

Online Tool for Young Bankers Raises $1M in Funding - Chirag
http://dealbook.nytimes.com/2014/07/28/online-tool-for-young-bankers-raises-1-million-in-funding/?_php=true&_type=blogs&_r=0

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chatmasta
How do the banks feel about their junior analysts carelessly tossing around
revenue models with their college buddies at other banks? This reminds me of a
story last summer about the popularity of snapchat amongst Wall Street
interns, and the dangers of accidentally sharing sensitive financial data.

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ugwigr
founder @thinknum here. worked at a GS for 4 years and saw analysts email
spreadsheets ('carelessly tossing around revenue models') by email. with
@thinknum banks are better able to track their content.

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chatmasta
Maybe I'm misunderstanding the use case. The dealbook article makes it sound
like this is a time saving utility for junior analysts, many of whom have to
do the same work, but at different banks. Did I understand that correctly?

If so, I'm still unclear as to why banks would be okay with institutionalizing
what seems like a pretty sketchy process. As a junior analyst, sending
internal spreadsheets to your friends at other firms, just so you can save
time, does not seem like the most policy-compliant approach to reducing your
workload. I fail to see why banks would be okay with their junior analysts
sharing spreadsheets with their counterparts at competing banks, especially
when sent through a third party.

Obviously you know more about this than me, so hopefully you can clarify.

EDIT: after checking out your site instead of just the (poorly explained)
article, your business makes far more sense. However my question still stands
in regards to collaboration. Won't companies want to protect internal modeling
strategies?

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sfall
i think one advantage could be instead of accidentally sharing the entire
model it would allow you to look at one or two variables that will be worked
on say you want to add a geolocation component to an existing model, the young
banker could work and share that piece publicly and getting their former
classmates to help confirm their work.

i want to make a reference to write code and sharing it but it is a really
poor ref. i think it is more like getting help making sure you are getting the
proper area of a circle before putting it into the companies formula for the
volume of the sphere, helping ensure a smaller problem is solved correctly
before being added

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bdevani
Does thinknum have any plans for utilizing the models tracked by users to find
larger trends? Wouldn't that be the largest concern after not actually having
this info on company servers?

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ugwigr
Yes we do. More interestingly we plan to let third party developers do as
well. However, clients can pay a monthly fee to keep their models private. Our
business model is similar to Github. Free for users who wish to contribute
their models to the public. monthly fee for private repos.

