; only I don’t harbor much fear that this threat will come from Mountainview. The competitor that Rightmove’s shareholders should be keeping a close eye on isn’t Google, but Zoopla of course. (Reminder: we are investors in Zoopla.) Ah, but Zoopla has a silly name, it can’t be a real threat. Google however…
And it’s not just UK property where I think the mainstream markets and pundits breathlessly get it wrong about Google. In area after area they have proven not to be a very successful or threatening competitor and in other areas their entry has often been a boon for specialist competitors in the segment due to the legitimizing power Google brings to the table. They are able to (implicitly) validate new business models in ways a smaller, more specialist start-up could never dream of, and yet this market validation very often plays right into the hands of folks who, well, know what the hell they are doing.
Don’t believe me? Let’s take just a couple areas where – if you believe the logic in the argument used to justify Rightmove’s downtrade – Google should be causing wholesale panic and disruption:
Financial Information: maybe I’m wrong but I don’t exactly see Thomson Reuters or Bloomberg shaking in their boots, and yet here is a sector that is tailor made for Google’s engineering, distribution and technology assets, and one where they have had years to refine the value proposition; and yet Google Finance remains essentially a working prototype of a back-of-the-napkin sketch of what a Google financial information portal could become. Umair challenged CEO Schmidt to take up this challenge a couple months ago but I’m not convinced it would be as easy as it looks.
News aggregators: Google News is all we need right? (Perhaps supplemented with Google Reader…) There’s no reason for sites like Digg or Daylife or the Huffington Post to exist. I mean what are these guys thinking: some of them even started after Google News went into public beta. Crazy. Except they actually work, they have customers willing to use them despite Google News existing. But really, how long can this last?
Advertising: I must be joking now. After all advertising is the one market Google owns; the market that gave them their billions that allowed them to hire all the smart (non-evil) people and enter and take any other market at will. Right? Well if you think so, have a look at this recent post from Paul Kedrosky. It’s why vertical search and specialist sites exist. It’s why you (usually) go to Amazon.com if you know you are searching for a book, and not necessarily via Google.
And I could go on. But the point of this post is not to say that Google are useless, yesterday’s game, past their prime. In fact my best Google-fanboy guess would be that they are far from the point of diminishing returns and structural foolishness. My point is rather that they are not – or at least not universally – the ‘destroyers of all economic worlds’; that as they grow to become a company of thousands of employees in dozens of locations they will inevitably have to deal with some of the structural pathologies that this involves, including rising mediocracy and products looking more like camels than horses. Oh yeah and evil too. Yes they are a fierce competitor and certainly there is some risk that they could destroy your business model and take your business with it. But this is far from certain. They are human. They make mistakes. They execute poorly. They don’t always (or even often) win. And best of all, once you’ve proven that you can beat them, they just might buy your company.
Update:
I forgot to send you to a great essay by John Borthwick, thinking about the challenges Google faces going forward and highlighting the structural shortcomings of trying to regulate behavior in the fast moving world of technology, inspired by Ken Auletta’s book Googled: The End of the World As We Know It.
And of course Jeff Jarvis wrote a book about the opening premise of this post (which perhaps Santa will bring me) called What Would Google Do?
Using the tried and tested TED 20min format, it was a great opportunity for me to collect my thoughts into (what I hope was) a coherent overview of how I think technological and economic forces will shape the optimally adapted ‘industrial stack’ for the sixth paradigm. It’s a great summary of the prism through which we look at potential investment opportunities and I hope will help us articulate this more powerfully to entrepreneurs and prospective investors.
I’d love to hear any feedback (good, bad and ugly) from any of the eComm delegates who saw my presentation and hope to continue the conversation with you and others here. You can also follow me on twitter @nauiokaspark.
Thanks to Paul and Lee for inviting me and especially to those of you who took the time to respond to my call for input – it was tremendously valuable in helping me to shape and refine my thinking and in building the presentation; just a few years ago, assembling this kind of distributed brainpower would have been impossible, and I hope I never lose my ‘childlike sense of wonder’ at the boundless possibilities that technology enables.)
A couple years ago, I had just decided to try to build what would become Nauiokas Park. I wasn’t entirely sure exactly how I was going to go about it but I had a vision of what it might look like and I knew the market opportunity – to develop technology-enabled disruptive business models in financial services and markets – was vast. Also, Saul and Reshma’s inaugural seedcamp had given me an excuse (or a push) to stop ‘mulling it over’ and ‘get started’ even if I didn’t exactly know what ‘it’ was yet.
