Building AI for the Top 1% of Excel Users with Peter Fuller
In this episode of Financial Modeler’s Corner, the Mod Squad, Ian Schnoor, Giles Male, and Paul Barnhurst, speak with Peter Fuller about AI-powered financial modeling and the rapidly changing future of Excel. Peter shares how Tracelight evolved from an AI-for-Excel tool into a broader AI workspace for professionals in finance and consulting.
Peter Fuller is the Co-Founder and CEO of Tracelight, based in London, England. Before founding Tracelight in 2024, he was an early-stage venture capital investor at Entrepreneurs First and spent five years at McKinsey, including time with QuantumBlack, McKinsey’s AI practice. His background combines finance, consulting, venture capital, AI, and financial modeling.
Expect to Learn
How Tracelight evolved from an AI-for-Excel tool.
Why specialized AI tools can compete with larger platforms.
How AI orchestration is changing financial modeling.
Why enterprise AI adoption is accelerating.
How AI could transform the role of financial modelers.
Here are a few quotes from the episode:
"The needs of the top 1% of users are different from the needs of the other billion people using Excel." - Peter Fuller
"The amount of value that you'll be able to add in the world is now just increasing exponentially." - Peter Fuller
Peter explains why he sees AI as an opportunity for financial modelers rather than simply a threat. As AI becomes more capable, he expects modelers to move beyond manually building spreadsheets and toward creating models that become a persistent part of how businesses operate.
Follow Ian:
LinkedIn - https://www.linkedin.com/in/ianschnoor/
Follow Giles:
LinkedIn - https://www.linkedin.com/in/giles-male-30643b15/
Follow Peter:
LinkedIn - https://www.linkedin.com/in/peter-fuller-/
Disclosure: Portions of this episode (such as the introduction or promotional segments) use AI-generated voice narration produced under human editorial review.
In Today's Episode:
[00:00] - Trailer & Introduction
[03:40] - Building AI for Excel
[07:14] - Competing With Big AI Labs
[11:27] - Tracelight's Strategy
[15:30] - Tracelight's Core Customers
[16:23] - AI Harnesses & Orchestration
[19:32] - The Future of AI Models
[22:10] - Multi-Model AI Workflows
[27:44] - Enterprise Growth & User Love
[33:32] - The Tracelight Platform
[43:03] - Excel, AI & The Future of Modeling
[47:13] - The Future of Financial Modelers
Full Show Transcript
00:01:57.130 — 00:02:05.940 · Host: Paul Barnhurst
Welcome to another episode of The Mod Squad. I'm really excited to be joined by my co-hosts Ian and Giles. And how are you doing?
00:02:06.140 — 00:02:14.900 · Co-Host: Ian Schnoor
I am doing well, Paul. Trying to keep up with the madness like everybody else is, I think, and we're getting ready to release everybody else.
00:02:14.900 — 00:02:15.580 · Co-Host 2: Giles Male
It's just me
00:02:16.820 — 00:02:17.900 · Co-Host 2: Giles Male
or not. Yeah.
00:02:17.940 — 00:02:19.500 · Co-Host: Ian Schnoor
Wow. Was that me?
00:02:19.540 — 00:02:23.620 · Co-Host 2: Giles Male
Yeah, that was like you. I think you just run with it. That's a great start.
00:02:23.660 — 00:02:41.740 · Co-Host: Ian Schnoor
Love it. We're getting excited for the modeling conference coming up in three weeks on September 24th. Just over. We've got an amazing lineup of speakers and going to be thousands and thousands of people at the world's first-ever 24-hour online virtual modeling conference. So yeah, lots going on. We're busy having fun and excited to meet with Peter today.
00:02:41.780 — 00:02:45.780 · Host: Paul Barnhurst
Yeah, really excited for that conference. What are we three weeks out? About three and a half. Yeah.
00:02:45.780 — 00:02:48.780 · Co-Host: Ian Schnoor
No, only three weeks. September 24th, 24 hours.
00:02:48.820 — 00:02:50.380 · Host: Paul Barnhurst
Giles, what have you been up to?
00:02:50.420 — 00:03:21.870 · Co-Host 2: Giles Male
Just working. I don't have a life outside of work of Emma is one of those things where I'm happy to be busy. But even, like this week on its own. I'm doing copilot training tomorrow with a team of about 100, doing some collaborative claw training on Friday with some other quite well known trainer with a large beard.
That's interesting, isn't it, Paul? And then we've got the UK Excel Esports finals in London on Saturday. So yeah, like crazily busy and also trying to keep up with everything that's actually happening in AI world as well.
00:03:21.870 — 00:03:39.950 · Host: Paul Barnhurst
And I can confirm his comment and no life because the time he decided to meet with me last week because I moved our meeting was 1030 his time on a Friday night to prep for some training. So that tells you he's working around the clock? I can vouch for that. It's the big bearded guy he talked about going to do a training with.
00:03:40.070 — 00:03:41.150 · Co-Host 2: Giles Male
I should be rich.
00:03:41.270 — 00:04:12.000 · Host: Paul Barnhurst
All right, well, we're thrilled this week. Have a guest with us. We have with us Pete Fuller. He's the CEO of Tracelightt. Some of you may have heard of it. It was the first I believe was the first tool we tested on the Mod Squad series back in September, about a year ago. That platform has expanded and grown quite a bit since then, so we wanted to bring them on and just talk about the journey.
A little bit of his background and where he sees modeling going. But why don't we start with just giving you a minute to just tell us a little bit about yourselves, tell our audience who you are and how you ended up where you're at.
00:04:12.040 — 00:04:53.840 · Guest: Peter Fuller
Well, yeah. Thank you very much for having me. I'm very excited to join you guys. So yeah, I'm Peter. I'm the CEO and one of the three co-founders of Tracelightt. So we founded the business in mid 2024, when the LMS could barely write valid formula in a spreadsheet. And before founding trace, right. I was a venture capital investor, very, very early stage VC investor here in London at a place called Entrepreneurs First.
And before that I was at McKinsey for five years, obviously did a lot of modeling there and was also part of Quantum Black, which is McKinsey's AI practice basically before McKinsey. I mean, a bunch of weird and wonderful things. I ran a charity in East Africa. I pounded spreadsheets, Amazon briefly as well, 1 or 2 other things.
So yeah, that's me, I love it.
00:04:53.970 — 00:05:04.970 · Host: Paul Barnhurst
Fun journey. Well, why don't we start? Can you tell our audience start by telling a little bit about Tracelightt, kind of how it came about. A little bit of the backstory, what you're doing today, and we'll go from there.
00:05:05.010 — 00:07:02.510 · Guest: Peter Fuller
Yeah. For sure. So I started working with Alex and Janek in mid 2024. So our backgrounds, I mean, I've just told you mine, Alex, our CTO, was a software engineer. James Streets before Tracelightt and before that he was at Cambridge, which is where he met Yannick. So Yannick is a machine guy and he did that at Cambridge and then did that in a bank for a while.
