Windfall CEO Arup Banerjee

Auren Hoffman (00:00.78)

Hello fellow data nerds. My guest today is Arup Banerjee . Arup is the CEO of Windfall, a data company that estimates the net worth of every American and does a whole bunch of other things as well. Arup, welcome to World of DaaS.

Arup Banerjee (00:13.754)

Thanks, Warren. Thanks for having me.

Auren Hoffman (00:15.262)

I'm really excited now to start with why is wealth data so tricky?

Arup Banerjee (00:21.548)

Yeah, so, you know, in general, when we started Windfall, you know, to take a step back, we really thought that a lot of different third party data was inaccurate. And there's been a lot of studies by folks like even Deloitte who have showcased that a lot of that third party data is right 50 % accurate. Now, wealth in general has been.

Auren Hoffman (00:40.718)

Right, because even when you look at like gender, know, gender is probably like 50 % better than throwing darts. It's probably 75 % accurate or something like that.

Arup Banerjee (00:49.142)

Totally, 100%. But even if you're thinking about misspellings with Aaron or Aaron, right, with AA versus E, right, that could be hard. But wealth has always been something that people are interested in, right? If you think about Orrin Hoffman, right, if you look at Google, you're going to have an auto-complete of net worth, probably in the first couple that Google is going to do. And so it's an intriguing aspect to most people in the world, and as well as businesses.

Auren Hoffman (00:53.251)

Yep.

Auren Hoffman (01:05.666)

Yeah, for sure. Yeah. Yeah.

Arup Banerjee (01:12.48)

To clarify, think, wealth is assets minus liabilities, right? So we're thinking about assets equals cash, properties. So doesn't necessarily all have to be stuff that you can transact from your wallet, but actually that you're accumulating over time. Whereas your liabilities have to be more of your debt, So more credit cards, things of that nature. So when we think about the data that you might have around wealth itself, we could survey 10 people on the street today. And I would bet you that

Auren Hoffman (01:28.184)

Your mortgage.

Arup Banerjee (01:41.342)

None of them actually know their net worth, right?

Auren Hoffman (01:43.298)

Yeah, a lot of people will know their salary. They'll tell you their income. They might know their salary like to the pending. They may even know their salary, but they won't. Most of them won't know their net worth.

Arup Banerjee (01:53.404)

Exactly right. Right. And so when you're thinking about estimating that and saying, is this accurate or not? Well, even with like one of our investors, this is the extreme example, told me that they did five different ways of calculating their wealth. And the disparate like the range was like $50 million. Now that's extreme. But like, what's the right answer? You probably have no idea. And so the interesting part about wealth is it's not necessarily super easy, like a salary to be like, hey, what is that point in time?

Auren Hoffman (02:11.606)

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Arup Banerjee (02:20.832)

But there's a lot of different ways that a person can accumulate wealth in terms of investments, their careers, inheritances. take an example of somebody that's worth $2 million. You could have $2 million in cash, or you could have somebody who has a lot of real estate, and they have tons of debt, but their property values are incredibly high. So both are worth $2 million, but are those people incredibly different? Yeah. So that makes it even more hard to think about that.

Auren Hoffman (02:42.147)

Right.

Auren Hoffman (02:46.594)

Yep. And I imagine you want to be like directionally right. Like if someone's net worth is $5 million, if you say it's like 3 million or 7 million, well, that's directionally correct. But if you say it's like 500,000 or 50 million, then you're way off. And that's a very different type of person.

Arup Banerjee (03:04.714)

Yeah, and would actually say that that it depends even in the example that we were using right now, like three to seven, like that actually isn't on the cusp because it's still like an order of magnitude, right? It's doubling somebody's net worth as you take a look at that. And companies really, you know, they want to take a look at wealth information. We see this across the board. So, you know, wealth management, that's probably the easiest one. If somebody's worth, you know, three million bucks versus seven million, you have to be fairly precise from a sales and marketing perspective of who you're going out.