One of the first things I did was to start building a database of startups and private growth companies that I thought fell into my embryonic firm’s new investment universe, and one of the first companies I added (on August 29th, 2007 to be exact) was Mint.com. I had first heard of them early that year when they were raising a Series A round and the concept had always appealed to me (and I had always wondered why banks had been so oblivious to it.) I had definitely hoped to be able to take a closer look once I had raised outside investment capital (they were already past the seed stage where I could have contemplated trying to play as an angel) and so it was one of the first companies on our internal ‘radar screen’. Well as they say in the start-up game, it always takes longer than you expect and here we are – one giant financial crisis later – in the fall of 2009 and Mint will now be coming off our radar screen (into our archives) having gone and gotten itself acquired by Intuit for $170mn.
On the one hand, it is exciting to see innovation in the space we are calling our own, succeed and be rewarded. And although I’ve never had the pleasure of meeting Aaron, I would like to congratulate him and wish him continued success with Mint and Intuit. Who knows, perhaps I’ll get to meet him in the future. Maybe when he’s contemplating his next venture? On the other hand, I can’t help but wonder if they sold too soon. I have to insert a disclaimer here – I have absolutely no idea what Mint’s financials looked like – so my view is entirely speculative, but I can’t shake the suspicion that if they had enough traction to get $170mn from Intuit, they had already hit and passed the inflection point and could have aimed at becoming (at least) a billion dollar company and owned the space.
Bittersweet? Well partly for not having invested as an angel but that’s just back-trading, so not really. Mainly it’s because – if the company was for sale – I would have really liked to have been in a position to run our slide-rule over it and, if it made sense, put in a bid, either alone or as part of a club deal with one or two private equity peers. If they have attained critical mass – which it looks like they may well have – it doesn’t take too much imagination (if you live in the sixth paradigm) to see them developing into a multi-billion dollar business over the next 5 years or so. Don’t get me wrong, I understand why management, the angels and the VCs, might find this exit attractive, especially given events of the past 24 months, but I can’t help thinking they’d done the hardest part and instead of letting a winner run, took their profits too soon.
PS If anyone knows where I can find Mint’s financials and projections, I’d love to have a look.
We can make our world smarter.
Intelligence can be infused into how we manufacture and sell… move goods, people and money…
The world is ready for a smarter planet.
Find out how to build it together.
If you would rather avoid wading through the inevitable corporate speak on IBM’s website, a good place to find out about what they are doing and how they are thinking is this recent article “IBM’s Grand Plan to Save the Planet” from Fortune:
In the parlance of the information technology industry, these situations all represent “dumb network” problems. The term sounds pejorative, but it simply means that we don’t truly understand commuter traffic or electricity flow or the inner workings of the cacao genome, and as a result our highways, utility grids, and cash crops are not managed as effectively as they could be.
The good news is that we now have the technology to convert these analog distribution systems into multidirectional “smart” networks. Readily available sensor technologies like RFID chips and digital video can track movements in granular detail. Cheap data storage, powerful analytics software, and abundant computing capacity give us the ability to warehouse and make sense of all that information. With the knowledge we’re gaining, we can remake our world in a more efficient way…
…So Palmisano is encouraging his employees to think even bigger, to scout out any dumb network that can be made smarter. Because, as any self-respecting capitalist knows, in great pain lies dormant profit. “We are looking at huge problems that couldn’t be solved before. We can solve congestion and pollution. We can make the grids more efficient,” he says. “And quite honestly, it creates a big business opportunity.”
By now, you probably understand why this resonated with me; there is significant congruence with the themes explored here and that underpin the foundations of out investment thesis at Nauiokas Park. In particular applying the amazingly powerful computing technologies that exist today to make sense of highly complex systems and networks, and of course to analyze and extract meaning from enormous and growing data sets. (Of course it’s also nice that they seem to have been inspired by our logo when designing their icon for ‘Smarter Money’!) On their website, IBM describes the opportunity they see for Smarter Money for a Smarter Planet:
Money, in other words, has been reduced to zeros and ones. It’s intangible, invisible. It’s information. Which is central both to the problem we face and to its solution.
Without question, the replacement of physical money with electronic money — and the spectrum of financial innovations that have accompanied it — have helped the world’s economy grow and prosper. But our technical and management systems haven’t kept pace. They couldn’t provide warning signals of risk concentrations, over-leveraging or underpricing. Banks could repackage risk and sell it, but they couldn’t value an individual loan in order to unwind the debt when needed. However, the same digitisation that has helped create this challenge is starting to provide the means to solve it. Intelligence is being infused into the way the world works, including our financial systems.
We’re all aware of advances like online banking, but the transformation happening underneath is far more profound.
Unprecedented computing power and advanced analytics can turn oceans of ones and zeros into insights, in realtime. Which means we could potentially have a more transparent, predictable and intelligent financial system for a smarter planet.