So we got together and we were exploring different ideas. Actually, I think it'd be fun to kind of build AI for Excel at that point. No one was doing it right. There was this funny little research paper from Microsoft. It wasn't anyone significant at Microsoft, but the research paper basically said, like, yeah, alums have a really hard time with two dimensional data structures in general, obviously, including spreadsheets.
But if you were going to kind of represent a spreadsheet to an LLM, this is kind of how you might think about it, how you do it. That's where we started. Alex implemented that over the course of a few days, and obviously we built on it very significantly. And yeah, the sort of the key thing for us at the beginning, which is now completely irrelevant, by the way, we've actually thrown out a third base entirely, right.
This is the journey for many AI startups. But the key thing for us was that middleware, I guess, between the spreadsheet and the LM that made the problem more comprehensible to kind of GPT four at the time, and we really built from there. I mean, our motivation to build for financial models in the first place.
I'm sure you guys would agree with this, right? It's like, you know, I feel like people build financial models whenever they have a really big and important decision to make, right? And we're very ambitious, right? We want to make our mark on the world, and we want to build a company that helps the biggest and most important decisions get made.
And so since kind of launching that Excel agent, we've really expanded the product. You know, we're now really kind of all in one AI workspace for our customers so they can do all of their work in trace, like it's like a central web app. And we have add ins to all of the Microsoft Office suite, but obviously we still have that heritage as an Excel company.
Right. So, you know, we're really, really outperforming in kind of spreadsheets and spreadsheet related tasks. So yeah, that's been the journey.
00:07:02.550 — 00:07:06.070 · Host: Paul Barnhurst
All right. I'll let Giles ah in ask some questions so I don't hog all the mic.
00:07:06.230 — 00:07:36.070 · Co-Host 2: Giles Male
I got, uh, just an initial thought. When you describe it as a Janik, you're saying you're, uh, the other founder, uh, machine learning at Cambridge. I can imagine somebody like that must look around now at all the AI experts popping up left, right and center and just be like, Good God, you know, machine learning.
Cambridge, I said, I said this some at some point, like a year ago, I was like, there is a world of actual like AI experts. Um, it must be so annoyed with this.
00:07:36.070 — 00:07:41.390 · Guest: Peter Fuller
I don't think Yannick feels that way about you guys, but he definitely did about me. I think at the at the beginning for sure. I think I've learned.
00:07:41.430 — 00:07:42.310 · Co-Host 2: Giles Male
He won him over.
00:07:42.510 — 00:08:10.760 · Guest: Peter Fuller
Um, no, he's he's an incredible guy. Right. So he has this obviously deeply technical backgrounds. Um, but, uh, you know, he also loves, like, front end and, like, design. He's this, like, unicorn of an engineer who, uh, can do the kind of ins and outs of machine learning, but also loves an interface, you know?
Um, and and also, you know, a lot of building with LMS is is not very sexy, right? Like, it's, um,
00:08:12.120 — 00:08:30.680 · Guest: Peter Fuller
you know, so it is a lot of prompt engineering, right? It certainly was um, and it's a lot of evals and there's a lot of hill climbing and, and you need a kind of tenacity and a certain mindset to be really, really good at that. And Yannick has that right. Um, so, uh, it's, um. Yeah, I think he's very, very well suited to what we do.
00:08:30.720 — 00:08:33.520 · Co-Host 2: Giles Male
I've got another question, but I don't want to take over. Go for it, Ian.
00:08:33.560 — 00:08:37.039 · Co-Host: Ian Schnoor
No. Go ahead, Charles, you go ahead. You can get five in a row. The.
00:08:37.479 — 00:08:38.000 · Co-Host 2: Giles Male
I'll take.
00:08:38.000 — 00:08:39.280 · Host: Paul Barnhurst
You. I'm going to limit you.
00:08:39.280 — 00:09:14.610 · Co-Host 2: Giles Male
I don't know if this is jumping ahead to, like, the meat of what we're going to get into, but obviously I guess what was interesting for us when we started last year with the Mod Squad was we tested Tracelightt first and a bunch of other tools. And then suddenly, you know, Microsoft came out with their first agent in web and and anthropic did and all of this.
I'd be really intrigued to hear what that journey has been like for you. And I guess for me, did you expect those, you know, the LLM providers like anthropic and OpenAI and Microsoft to do what they did when they did it, or was it a bit of a surprise?
00:09:14.650 — 00:09:27.530 · Guest: Peter Fuller
Yeah. No, no, that's that's I have to be intellectually honest about this, because I actually went back to, um, a memo that I wrote to raise our, our seed round, um, back and way back in the day. Um, and
00:09:28.570 — 00:09:47.820 · Guest: Peter Fuller
rereading that memo, it's clear that I didn't expect anthropic and OpenAI to launch an ad into Microsoft Excel. Right? Of course, I talked about collapse, but I just didn't think that was a likely product direction. I was obviously completely wrong about that. Um, like, clearly I expected Microsoft to.
Right. Um, but, you know, like, um,
00:09:49.300 — 00:10:57.750 · Guest: Peter Fuller
there's a few things going on there. Like one. Um, when big labs launch products like that. Yeah. Of course, it's easy to be scared. Um, it's also very, very validating, actually, for what you do. And you just get orders of magnitude more attention in your space, right? So anthropic in particular, launching Cloud and Excel was a huge moment for all of us, right?
And it was actually it was fantastic for sales. And like, you know, it's not like everyone was like, oh, okay. We'll just dump trace like, and we'll we'll go and use anthropic. It was like quite the opposite. Everyone got interested in in XL, right? Um, so so so that was, that was really good actually. And like the core argument for us, which remains the case to this day, in slightly expanded form, is that, um, the needs of the top 1% of users, right, are different from the needs of the other billion people using XR And that's.
That's still true. So that's very much us as a as a company. We have no ambition to go fight Microsoft and anthropic for the for the billion users. We'll fight them on the 10 million.
00:10:57.790 — 00:12:28.239 · Co-Host: Ian Schnoor
That's awesome. And listen we're we love we love supporting the the startup and the and the little guy as it will against the $5 trillion market cap. And we love Microsoft too, right? I mean, at FMI we've got a wonderful partnership with Microsoft. But we love the innovation that comes out of nimble, creative, small, hungry organizations.
I mean, we all work at, you know, and run small, nimble, hungry organizations. So we're so we love that. But you know, we've we talked a year ago I don't remember if you remember guys that felt like at the time, uh, last year that we were in the early stages of the auto industry. We remembered that in the early 1900s, there were well, we didn't remember this.