Auren Hoffman (03:14.7)

It's, it's, yep. Yep.

Auren Hoffman (03:31.938)

Yeah.

Arup Banerjee (03:32.832)

Whereas if you're in retail, right, if you're putting in a value ladder, like if you kind of have a little bit of a fudge factor, they're probably okay with it unless you're trying to.

Auren Hoffman (03:40.238)

Yeah, if I'm LVMH, it's probably, those are probably roughly the same customer to me or something.

Arup Banerjee (03:46.088)

Exactly. Right. If you're selling a yacht, like a 25 million dollar yacht, you probably want to be pretty precise versus like, again, if you're you're thinking about Costco instead. But I would probably say that, you know, overall, we kind of see that variety of if you're worth 240 million dollars and I say you're worth 200 million bucks, is that OK? That's still 40 million dollars off.

Auren Hoffman (03:51.096)

Yeah.

Auren Hoffman (04:06.318)

Yeah, yeah, it's totally right. It's totally fine. And by the way, like that 240 million births, could be worth 200 million tomorrow if the stock market goes down just slightly or something.

Arup Banerjee (04:16.576)

Yeah, so exactly correct. There could be fluctuations in that over time or how they've calculated themselves. The way that we approach is that you have to go to the most extreme example, maybe that wealth management side, because they probably have the best picture of your wealth profile of any other company, even the credit bureaus. you want to take a look at that. And if you can nail that, all the other use cases really fall into place.

Auren Hoffman (04:35.63)

Yep.

Auren Hoffman (04:41.922)

But I imagine it's like really hard to know like all this stuff like no one. mean, I can't imagine you would know all the different holdings that somebody has, etc. So you're really I assume it's very much of an estimation on every given person.

Arup Banerjee (04:56.788)

100%. In fact, we think about this as like a low bounce and a high bounce, right? So you have an estimate, but you probably want to have the confidence interval around that as well. And to your point, like if the stock market changes tomorrow, like am I right based off of that point estimate? Well, I want to give ourselves a little bit of flexibility of like what happens in the world beyond that estimate. So yeah, 100 % that this is more directional and we're not going into people's bank accounts and knowing every single component. And again, the credit bureaus don't probably even know that either.

Auren Hoffman (05:00.685)

Yeah.

Auren Hoffman (05:20.92)

Yep.

Arup Banerjee (05:24.832)

Wealthy folks in general also might have low credits scores, right? If you take a look.

Auren Hoffman (05:28.322)

That's right. Yeah. Yeah. What, what, I mean, what is the, what are the best proxies for wealth? I mean, I'm obviously like your real estate is probably real, relatively easy to figure out what real estate people have, though, even there, I assume that's really hard. Sometimes it can be hard to find out people have nested LLCs and other things that they control their real estate with. But what are some other things?

Arup Banerjee (05:51.466)

Yeah, so that gets gnarly. It's actually better to probably think about like, are the worst things that you could use for like a wealth estimate? Like home value, what's available out there? Like home value is one of them. And so you were in San Francisco before, like I live in San Francisco. If you look at a zip code that we live in, everybody's a millionaire, right? And they have home value alone. And obviously that's not true. I'm different than my neighbor who's very different than the person who lives across the street.

Auren Hoffman (06:08.908)

Yep.

Auren Hoffman (06:15.459)

Yep.

Arup Banerjee (06:15.574)

but ultimately you're looking at home value and based off of geographic location, I mean there's some places in the country where you can't find a property over $2 million. So what does that really mean? Does that person cap out? No, they're still accumulating wealth over time. And so home values.

Auren Hoffman (06:26.188)

Yeah.

In they may be more wealthy because they don't have to spend it all on all the other stuff. Yeah.

Arup Banerjee (06:34.826)

Right, on mortgages, cost of living, everything else that you might see. Now, some folks look at zip codes. Zip codes effectively are leveraging home value or those proxies for wealth effectively. And again, that's just too broad. That might have worked in the 40s and 50s, but really it's not good today. The other one that most people take a look at is income. If you think about income, does that correlate directly to wealth? Not really. mean, there obviously, there is some signal.