While it is very exciting to see a giant like IBM get behind such an intelligent and forward thinking strategy, I must admit I was a little disappointed not to find more substance on the Smarter Planet websites. It’s not that I suspect this is just a nice marketing campaign, rather that the communications department needs to work a bit harder to plug in to the projects and ideas IBM is working on in the trenches so to speak to make this vision a reality. And I think they could do more to engage a wider community through their Smarter Planet Blog and/or other social communication tools. Again as it is now it seems a bit sterile and very much a one-way broadcast, as opposed to a two-way dialog. Indeed one of the things I’ve tried to do – both through this blog and with our company – is to help to build a community of people interested in debating and shaping the future of financial services and markets. I think we have had some success, however I have nothing like the reach or resources of a giant like IBM and so it would be fantastic if they were to join the conversation and amplify it far beyond our modest community.
The Fortune article concludes:
Leadership positions, as the company knows all too well, come and go. But with luck, the tone of “Smarter planet” will remain. The message – that technology can be deployed to greater ends than creating the next fetishized cellphone – is bigger than any single company. And so, too, is Palmisano’s epiphany. He deftly led IBM out of the dotcom doldrums. Perhaps more important, he has revealed a model for monetizing scientific research in a way that benefits humanity.
Sure, not everyone can afford $6 billion a year for R&D. But real innovation rarely comes from big, rich companies. With luck, IBM’s ad campaign, coupled with its blowout 2008, will call scientists and entrepreneurs to arms. They’ll see our archaic global shipping infrastructure, a dilapidated educational system, disappearing honeybees, the fraud on Wall Street, and think, I know how to fix that. And I can make a killing doing it.
A couple years ago I saw a great presentation (on climate change and business) that pointed out that while in every other country in the world ’sex’ was the most common search term on Google, in the United Kingdom it was ‘weather’. And ‘property’ isn’t far behind (source: Google Trends):
(compare to results for ‘All Regions’:)
So you can understand why we invested in Weatherbill and Zoopla… (There were a few other considerations as well, but this makes for a more fun story.)
So where was I…? Oh, that’s right, I just wanted to draw attention to Zoopla’s nifty new property value widgets and what a great addition they would make to any website targeting a British audience. The great thing is that it’s not just UK or England or even London prices you can track but areas and postcodes. Local is the new global. (Or something like that.) Write a blog for hedge fund managers? Keep the readers coming back with a nifty NW8 price tracking widget for example:
Or appeal to their bonus envy with this cheeky London Dream Homes listings widget:
I’d be willing to bet it has more pulling power than showing the latest price on the FTSE100 index…
A few weeks ago, I issued a call to action with respect to creating a W3C working group focused on advancing the implementation of semantic web technologies and approaches in the financial services domain. Chris kindly responded, and in particular took issue with the usefulness/appropriateness of using (the existing) semantic web toolkit (RDF triples, OWL, etc.) due to their innate complexity. He writes:
At the moment though it seems that you have a problem if you need somebody that understands derivatives OR XML schema, and a real headache if you want somebody that understands derivatives AND XML schema.
Two thoughts. Firstly, I’m not a developer and so my enthusiasm for any particular solution or outcome with respect to software and code is necessarily (due to my lack of knowledge) more conceptual than practical: ie it is hard for me to have a robust opinion on the underlying path taken to achieve a certain result. What excites me and I think is important, is to build on the technologies of the web and ultra-cheap storage and bandwidth, to create rich, linked, open data and metadata sets in finance. Much of course already exists as Chris correctly points out, but so much more remains to be done. Secondly, it might be ‘a real headache’ but what 21st century finance needs is exactly people that understand derivatives and XML schemas.* I’m sorry but it isn’t that hard to develop these kind of people, and in a nutshell encapsulated the vision we had for Digital Markets at DrKW several years ago. I suspect that many Digital Generation finance professionals already (or could easily) fit this criterea. (The barriers however are cultural. When we built Digital Markets, while I knew there would be many challenges, I completely underestimated just how threatening such a vision was to the status quo: in particular, the very idea of calling into question the distinction between front and back office staff, even if just a subtle blurring of the line for a few dozen employees, caused the corporate anti-bodies to go on full alert. Removing the distinction between star-belly and plain-belly Sneetches was not something the organization was ready to condone.)