Paul might have remembered this, but Giles and I had just just read the research on it. Back in the early 1900s, there were about 3000 car makers in the US, and that quickly got condensed down either through consolidation or just, you know, companies just evaporating and not making it. And we've already seen both extremes in the AI space with spreadsheets.
I mean, it's a couple of companies that we interviewed and that we that we tested in early days are gone. Um, they just they just threw in the towel. And others seem to have taken a more niche approach and said, you know what? We are going to focus on this niche and this target and this particular subset that we don't think we don't think the big folks will either focus on or would they can't do as good a job on.
And I'm just wondering, I mean, as
00:12:29.320 — 00:12:51.340 · Co-Host: Ian Schnoor
a follow on to Giles's question, what is your plan or strategy to ensure survival and growth? Um, because as you said, I mean it, most people have discovered it doesn't really make sense to go against head to head against Microsoft. So, um, so what's what's what's the plan? Um, I'd love to know how you're planning to develop something, you know, or what you're doing to develop some niche.
Yeah.
00:12:51.980 — 00:12:55.620 · Guest: Peter Fuller
Well, call me an idiot, but I actually am fine going head to head against Microsoft.
00:12:56.700 — 00:13:02.220 · Guest: Peter Fuller
Like, in my in my in my user base. I'm, uh,
00:13:03.420 — 00:13:20.140 · Guest: Peter Fuller
I have vast respect for Microsoft. Do I think they're a good product organization? No, I do not. Do I think Copilot is a good product? No, I do not. I think it's actually I'm sorry if, uh, if you guys have allegiances there, but, um, I think it's.
00:13:20.780 — 00:13:25.580 · Co-Host 2: Giles Male
Oh, no, let it let it out. I I'll support everything you're about to say. I.
00:13:25.860 — 00:13:29.500 · Guest: Peter Fuller
I remain shocked by how bad it is. Right. Um,
00:13:30.660 — 00:14:39.390 · Guest: Peter Fuller
I anyway I won't, I won't go on so that like that's big number one right. Like, uh, I think, um, it's easy just to, like, roll over and say, oh, you know, these big companies are looking at it or it must all be gone now. I think there would be. There are countless entrepreneurs who, if they'd taken that approach, then massive companies would never have been built.
So, um, that's that's the first thing. The second thing I, you know, when I, when I it's interesting when you said that this is like the beginning of the auto industry, I was, like, nodding along because I thought you were going to say something else. I thought you were. I thought you were going to say that the products are all, like, very rudimentary, like.
And and I still feel that way. I feel that there's enormous product overhang in the space now. Right. And by that, I mean, um, the capabilities of the models are fantastic, but the products that we built around those models, the harnesses that we built around those models, still are, to me, feel inadequate, right when I look around the market.
Um, so I think there's an just enormous amount of work to be done there. And then the final thing is like, um,
00:14:41.120 — 00:15:57.690 · Guest: Peter Fuller
You know, Tracelightt. We start at the application layer. Right? We we we aim to build the very best product for our users to do all of their work with AI, including their Excel models. Um, but the way to emote in our space and in many spaces, um, is by making your products get better with every single interaction a user has with it, right?
And so that means that you are not just building at the application layer, right? You are building memory, right? You are building like you're taking all of the data that's generated there, and you're helping your customers, um, to or their instance of trace like to learn from that data and get better every single time they use it.
And there's actually enormous entrenchment that you can build there. Um, if you, if you get that loop. Right. Right. So this is what we're working on currently with, with with customers and, um, it's, uh, it's really, really exciting, right? And, um, the needs of our customers in terms of not just the application level.
So the kind of information architecture and everything that sits behind the needs are very, very specific. Right. And the labs and Microsoft definitely are not building for them right now. So it's a very exciting time.
00:15:57.730 — 00:16:23.370 · Co-Host: Ian Schnoor
Oh I love listen I love that I, I was not expecting that response. But listen, I, uh I applaud the fact that you have a plan and a strategy and you and you are, at least for the moment, not that it can't change, but that you are intending to, uh, take advantage of what you believe is weaknesses in, um, in the alternatives.
I mean, good for you. That's, um. I love that we'll be cheering you on from the sidelines here.
00:16:23.450 — 00:16:54.780 · Host: Paul Barnhurst
And so just just for our audience, I think, to step back for a minute, you know, how would you describe Tracelightt's core customer? I know you've done modeling. I know you help a lot on modeling and consulting, but you also now have a word app, a PowerPoint app. So you mentioned the 10 million as an example, right?
You're going after a very small subset. You're not going after the billion. So I know modeling is a big part of that. But what within modeling like how would you just describe your ideal customer. Someone's listening and say, hey, I want to try trace. Like, who's it really for?
00:16:54.820 — 00:17:27.540 · Guest: Peter Fuller
Our customers are primarily in management consulting and high finance. And, um, the I think it's yeah, it's fair to say that, um, you know, the, the big early share of those customers work in areas related to private market transactions. Right? So, uh, that's valuations and modeling practices in management consultancies.
It's financial due diligence, commercial due diligence, um, as well as the investors and investment bankers who are kind of working on the other side of the deal. Right. These are very, very high stakes, um,
00:17:28.700 — 00:17:48.070 · Guest: Peter Fuller
very happy, as you guys know. Um, uh, yeah. But just just a very important work. Right. and those users benefit a lot from a from a product that is better than the kind of basic horizontal products you can you can buy anywhere else. Um, so yeah, that's where we're focused.
00:17:48.110 — 00:18:05.710 · Co-Host 2: Giles Male
I've got a question for you, and a thought has the terminology that is now like, you know, in the kind of ether for most people, like harness and orchestration. Have we just caught up to where teams like you were before? I'm assuming they aren't. New words for this. Yeah.
00:18:05.750 — 00:18:06.510 · Guest: Peter Fuller
Um, maybe.
00:18:06.550 — 00:18:06.870 · Host: Paul Barnhurst
Yeah.
00:18:06.910 — 00:18:12.590 · Guest: Peter Fuller
I think we've been talking about this, and we've been talking about harnesses and orchestration for for quite a long time.
00:18:12.590 — 00:18:23.430 · Co-Host 2: Giles Male
But but it seems like harness has probably been the word of July, and now it's all I don't know what it would be now, but loops was one recently and it God knows what else. But orchestration and harnesses are definitely buzzwords.
00:18:23.470 — 00:18:29.190 · Guest: Peter Fuller
Yeah. And like for for good reason right. They are really important. I mean, um,
00:18:30.350 — 00:19:30.880 · Guest: Peter Fuller
you know, I think people like, like harness is a is a fancy word. It's like the environment that you build around the land, the agent like, the tools that you give it and to do the work that you care about. But, um, you know, I think people have made mistakes there, right? Um, and I've probably suffered as a, as a consequence.
