Benzinga, a media and data provider bridging the gap between retail and institutional investors, is bringing back its annual Global Fintech Awards event to New York City on Dec. 8, 2022.
Ahead of this recognition of disruptive innovators in finance and technology, Benzinga will periodically publish articles on those brands that it thinks are making a measurable impact.
Today’s conversation is with Viacheslav Derzhaev, co-founder and CEO of Rupt.
The following text was edited for clarity and concision.
Q: Hi Viacheslav, nice to meet you! Care to start off with an introduction?
Viacheslav Derzhaev: My co-founders and I have been involved in markets, trading stocks on our own, while working at top-tier management consulting firms.
We met, actually, during our pre-employment case studies. We’ve been friends since then and, about seven years ago, we began studying and trading stocks.
As management consultants, though, working 14 and 16 hours a day, the last thing you want to do is come home and analyze stocks for two hours.
What’s your experience with other analysis tools? What were some of the pain points?
We started looking for tools that would cut our efforts. In the end, though, we still had to get data, which was costly, put it into spreadsheets, and do some modeling.
So, we went to our hedge fund friends, and they told us what they were doing. We wanted to automate it a bit and, then, we thought about whether we were the only ones who had this problem. That was the inception of Rupt.
What happened, then?
We searched for a CTO and found one with 15 years of development experience. Then, we tapped a financial adviser from the hedge fund space, as well as an engineer who used to do pre-IPO company models, which is much harder to do because there is fewer data.
How did you know what to focus on, though? This is a pretty saturated field, right?
We did a survey of 700 investors and that basically told us what we wanted to hear. That validated to us our solution.
Basically, these investors acknowledged there is too much data to keep track of, it’s too hard to interpret, and there are conflicting opinions from experts.
Can you share with us a little bit about the user experience?
What has made the platform unique is simplification. In about 15 seconds, you get an elevator pitch for a stock.
Graphic: Retrieved from Rupt.
What was the process from start to finish – idea to launch – like? Did you raise? How did all of that look?
No, we have not raised.
In terms of building, we took courses on Codeacademy and watched other people, online, as they built their own apps. It’s actually super efficient.
At its core, coding is simpler than learning another language. Everything is very logical and all that is different is the kind of punctuation or ways you express things.
After building a prototype ourselves, then, we invited the CTO to build it out.
When you’re looking into the future, what are you most concerned about?
Making sure that something which has my name on it works is a difficulty. I want it to be perfect, and that’s important for me.
We did a lot of backtesting to make sure that it works but, again, that accounts for everything that’s happened up until now. It’s tough to account for black swans.
Graphic: Retrieved from Rupt.
What are things that excite you?
Working as a team and solving for our users the same problems we had not too long ago.
What’s on the backend of your platform? What does that look like?
We’re using several APIs like Alpha Vantage. We have to do a lot of work, though, to this day, manually entering analyst and hedge fund data. This is because APIs can have mistakes, too, and we’re obsessed with perfection.
Before we end, what’s the cost to users, as well as the big takeaway you want readers to come away with?
About $30 per month. We have discounts if you pay yearly.
In terms of the last remarks, a lot of people have joined the market since 2020. In the beginning, it was very good for them, and they outperformed the S&P by a significant margin. Everybody was feeling as if they were the next Warren Buffett.
In 2022, they lost all the money. We’re giving these people the insights that resulted in large players selling their stocks on the way up.
Graphic: Retrieved from Rupt.