Auren Hoffman (06:51.043)

Yep.

Auren Hoffman (06:59.5)

Yeah. Especially on the extreme ends, like, I mean, I've had years where I've had negative income, I do have neck, like it's very, it can really change.

Arup Banerjee (07:08.8)

Yeah, I mean, think about somebody who retires. You can go from making a lot of money to just having a retirement income. Well, does that mean that you've lost all your wealth? Well, if you were just looking at income alone, you're probably going to miss that person versus actually thinking about the wealth instead.

Auren Hoffman (07:14.157)

Yep.

Auren Hoffman (07:18.882)

Yep. Yep. Plus also I'm sure it's very hard to get income data, whatever that is. And people may have many different types of incomes that come in.

Arup Banerjee (07:29.548)

Yeah, exactly. When we talk about retirement income, multiple jobs, pension funds, all of that goes into place.

Auren Hoffman (07:37.676)

What are some interesting stats about the wealthy that maybe people wouldn't appreciate?

Arup Banerjee (07:44.288)

So I think that there's an interesting, a fun fact that we do at Windfall all the time. So I'll actually ask you this, because it's fun. How much wealth do you need to be to be in the top 1 %?

Auren Hoffman (07:58.83)

Top 1 % of America? I would say $10 million gets you top 1%.

Arup Banerjee (08:00.885)

of America.

Arup Banerjee (08:06.26)

And so usually my answer to this is it depends because we're talking about the US population. a point figure is correct. And realistically, most people actually would have said a million dollars. So you're doing better than most. Yeah.

Auren Hoffman (08:17.902)

Really? Because because I remember like I remember like this is a long time ago, but Ronald Reagan celebrating that we had over a million millionaires in the US. And obviously that was 40 years ago when Reagan was president. So I just would presume, OK, we've you know, that has gone up pretty significantly since then, you know.

Arup Banerjee (08:37.46)

Yeah, in fact, if you take a look in last five years, I think the high net worth population has increased by about 75%. And that's basically the data that we've shown. there's, yeah, over a million dollars. So high net worth over a million dollars of wealth is how we over a million dollars. And so most people kind of think about that million dollar wealth figure to be affluent versus non-affluent or high net worth, not high net worth. And so when we looked at that,

Auren Hoffman (08:47.05)

high net worth meeting people over 10 million or.

Auren Hoffman (08:52.819)

Over a million. Okay, got it. Okay, got it.

Auren Hoffman (09:00.631)

Okay.

Auren Hoffman (09:04.14)

How many millionaires are there in the US? mean, it's got to be. We've got to be talking about tens and tens of millions, I assume. Yeah.

Arup Banerjee (09:10.964)

Yep. So we believe that there's a little bit over 20 million households that have over a million dollars of network.

Auren Hoffman (09:16.834)

households and our household may have four members or something like that. So we could be talking about 80 million people that have over a million dollar net worth in the US. Wow. That's crazy. Yeah. Yeah.

Arup Banerjee (09:26.312)

Exactly. When you think about that whole whole level, right? And so there's a lot of folks out there, and realistically, it's probably like 15 to 20 % of the population. So when we talk about the top 1%, usually we're actually thinking about this from like a geographic perspective. Even in New York, right? If you look at New York, if you live in New York City, to be in that top 1 % versus if you're in Albany, well, that's very different. And then that accumulation of wealth can change quite a bit.

Auren Hoffman (09:35.96)

Yep.

Auren Hoffman (09:47.968)

Mm-hmm. Good point. Yeah, yeah, good point. Yeah, yeah.

Arup Banerjee (09:52.596)

And your sentiment of how wealthy you are also changes based off of your geographic location.