Um, I think a lot of people built harnesses that just didn't price in, like the improvement in the models. Right? So you can build a super opinionated harness where you, like, really put the model on rails. And you do, you know, back in 2024 or early 25 when everyone was doing that, they, their, their products were performing better, right?
Because, um, you know, because they had all these specifics baked in. But then the next model generation comes out and you've got to throw all of that stuff out. Or usually teams actually just aren't intellectually honest enough to to throw it out. So mistakes have been made at the at the harness layer.
Um, I think we've done a very, very good job on the on the harness orchestration. Um,
00:19:32.320 — 00:19:33.120 · Guest: Peter Fuller
I think,
00:19:34.570 — 00:19:35.330 · Guest: Peter Fuller
Like
00:19:36.410 — 00:19:40.450 · Guest: Peter Fuller
it's very important to be model independent. Right. Um,
00:19:41.850 — 00:20:05.570 · Guest: Peter Fuller
that's another thing I was going to say when you asked about the particularly about the big labs is like, there's a lot of nervousness in our customer base about like, betting the house on anthropic, like betting your entire organization just on anthropic models when OpenAI could overtake them, like next month and, you know, maybe even Gemini one day, who knows?
Right. But like, um, I,
00:20:06.770 — 00:20:27.730 · Guest: Peter Fuller
I just a lot of our customers just don't think that's a good idea. And I agree with them. Right. I don't think you need to take that risk. I think you need to, you know, they they buy us because they, they want to buy the the vertically focused product that is built specifically for their needs. That's just going to be able to send them to the best model for the for any given task.
So yeah, those things are very, very important.
00:20:27.770 — 00:20:57.140 · Host: Paul Barnhurst
I have a couple questions and I'll let in and gals go again. The first when you mentioned the models. I'd love to get your thoughts on. Are they going to kind of become a commodity at some point, and the models will just all be pretty similar? Where do you think we're heading? Because it feels like outside a customized special, but the big huge ones.
How much can you differentiate yourself in a model when you're all training off similar data? So I just love a little bit of your thought there and you're already smiling, so I know you have an opinion.
00:20:57.300 — 00:21:01.140 · Guest: Peter Fuller
I'm not going to claim to know the answer to that. I don't think anyone knows the answer to that question.
00:21:01.180 — 00:21:07.300 · Host: Paul Barnhurst
Sure. I just love your thoughts. Yeah, if you're right, we'll come back and congratulate you. And if you're wrong, you'll be like most of us.
00:21:07.340 — 00:21:09.060 · Speaker 8
Yeah, yeah. Well, look.
00:21:09.220 — 00:21:18.980 · Guest: Peter Fuller
I'll say a couple of things. The commodity thing, I mean, it's kind of baked into their mission statements, right? Like, OpenAI always talk about intelligence to cheat to meta.
00:21:19.740 — 00:21:20.740 · Speaker 8
And I read.
00:21:20.740 — 00:21:26.140 · Guest: Peter Fuller
That and I think it's not good for your business model or like but they're always talking about.
00:21:26.140 — 00:21:27.380 · Co-Host 2: Giles Male
That. And I'm like, well, that means it's.
00:21:27.380 — 00:22:11.110 · Guest: Peter Fuller
A commodity, right? Um, so I think. I think there is there is going to be a lot of that. And, um, people will make a lot of money selling the complements to that commodity. Right? Our customers included, uh, and it's already happening, by the way. Right. As as the power of the models grows, this intelligence grows.
Um, our customers, like our consulting customers, are I think BCG grew AI transformation related revenue at like 25% last year. Something crazy like that. And they're just making so much money implementing AI in, you know, helping customers implement AI. So you're already seeing that effect where the complements are, um, are doing really, really well.
00:22:12.470 — 00:22:32.480 · Guest: Peter Fuller
The other thing is, I mean, I really I really don't know. Um, there's been like architecturally, there's just been so little diversity in the frontier models. I mean, everyone's kind of pursuing the same thing, right? And scaling it. Uh, that's that's been the winning play for the last however many years.
Um,
00:22:33.920 — 00:22:52.880 · Guest: Peter Fuller
I don't know. Uh, it's perfectly possible that, uh, a startup or someone like Ilya, um, releases a model that is architecturally different and has very different capabilities, maybe different spikes and troughs versus the existing models. And
00:22:54.200 — 00:23:03.240 · Guest: Peter Fuller
that would be amazing for companies like us. Right. Diversity at the model layer increases the value of orchestration between those models.
00:23:03.280 — 00:23:07.800 · Co-Host 2: Giles Male
And it because because your users can choose between them easily.
00:23:07.840 — 00:23:27.120 · Guest: Peter Fuller
I mean it would be sorry. Let's say Ilya releases this like fantastic model, which is just very different from from anthropic models. And then I, you know, customers would be able to use Trace Lite and we would use both the models for different tasks. Right. And um, and so the value of orchestration would grow.
00:23:27.120 — 00:23:28.690 · Host: Paul Barnhurst
But Uh.
00:23:28.730 — 00:23:34.970 · Guest: Peter Fuller
People have been thinking that for a long time, and it hasn't happened. And it might not happen, right? It might just be scaling all the way. I don't know.
00:23:35.410 — 00:23:57.530 · Co-Host 2: Giles Male
And just to delve the magic is the way you just use the word orchestration I'd never thought of. Because to me I was thinking sort of within, I don't know, like a cloud environment. You have a sub agent team of agents, but you're actually talking about the orchestration of, um, potentially the use of different LMS.
We already doing this? Yeah. Oh, wow.
00:23:57.570 — 00:24:10.850 · Host: Paul Barnhurst
Okay, well, we'll think about if I can say one thing. I think, Giles, when you think about it, you're selecting which which model to use within an LLM. They're just selecting which model to use of all LMS.
00:24:10.890 — 00:24:24.570 · Co-Host 2: Giles Male
But but the but also by the sounds of it. But this is what I want to make sure I understand. Orchestration for me would be like within a workflow you're actually delving within different LMS from different providers within a workflow.
00:24:24.730 — 00:25:16.940 · Guest: Peter Fuller
Yeah. So um, For example, if you upload, um, 500 pages of PDFs into Trace Flight and say, here's contracts, read contracts, transcribe and build a model, right? Um, it would be Gemini reading the reading those PDFs. And then it would be today. Claude. Um, doing the modeling for you. Right. So it already happens in our in our products and, um, you know, on our kind of pro tier as well.
Um, and our max tier, you can choose between, um, using the kind of frontier intelligence, right? Um, or we have efficient mode as well where we'll use, um. Yeah, like a smaller, cheaper model. Right. But people get way more usage out of their, uh, out of their subscription. And, um, today, those are from different providers.