Indeed one of the most important and valuable objectives of setting up such a working group (whether or not it is under the auspices of W3C, although I lean toward not reinventing the wheel and building on the existing infrastructure of such a collaborative industry forum and think there is a better cultural fit with the objectives of such a project at W3C than say at any financial sector industry association…) is to create a focal point – not a gatekeeper (!) – for the community to innovate around a common theme and purpose. Another is to cultivate a shared respect for and understanding of the value of open standards, something that is taken for granted in many other industries but is still anathema on Wall Street and in the City. Of course there are glimmers of light to be seen in things like the FIX Protocol, but even here the underlying cultural mindset was more Microsoft than Unix… Way back in 2003-ish (?), when I was running syndicate at DrKW, we published (on the web) an XML schema describing a new bond issue, with the goal being to help others create e-bookbuilding platforms that would be able to communicate with ours. (I tried to find the link but was unable, any current DKIB folks know if it is still live?) Pretty tame stuff right? Well suffice to say the reaction of our/my peers was various combinations of:
what the hell is XML and what are you guys on about?
you guys have the best e-bookbuilding platform, why on earth would you give away your data structure???
is this some kind of trojan horse? what are you trying to pull?
I no longer work day to day in a big institutional banking environment, so it’s hard for me to judge how much, if at all, these attitudes have evolved over the past couple years. I may be naive but I don’t see why we assume finance and derivative professionals can understand (and apply) concepts like convexity, but balk at expecting them to understand ontology and its implications. I thought these folks were supposed to be clever. In my view it’s about leadership. If the folks in the corner office think ontology is important, so will the rank and file.
So maybe semantic web tools aren’t the only – or even the most important – path to enabling my vision; I’d still think it would be useful to catalyze a more formal community of interest around creating a truly rich set of linked data in financial services and markets. And I hope Chris, and others like him, would be keen to get involved.
* If a few more of these kind of people had populated the top of securitization groups of the last several years, we may have avoided some of the worst excesses; securitization is nothing but managing vast and complex sets of (inter-related) data. Data quality is more important than credit quality: garbage in, garbage out…
As you know, one of the key fundamental foundation pillars of our investment thesis here at Nauiokas Park is the migration of value in many (most?) markets from transactions (matching, broking) to data. Quick and dirty: technology is driving the marginal cost of matching buyers and sellers to zero, and is driving the ability to collect, store and analyze previously unimaginable amounts of data and metadata to a different dimension. The value (and creativity and innovation from a business model point of view) now lies in thinking up ways to harness this new ability to good effect. The possibilities seem vast to us and we love discovering clever entrepreneurs and technologists who identify opportunities along this vector.
If you are a data geek, (or just a wannabe/groupie like me) you need to add Joshua Reich’s i2pi blog to your RSS feed. Not only does he know alot about data and technology, but he can leverage that knowledge through his excellent and lucid understanding of markets and business:
The premise that led us to this mess was that with only a modicum of data and some threadbare models trading would be the final arbiter of value and the collective intelligence of efficient markets would result in fundamentally sound pricing. Now that liquidity has gone from the markets, traders of these illiquid instruments are bulking up their data and models to try and better their understanding of fundamental value. And so it is that when markets are liquid the market relies on trading to assimilate the information of individual agents. Without this method of price discovery these agents need to gather their own data as the market no longer performs the role of grand aggregator. Data trades inversely to liquidity.
And he gives great math lessons too (which is great for those of us having mid-life worries about having forgotten more than they’ve remembered…) He’s just (re)started his consulting business i2pi, but I’ve got my eye on him for my new bank so if you are interested in his services, you better move quickly!
Today Markit Group announced that General Atlantic has invested $250 million, valuing the 7 year old company at a whopping $3.3 billion. Founded by Lance Uggla, Kevin Gould and Rony Grushka in 2003 to address the growing need for quality data in the burgeoning credit derivatives market, what followed was several years of unbelievably good execution and disciplined acquisitions which has positioned the company as a critical component at the heart of the trillion dollar OTC derivative markets. The products they provide aren’t considered sexy (something that is often given all too much importance in this status conscious industry) – but their data, valuations, indices, trade processing and other products and services are the plumbing that is key to the continuing operation of many financial markets. They are a great example of creating value by building a great platform and understanding how to monetize data. I had the good fortune to be a non-executive director from 2003 to 2006 and I can say without hesitation that this team is one of the best I’ve ever seen and fully deserve the success they have achieved. (Congratulation guys. Awesome, truly awesome.)![Reblog this post [with Zemanta]](http://img.zemanta.com/reblog_c.png?x-id=2289b14f-e2bb-4fc6-bf72-e2826b3127f9)
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By now, you probably understand why this resonated with me; there is significant congruence with the themes explored here and that underpin the foundations of out investment thesis at ![Reblog this post [with Zemanta]](http://img.zemanta.com/reblog_c.png?x-id=854c3cc5-9621-4020-a308-66b6d1ecc635)
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