Auren Hoffman (09:56.406)

Yeah, if you have $10 million and you live in the Upper West Side, Manhattan, you probably don't even feel rich. Whereas if you have $10 million and you live in Albany, New York, you feel rich for sure.

Arup Banerjee (10:07.316)

And your spending habits and your patterns and how you think about life also changes over that time period.

Auren Hoffman (10:09.667)

Yep.

Yep, yep, interesting. That's super interesting. What are some other kind of like misconceptions about wealth distribution?

Arup Banerjee (10:22.528)

Yeah, I mean, just just even thinking about, you know, looking through and I'll use the income portion of this quite a bit to like not not to kind of double down on that. There's probably two factors that we normally see. One is that if you're targeting based off of income and you're looking at high net worth, a lot of people use 500K and above. Going back to our equation, like that's about like maybe one to two million households. So again, that's probably thinking about the differences of people retiring versus having well.

Auren Hoffman (10:30.413)

Yep.

Auren Hoffman (10:51.16)

Sorry, there's one to two million households make 400K and above? 500K above. Okay, I would have thought it was higher because I would have assumed like that's like top 1 % or something like that. then, okay. but then there's only, okay. All right. So I would have assumed it would like a million households or more make that, okay.

Arup Banerjee (10:55.404)

500 Caneva.

Arup Banerjee (11:06.986)

which literally cost us.

Exactly. so like think thinking about like targeting what most people do is they look at zip code and income based targeting. And so if you're looking at like private aviation and you're like, hey, I'm going to be on a private jet and I'm making more than a million dollars a year or making a million dollars a year. Let's make it an even number.

Auren Hoffman (11:17.411)

Yeah.

Auren Hoffman (11:25.358)

Yeah, yeah, you're probably not flying private jets if you're making a dollars a year, yeah.

Arup Banerjee (11:29.472)

you have half of that goes in taxes, you know, have 150K in mortgages, your childcare,

Auren Hoffman (11:31.566)

Yeah.

Yeah, if you live in California, you're talking about 54 % of that goes to taxes. Yeah, okay.

Arup Banerjee (11:39.66)

Yeah, you might save like $50,000 at the end of the year. Like you might actually not have that much luck.

Auren Hoffman (11:42.668)

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, especially if you got kids in private school or something like that.

Arup Banerjee (11:47.272)

Exactly, or you might be break even. And so there's no way you're actually going to fly private, right? Versus that person who's in Albany who might have that 10 million bucks and is just accumulating wealth over time.

Auren Hoffman (11:49.142)

Yep. Yep. Yep.

Auren Hoffman (11:56.492)

Yeah, yeah, especially if their kids are out of the house and they've paid off their mortgage and you know, all these other types of things. So really kind of depends on your situation.

Arup Banerjee (12:05.344)

Yeah, and I think that this is all fluid, right? Like a lot of people believed like one of the things that we also have looked at the last, you know, four or five years is how wealth has actually accumulated across the United States. If you take a look at 2020 to 2024, it's actually like, it looks like a mixed bag. You know, there's, folks of varieties, but if you look at the growth over time in certain vectors of the population, right, for example, from 2020, if the beginning of the pandemic from March to December,

we actually were pretty much break even. You had that shock at the very beginning in March, but at the end of 2020, we actually were doing pretty well. There's a lot of savings, there was a of cash in the economy. But then if you look at 2020 to 2022, like looking at August to August, all of a sudden, the coast actually got a lot more wealthy because people were moving back. Now all of a sudden, if you look at 2022 to 2024, there's another migration in the Midwest.

Auren Hoffman (12:38.424)

Yep.

Auren Hoffman (12:43.639)

Yep.

Arup Banerjee (12:59.84)

So again, looking at the point solutions, you really need to think about recency of the data of where is wealth gain accumulated right now versus looking at a four year horizon.

Auren Hoffman (13:08.686)

There's kind of a difference between quote unquote being rich and maybe quote unquote feeling rich. I know people that I would think of as rich, but they don't feel rich for maybe because they're trying to keep up with the Joneses or other types of things. How does that like that psychology play in?