00:25:16.980 — 00:25:39.430 · Co-Host 2: Giles Male
Do you have a strong view on. And again, this has come up in a couple of places recently. Do you have a strong view on, you know, choosing the most powerful model out there at the moment versus having a really strong harness and setup. However, that is kind of implemented. Do you get a sense of like, what is better if that's fair?
00:25:39.990 — 00:25:40.310 · Guest: Peter Fuller
I mean.
00:25:40.990 — 00:25:41.430 · Host: Paul Barnhurst
I.
00:25:42.230 — 00:25:43.870 · Guest: Peter Fuller
I don't think
00:25:45.550 — 00:25:49.709 · Guest: Peter Fuller
we've yet reached the like the point where
00:25:50.750 — 00:25:59.590 · Guest: Peter Fuller
the tasks where you care about are saturated by the, uh, behind the frontier models. Right? So, I mean,
00:26:01.110 — 00:26:12.150 · Guest: Peter Fuller
if you are building a big, complicated spreadsheet, you definitely do want to be using opus 5 or 5.6. All right. Um, and,
00:26:14.070 — 00:26:39.440 · Guest: Peter Fuller
you know, I we will get to a point, I think, where that saturation worker and it will probably happen quite fast. Right. Uncomfortably fast where like, yeah, I mean, opus five is really, really strong. And so when you've got when you've got opus 6 or 6.5, I don't know if it's worth spending all the money on the, on the tokens to get 6 or 6.5 to write your, your formulas.
Right. You should be getting it to do something else. So. But we haven't reached that point yet in my opinion.
00:26:39.520 — 00:27:22.920 · Co-Host: Ian Schnoor
I mean, listen, I love I can't even imagine waking up every day and wondering, is there going to be an announcement that is just like you? Do you even sleep? Like every hour or something can happen that might, you know, cause you to, uh, you know, flip over or, uh, or, I mean, like, it's just I can't imagine being in a place that is changing so fast, but surely you.
I mean, you must be feeling you're doing the 100 meter sprint every day and wondering, what's the newest release? What's that like? Talk about what? That's like. Wondering. Yeah. Obviously anticipating any days a competitor or a frontier model might release something that's different. What's the feeling like to be in that environment right now?
00:27:22.970 — 00:27:24.210 · Co-Host 2: Giles Male
I'm really looking.
00:27:24.210 — 00:27:32.010 · Guest: Peter Fuller
Forward to the releases I like. I don't know, I think you guys maybe imagine that I might be, um, nervous about them or scared.
00:27:32.010 — 00:27:34.130 · Co-Host: Ian Schnoor
I'm nervous. I, I it just.
00:27:34.170 — 00:27:59.530 · Guest: Peter Fuller
I really, really look forward to them because I know that if a really, really strong model comes out, I'm gonna we're going to click that model into into Tracelightt. And next day we're going to have really happy users. Right. Um, and so and so I feel really, really good about that. And, you know, we're, we're, we're at a point now we've signed a lot of kind of big enterprise enterprise customers.
Right. And um,
00:28:00.610 — 00:28:06.610 · Guest: Peter Fuller
yeah. Uh, and making those users happy and it's yeah, feels great. So I.
00:28:06.610 — 00:29:09.660 · Co-Host: Ian Schnoor
Love it, I love it. I think that's the right healthy mindset anyway. I mean, you'd be you couldn't do it if you were just stressed and nervous and worried all day long. You can't you and that's not that's not going to be. But no, I, I love that it's, um. Listen, obviously we are. We are in the fastest changing, evolving segment of any market that anyone is.
We talk, we have conversations and talk about events as though they're like milestone events that were like over a 5 or 10 year duration as they would normally be in most industries. And yet they were talking weeks, right? Well, remember, remember way back in March when we thought this. Well, that was because it changed from February, right.
Like it it is. We're all in the same year here still. And it's, uh, it's we're excited about where where it goes. Um, do you want to do you want to talk? Do you tell us a little bit about. I mean, I know we're we've been with you for a while. Can you tell us about what the what is the what is the what can you talk about the future a little bit like what is what is the future of trace?
Like, what are you talking about? What are your short term dreams in the long term? Like, what can you talk to? You know, our audience about what does that look like?
00:29:09.700 — 00:29:43.150 · Guest: Peter Fuller
Yeah. So, um, I think, you know, we are in the, in the position now where, like, like I mentioned, we've we've signed a lot of, um, very large customers. And, um, we have some, some others, uh, sort of very close in the, in the pipeline as well. And so, you know, when you're building, I mean, you guys have used our kind of pro tier, our max tier, to be honest.
Like, this is not the main engine of growth in our company. Right. The main engine of growth for us is, is enterprise revenue. And.
00:29:43.550 — 00:29:45.470 · Host: Paul Barnhurst
Um, as it should be.
00:29:45.870 — 00:29:46.310 · Guest: Peter Fuller
Uh.
00:29:46.790 — 00:29:47.390 · Host: Paul Barnhurst
Yeah.
00:29:47.710 — 00:29:47.990 · Guest: Peter Fuller
Um,
00:29:49.230 — 00:30:02.109 · Guest: Peter Fuller
and and when you sell into enterprise, you know, it's different from, from consumer or prosumer. There's a there's this lead time, right. You've got to sign contracts. You got to get through the infosec. You've got to you've got to, you know, get through all of this. And so
00:30:03.590 — 00:31:05.000 · Guest: Peter Fuller
that part or we'll always be doing that. But um, a big part of that now is done for us. So now we're in that kind of super exciting growth curve now in enterprise, right where we're deployed and we're just expanding into into these accounts. So, um, the revenue is growing really, really fast now. And the obviously, you know, it's such a large market that we're that we're selling into, right.
There's such a big opportunity here. Right. The way I think about it, you know, is you've seen coding, right? You've seen the you've seen the cursors, the cognitions of this world encoding. You've seen law la Guerra and Harvey and what they've done banking a little. You know, maybe Rogo has has done pretty well in banking and you know, in in in management consulting.
You know, you know, we think we're going to be the next one of those. Right. And um, and so that's, that's what the next kind of 12 months is about for us is like really, really scaling scaling revenue and um, scaling the number of users in those places.
00:31:05.000 — 00:31:06.880 · Co-Host: Ian Schnoor
I love it. That's amazing.
00:31:06.880 — 00:31:25.010 · Co-Host 2: Giles Male
And I'm would it be I'd be right in saying, you know, once you once you agree, you know, to to some sort of enterprise deal, I'm guessing it it's trace like becomes quite sticky because it must be quite an effort to get Tracelightt in, I guess on the reverse. Or actually then step away.
00:31:25.410 — 00:31:25.650 · Host: Paul Barnhurst
Yeah.
00:31:25.690 — 00:31:44.849 · Guest: Peter Fuller
No, you're right, you're right. So so the I mean, it's it's so much work. It's so much work to get, um, you know, to go live right in an, in an enterprise. And, and so you do have that kind of baseline level of stickiness, but that's not the stickiness we aspire to. Right. I think user love is the is the real stickiness.
And um, and uh, you know, we
00:31:46.530 — 00:33:12.700 · Guest: Peter Fuller
yeah, that's that's going really, really well. Right. And so, um, that helps you also expand into the enterprise. Right. Um, because, you know, you can have a beachhead into it, into a very, very large company. But you are far from done. Right. You have the whole company to go to go sell to. Um, and so that's the kind of phase that we're in now.
Um, and uh, and then, yeah, like I mentioned, everything that goes underneath the, you know, the layers beneath the application layer, the kind of like memory architecture, the way that you may trace, like, learn from in a compliant way. Right. I mean, like these organizations, they have, uh, um, they have a very specific like, way that knowledge and information is allowed to run through the organization.
Like when I was a consultant, I could do a project and I could not tell any of my colleagues, right. What was what happened on that project or who the client was and all of these things. And yet I could kind of learn generally from it, right? I could I could bring that experience and that judgment to the next.
And that's kind of the the trick here. Right. And um, and you need to build that same thing in digital form. Right. If Tracelightt is going to get better every single time that they use it, and it's just very, very deep and very specific work. And there's actually a lot of actually unsolved research stuff there as well.
So, um, yeah, we hope that that will be the next thing that will make trace like more and more, um, useful, uh, and entrenched obviously.
00:33:12.700 — 00:33:13.460 · Co-Host: Ian Schnoor
And I love.
00:33:13.460 — 00:33:13.580 · Guest: Peter Fuller
It.
00:33:13.580 — 00:33:41.510 · Co-Host: Ian Schnoor
You I mean, you are obviously aware of other firms, ancillary peripheral firms, whatever to you that are not around today that were around a year ago? You are clearly you are clearly hurdled a number of critical hurdles by now. I think that's phenomenal. And I think the market will be better off with your success.
And and so we're excited to continue hearing about how you are doing and performing. Um, Giles.
00:33:41.750 — 00:33:55.550 · Co-Host 2: Giles Male
A couple of things that jumped out to me, I think already is number one, you're excite excitement at new LMS, which I, I, I suppose I'd never really thought about. Um, and I've forgotten what the second one was. My memory now on my 40s is.
00:33:55.590 — 00:33:56.710 · Co-Host: Ian Schnoor
You got too excited.
00:33:56.750 — 00:34:02.990 · Co-Host 2: Giles Male
Truly shocking. The second one was better as well. Oh, Paul, I had a few. I'll think about it. I'll, I'll I'll figure it out.
00:34:03.030 — 00:34:05.990 · Host: Paul Barnhurst
Thanks for that moment, Giles. That was helpful. No worries. Yeah.
00:34:06.870 — 00:34:08.750 · Co-Host: Ian Schnoor
That seniors moment. That was great.
00:34:08.790 — 00:34:10.230 · Host: Paul Barnhurst
I know will have it.
00:34:10.270 — 00:34:11.830 · Co-Host 2: Giles Male
42. What was the second one?
00:34:11.870 — 00:34:57.680 · Host: Paul Barnhurst
It's great. Well, you keep thinking, Speak up. I would love to know. I know you guys have added the product. Are there other tools you plan to go into expansion? You've mostly been focused, as you mentioned, kind of the due diligence, the modeling, whether it's helping with the, you know, the memos and word or research there, and PowerPoint, I think Excel are the three main ones you have right now.
Are you planning on expanding beyond that to helping with, you know, these valuations and these very specific niche? Is it always going to be kind of that finance area and consulting, or do you look to go to other areas, or are you looking to add more apps? Or how are you thinking, as you call this, a platform, kind of that growth play as you continue to scale and grow and want it to be more used?
00:34:57.760 — 00:36:18.740 · Guest: Peter Fuller
You know, I don't think it will be growth in terms of more add ins, right? I mean, maybe that'll be an outlook add in or something down the line, but I don't think that will be the main vector. Right. I think the the main growth will happen within our web app. Right. And so this is actually the central place where more and more, um, we expect users will be doing most of their work.
Right. And, you know, actually, I think, you know, you'll still want the Excel add in and the PowerPoint add in for the for the last mile. Um, but I think that's going to decline in importance, right, as the LMS get better and better. I don't think you're going to be wanting to spend so much time hunting through cells, right?
You're going to you're going to kind of you're going to have a system that, you know, gets that done correctly and shows you that it's been done correctly, and then you're just going to want to think at a higher level of abstraction. It's the same thing that's happened in coding, right? And so I expect the growth to be growth in usage in our web app, right?
Where, you know, it's essentially a project workspace. You have all of your input files, you know, all of your agents and chats and all of the outputs that you're creating. And we sync it with SharePoint. And, you know, you can send emails from there. You can bring in emails and teams messages, etc.. And, you know, this will be the central hub for how these projects are run.
Right. And um, and so that, that that's where I do expect to see the growth in terms of users. I mean,
00:36:20.020 — 00:36:23.060 · Guest: Peter Fuller
I you know, we still have.
00:36:23.100 — 00:36:23.380 · Co-Host 2: Giles Male
A.
00:36:23.380 — 00:36:54.260 · Guest: Peter Fuller
Lot of, you know, a lot more people to serve and our kind of core areas, right. So like I mentioned valuations and modeling PhD seed, um, these um, you know, and the investors and bankers like these are, these are the people that we serve. But you know, we we also do have users in audit now. Right. And um, they love it too.
We have users in tax. And um, that's going really well. So I think those would be the kind of slightly adjacent, um, user bases that we'd look to expand into.
00:36:54.900 — 00:37:09.500 · Co-Host: Ian Schnoor
You know, I've got a question that might be a little bit crazy, but tell me what you think about it. I mean, often companies that are succeeding in one part of a vertical at some point get worried because of the, uh.
00:37:10.590 — 00:37:45.230 · Co-Host: Ian Schnoor
uh, because they they're part of a chain. Is there any merit in discussion? Is there any feasibility one day to abandoning the existing frontier models and creating your own, or somehow leveraging your own so that you don't? I mean, you just said you're excited when a new model comes out, which is great, but there's also presumably some risk that they can change their mind.
I mean, it's conceivable, I guess, that I don't know, maybe they'll find ways to restrict firms like you from using their tools. Like is there a way is there a future where you don't have to rely on them at all and you can create your own frontier? Um, lm or is that. It's it.
00:37:45.710 — 00:38:01.510 · Guest: Peter Fuller
Never say never. Right. Um, I think I think there is a, uh, a risk there. Um, it's not a it's not a risk. Today. I it would be a risk that we'd be thinking about maybe, uh, a few years from now, but, um,
00:38:03.030 — 00:38:07.070 · Guest: Peter Fuller
uh, you know, anthropic, as you know, uh, OpenAI just did it to Castle, right?