Arup Banerjee (13:29.324)

Yeah, we actually, like at Windfall, what we've done to kind of help out with this is that we have our own proprietary way of thinking about your metro rank. How wealthy do you feel compared to your neighbor, your state rank, how wealthy you flow in the state, and then we have your national rank, right? So that's like how wealthy you holistically. Now, all of that drives into sentiment because if you're in the top 1 % in the state, but in the bottom 10 % or in the top 10 % of your metro, again, that's the sentiment.

Auren Hoffman (13:40.906)

okay. Interesting. Yeah. Okay.

Arup Banerjee (13:57.61)

Right. That's a New York to New York City example that we kind of have been utilizing. But like I think about this as well as saying what's the pattern of where you feel wealthy? Because as soon as you have a wealth creation event, you actually feel a lot more wealthy in that moment than the steady state like a year later. And so all of these transactions are actually signal.

Auren Hoffman (13:57.804)

Yep.

Auren Hoffman (14:12.302)

right, right, right. Good point.

It's really like how, because if there's a huge difference between this year and last year, either way, you're going to feel very wealthy or less wealthy. If it's just like a slight difference between this year and last year, you might, you might not, you might be updating in a different way.

Arup Banerjee (14:32.502)

Totally. You splurge, you buy the next property, you might want to donate to a nonprofit that year, but the following year you're like, man, okay, that was too much. Let me kind of pull it back. And now this is my steady state moving forward.

Auren Hoffman (14:34.019)

Yeah.

Auren Hoffman (14:43.814)

I always been interesting. Like there, there's, used to be this advice that you want to have, like the smallest house on the lot. and, but to me, this seems like that advice would mean that you all, all the people, all your neighbors are going to be richer than you. And you're always going to be keeping up with the Joneses and you're always just going to be feeling inferior and stuff like that. It's like, you don't want to be the poorest person in Martis camp and stuff like you wanna. And so.

you know, what, would be your advice to somebody like it would your advice to be like, Hey, go move to Albany, New York now, or like, what's your advice to somebody to, to feel good about themselves.

Arup Banerjee (15:20.928)

Yeah, mean, kind of so the example that you potentially like the most common one is Warren Buffett's been in like this small house for 50 plus years, right? He obviously owned other properties.

Auren Hoffman (15:29.078)

Yeah, yeah, yeah, of course. It is still Warren Buffett. Yeah, yeah. And I think it's still a decent house. It's just small for a billionaire. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Arup Banerjee (15:37.516)

Right. And so like, if you think through where asset level like in general for wealth, one of the other things that we dispelled is actually one thing that you mentioned a little bit earlier where the stock fluctuations like you could lose $40 million, most wealthy people are not going to lose that much money overnight unless they have their insider is tied to their stock of like the CEO.

Auren Hoffman (15:56.302)

Yeah, but I mean, the S &P 500 could go down 20%. I mean, in this year, it's very possible it could go down in the next few months, 20%. I mean, not super likely, but definitely has happened many times in history. so, you know, for most of us, our wealth is tied, you know, all of our wealth is probably directionally correlated with the S &P 500, including most of our real estate is probably directionally tied to it. Right. So if that goes down, then probably our wealth goes down 20%.

Arup Banerjee (16:19.18)

I'm coming.

Arup Banerjee (16:23.788)

percent. So you know, the advice associated with this is saying it really depends in terms of where you're at from a life stage perspective, as you're thinking about that wealth accumulation, and then ultimately, what are the goals. And so to a certain degree, the expectation that most people have, right in the American dream is to desire that you can be a billionaire, that you can literally go through that and work hard and change your fortunes. And so as in some people want to do that, some people don't, some people are okay living in, you the suburbs of Nebraska, and you actually might

Auren Hoffman (16:32.749)

Yep.

Auren Hoffman (16:43.884)

Yeah.