00:38:08.190 — 00:38:10.770 · Guest: Peter Fuller
Cut Got them off. Cut them off from their models. And
00:38:12.010 — 00:38:13.090 · Guest: Peter Fuller
that was a is that.
00:38:13.210 — 00:38:14.410 · Co-Host: Ian Schnoor
Would that be going down or.
00:38:14.610 — 00:39:43.820 · Guest: Peter Fuller
That that that you know it's it's it's it's plausible. It's plausible that that can happen. Um, I think you have seen vertical startups, uh, build their own models. I say like it's like quote unquote build their own. It's like, do a lot of post training on, on, um, kind of open source bases. And I think, um, I think the Castle guys did, uh, did a really, really good job at that.
Right. I think composer is a is a really strong model series. I like if I look at our internal like coding model usage, I think there was quite a lot of composer. I think that's actually now mostly been replaced by grok. Um, so, you know, people get fabled to do the kind of like big, hard planning and thinking, and then they use grok to, to, to do the work.
But I think the Harvey guys are training their own, um, model. I think usually when people do that. Um, the first reason is, is actually cost, right? So your job is to get your customers the very best ROI on, on every token that they use with you. Right. And I think it's extremely unlikely that you're going to train a model that is going to be, you know, at the frontier in terms of pure capability.
Right. I think that that is the that is the labs job. But it is possible, right, with enough data and enough expertise that you can, you know, um, train a model that is on the, on the Pareto frontier. Right. And um, even, you know, but but it's like much more efficient. I,
00:39:45.260 — 00:39:49.260 · Guest: Peter Fuller
you know, I won't commit firmly to it, but I think there's a, there's a, there's a world of work to do that.
00:39:49.420 — 00:40:04.340 · Co-Host: Ian Schnoor
Cool. No, no, I can't expect anyone in this space to commit firmly about anything beyond dinner tonight. So, I mean, I even even that's a stretch, right, Giles? But I, uh, I mean, I have no idea. That's hours away. Anything could happen before then for me.
00:40:04.380 — 00:40:07.070 · Host: Paul Barnhurst
I was gonna say, if you did commit, we would have been wondering.
00:40:07.150 — 00:40:40.350 · Co-Host: Ian Schnoor
Yeah, right. I but I know I did helpful. To think about that I, I know you must have been thinking about it because of course, as a responsible company, you're thinking about all the potential future, uh, permutations and what the potential risks are. And what does that mean? And where do we allocate our resources?
I mean, you'd be no different than anybody else. Um, so I'm sure you are. But anyway, I just was curious to know what the major bottlenecks would be. Anyway, you've given a great answer, I appreciate it. Um, and it's been fascinating to have a small window into your world and your lens right now. So, Paulo.
00:40:40.390 — 00:40:42.110 · Co-Host 2: Giles Male
I remembered my second question.
00:40:42.150 — 00:40:44.270 · Co-Host: Ian Schnoor
Oh, you did. Come on, you did. Wow.
00:40:44.310 — 00:40:44.950 · Co-Host 2: Giles Male
Remembered it.
00:40:45.190 — 00:40:46.910 · Co-Host: Ian Schnoor
It just takes a few minutes sometimes.
00:40:46.950 — 00:41:38.280 · Co-Host 2: Giles Male
Yeah, well, this happens too many, too many times in my daily life now. Uh, so it was just, again, interesting, like hearing you talk about the when you get into an enterprise. And I don't think this is revolutionary. What I'm saying that the journey starts once you kind of agree that deal and actually it's, it feels like a really unique, um, environment where you probably see what we're seeing as trainers, where people are genuinely like, we will give you like we will we want to spend money on AI, and we don't know what we want to do with it.
And I struggle to think of any other topic or category where it's been so strong, like, we are ready. We've got FOMO, take our money, but what do you want? We don't know. And I don't know if you're seeing that. It must be quite a nice environment in you are if you are to be like, okay, we've got the tool, we can now help you figure out how to use it.
00:41:38.640 — 00:41:46.920 · Guest: Peter Fuller
Well, I'm not sure our enterprise customers are saying take our money. Sometimes they really negotiate. It's really annoying. Um, but no. Um,
00:41:47.960 — 00:41:51.480 · Guest: Peter Fuller
now, the way I think about it is, you know, our,
00:41:52.840 — 00:42:09.210 · Guest: Peter Fuller
our end markets are historically like very, very bad. And markets for software actually. Right. Um, I think it's hard to think of true category winners in software that have been built selling initially into,
00:42:10.930 — 00:42:21.290 · Guest: Peter Fuller
I'm going to say, high finance and management consulting. I think there are some parts of high finance, like on the data side where that's not true. Um, but selling into, you know, the way that we have been. Um,
00:42:22.970 — 00:42:28.810 · Guest: Peter Fuller
and I think probably about the time that you guys first tried trace, like
00:42:30.050 — 00:42:44.330 · Guest: Peter Fuller
that changed and the world just changed. And after we launched the amount of inbound from every single institutional brand name that you can think of was insane. And and
00:42:45.610 — 00:42:48.770 · Guest: Peter Fuller
most of our funnel to this day is inbound, right.
00:42:48.770 — 00:42:50.330 · Co-Host 2: Giles Male
And amazing.
00:42:50.330 — 00:42:51.130 · Guest: Peter Fuller
And.
00:42:51.170 — 00:42:52.810 · Host: Paul Barnhurst
Wish I had that problem right now.
00:42:53.850 — 00:42:57.730 · Co-Host 2: Giles Male
But that's what I mean. It's so interesting to you. But you're right. So you're.
00:42:57.730 — 00:43:01.980 · Guest: Peter Fuller
Exactly right. All of these organizations Woke.
00:43:01.980 — 00:43:02.700 · Co-Host 2: Giles Male
Up.
00:43:02.700 — 00:44:15.350 · Guest: Peter Fuller
And they all put together task forces. And, you know, I was initially very skeptical. I was like, don't sell to the task force. You know, it says to the managing director, you know, but actually these task forces were real and they really bought stuff and their people were really motivated. Um, so it's it's been it's actually been amazing to watch that, watch this kind of category change in the last in the last year or so.
Um, so, yeah, um, I think now the challenge they have is there's a lot of vendors out there and they need to figure out which one is which one is best. And obviously I think that's gross. Like, but um, so there's a lot of trials going on. There's a lot of pilots and there's a lot of change management on their side as well.
Right. And then you get the, you know, the real worry that a lot of them have is, is that they just buy the wrong thing. That's the thing that they're, that they're most worried about. right? Because then, you know, eight months from now, they'll have to do a whole change management program again. And that's not really what they want to be doing.
Um, so your our job is, you know, we'll have our foot in the door, but our job is to prove to them that we're the long term partner.
00:44:16.070 — 00:44:18.429 · Co-Host: Ian Schnoor
Nice run. That must be a
00:44:19.590 — 00:44:28.390 · Co-Host: Ian Schnoor
fun time to be alive and running your business. Uh, yeah, I love it. We can. We can live vicariously through you.
00:44:28.550 — 00:45:17.760 · Co-Host 2: Giles Male
Well, it's interesting when you compare again. I'm not going to say too many nasty things about Microsoft because they'll they will kick me out of the MVP program eventually. But Microsoft are so lucky in the sense that they are the stickiest company. And and I agree with you. Like a year, especially a year ago or even more copilot was awful.
I mean, I I'm now in a position where I can train it because it's good enough in lots of areas. It's certainly not perfect, but my God, I don't I'm not sure any other company other than Microsoft would have gotten away with how bad it was and how overhyped it was by then. Um, for so long. Which is crazy. So if you're going in and from day one, like you say, you're focused on, like give the customer a good experience.
It's doing what we said it would. Uh, that's yeah. That's awesome.
00:45:17.840 — 00:45:18.280 · Guest: Peter Fuller
But I.
00:45:18.320 — 00:45:19.240 · Co-Host 2: Giles Male
Think so.
00:45:19.320 — 00:45:33.760 · Guest: Peter Fuller
Yeah. I continue to be confused about how bad copilot is, given how strong the models are that are powering copilot, right. Um, but I think Microsoft does have that innovator's dilemma problem now. And
00:45:35.720 — 00:46:13.970 · Guest: Peter Fuller
let's just take Excel. I always compare Excel with, uh, coding. And one big difference I think between those domains is coding was really nicely set up actually, even before ChatGPT coding was really nicely set up for AI to come along. right? You had ideas. You had a really nice collaboration environment.
You have diffs, you have git, you have version control. All of these things are really important. If you're going to start working meaningfully with someone or something else. And in this case, that's something else is AI.
00:46:15.010 — 00:47:11.220 · Guest: Peter Fuller
ML is just it's just missing all of it. And and that's that's a huge problem. So you know, now if you go into the trace like web app and you say, here's an Excel, I want you to make the following 25 changes to this Excel. What you'll get back is you'll get a diff. You'll get okay. Here's, you know here's an overlay kind of thing of what the file was like before.
Here's what the file is like now. And as you build up these diffs, you can then build up versions of what you're working on. And you can roll back and you can do all of these things. And yeah, I know, I know there is some versioning etc. and diff thing, but it's completely insufficient in my view in Excel. So yes, its copilot being slightly disappointing, but it's also the product right around.
You know, I think that some big changes have to be made to make it really nicely set up to work with very powerful agents. I think they have a bit of a problem there.
00:47:11.260 — 00:47:32.900 · Host: Paul Barnhurst
It'll be interesting to watch. I think there's some good points there, and I've said to get what they really need. You almost need that kind of online whole new environment because it's 40 years old to truly have that modern, innovative platform. But given the constraints they've had. They've done an amazing job in my opinion, overall on Excel.
Obviously, AI, I bought from challenges.
00:47:32.940 — 00:48:22.350 · Co-Host: Ian Schnoor
When you're a $5 trillion company and you have 7 or 8 billion customers, we should all have such problems one day. But, you know, it's a whole different set of criteria and internal machinations, and it just obviously is different. And you have to be careful about people all over the world using things.
I didn't even realize until recently how many people are not even working on Excel 365 yet? I mean, they're still using older versions of Excel that don't even have. So there are lots and lots of things that factor in when you are, you know, the large player that the whole world relies on. But that said, I mean, but that's why there's opportunity for Trace Lite and others to take advantage of speed and nimbleness.
And you're obviously doing a fantastic job with that. So anyway, thank you for spending time with us on an evening. Obviously as busy as you are.
00:48:22.390 — 00:48:33.270 · Host: Paul Barnhurst
I think we'll go ahead and kind of wrap up here. But before we do, any last thoughts? Anything you want to share? Any thoughts about the future modeling. Anything you want to say to our audience here?
00:48:33.310 — 00:48:34.710 · Guest: Peter Fuller
Thoughts about the future.
00:48:35.150 — 00:48:38.030 · Host: Paul Barnhurst
Or wherever you want to go? It's up to you. Just kind of last thoughts.
00:48:38.070 — 00:50:01.650 · Guest: Peter Fuller
One thing that I think about and talk about most days you can be quite scared, right? Looking at how this stuff is evolving and it is quite scary experience. I guess if your career to this point has, you know, your unique, you know, value, right? You've been the best at writing the formulas and building these complex models.
I can imagine that it's very scary. Then watching lens, you know, the curve is just like this, right? And even if they're not past you today, they probably will be past you quite soon. Right? And I totally get that. But I think people, your viewers, our users should all just be tremendously excited about what the future holds, right?
Their jobs will be different, but the amount of value that you'll be able to add in the world is now is just like increasing exponentially. And I think by this time next year, if your job had been building big Excel financial models and then handing that over to a customer, I think your job will be building those models and then that becomes code, and then that becomes a persistent part of how your customer is operating.
And like just the amount of value adding to them is so much greater. So I am very, very optimistic, right? Even about the users that most of the rest of like Twitter, if you read it, everyone's like, oh, these, you know, these people are so cooked or whatever because the other lands are doing their work. I just completely disagree.
That's how I feel about our users, and I hope that's how your viewers feel too.
00:50:01.690 — 00:50:02.610 · Co-Host: Ian Schnoor
I love it.
00:50:02.690 — 00:50:11.370 · Host: Paul Barnhurst
Love it. Well thank you. Really enjoyed it. Appreciate you carving out some of your evening for us. And Giles, in anything you want to add before we say goodbye?
00:50:11.410 — 00:50:18.210 · Co-Host: Ian Schnoor
No exciting to chat with you. I'm thrilled and rooting for you and excited to hear how things go. So thanks for spending time with us.
00:50:18.250 — 00:50:19.290 · Guest: Peter Fuller
Listen, thanks for having me.
00:50:19.330 — 00:50:32.530 · Co-Host 2: Giles Male
Echo that. It's, uh. I'm happy you're. You guys are doing so well. It's been really interesting just delving into your mind and your outlook a little bit. And there's some things I probably wouldn't have thought of but make a lot of sense. So. So, yeah, I wish you all the best with it.
00:50:32.570 — 00:50:36.090 · Host: Paul Barnhurst
Well thank you so much. We really appreciate you carving out some time.
00:50:37.730 — 00:50:39.090 · Co-Host: Ian Schnoor
Take care Pete. Thank you.
00:50:44.530 — 00:50:45.730 · Intro
The mod squad.
00:50:48.330 — 00:50:50.130 · F
We are the mod squad.