Arup Banerjee (16:53.32)

on average, be wealthier than if you go and move to New York City and try and make it rich. So realistically, I would say that it depends on your scenario and how you actually think about that n number of those wealth creation events.

Auren Hoffman (17:07.458)

You said 1 % of Americans are worth 10 million and more. I assume that the average age skews very old, like these are people in their 70s or just because they've had all this time in their life to accumulate wealth. Is that correct or is that not correct?

Arup Banerjee (17:23.82)

That is generally correct only because of things like real estate, right? If I bought a house in the 1970s and then, you know, I stayed in there, then, you know, inflation and everything else along those lines basically gets me there. Or just because I have a 401k that's been sitting on the side lines for the last four years, it just gets me there. Right. So I would think that age has something to do with that. Now, if you look at investable assets, which is something that we also provide, which is the liquidity. Now that's a little bit different. Now that's a little bit more averaged out.

Auren Hoffman (17:28.109)

Right.

Auren Hoffman (17:33.912)

Yep.

Auren Hoffman (17:38.102)

Yeah, and just compounding. Yep.

Auren Hoffman (17:49.804)

Yep. Okay. Skewing younger. Yep.

Arup Banerjee (17:53.366)

you think about age and how much money do you actually have available to spend?

Auren Hoffman (17:58.414)

Now, if 1 % of Americans have 10 million net worth, what percentage have 100 million or above? Is that 0.1 % or is it 0.01 %? Like how does the draw work?

Arup Banerjee (18:10.732)

Yeah, if you think that there's about the stats that we normally use is like ultra high net worth is $30 million and above.

Auren Hoffman (18:17.942)

Ultra net worth is considered 30 million above. Okay, got it. Okay. Who comes up with that definition? Like does someone just like, is it someone like Goldman Sachs being like, up to this year, are you going to say it's 30 million or something? Because it's a random number. mean, 30 just seems like the most you would think of like 25 would be, you know, or maybe it used to be 25 and then the inflation made it 30. Like, I don't know how they come up with that.

Arup Banerjee (18:20.97)

Yeah, and so there's about a hundred.

Arup Banerjee (18:28.648)

you

Yeah, I think generally I'm

Arup Banerjee (18:42.412)

Yeah, so I think that there's some, you know, there's some heuristics or rules that most people use, right, like high net worth of a million bucks, like that's also 15, 20 % of the population. Is that really the real number today? Well, somebody made a heuristic saying, well, that's 300k of investable assets. So that's the people that we want to target so we can port it over for our people. So it probably was somebody at Goldman, like threw their hand in the air. And so 30 million bucks is kind of the other litmus in terms of a lot of wealth management funds, I kind of think about that way.

Auren Hoffman (18:49.688)

Yeah.

Auren Hoffman (18:59.49)

Right, yep, Yeah, yeah.

Arup Banerjee (19:10.796)

to translate it to investible assets. And so there's about 120,000 households that are above $30 million, which is...

Auren Hoffman (19:17.166)

There's 120,000 houses. I would have thought there would more than that in the U S. so that's like, cause there's probably 120 million households. Right. and, okay. So interesting. So we're talking about 0.1 % ish or 30 million above.

Arup Banerjee (19:23.35)

So much.

Arup Banerjee (19:37.376)

Yeah, it's a pretty steep curve, right? So if you think about where most of the millionaires in the United States actually fall, it's between one and two, and then two to five. Then after five, it really starts to cascade very quickly down.

Auren Hoffman (19:39.182)

Yeah.

Auren Hoffman (19:45.251)

Yep.

Yeah. And 30 million is very wealthy. Like if you have $30 million now worth, like you probably should feel rich unless you have that smallest house and artist camp or something or, you know, yeah. Yeah. Okay. Interesting. Now, a lot of talking about just like running a data company. You know, I started SafeGraph around the same time you started Windfall.

Arup Banerjee (19:59.308)

Sure. Right.

Auren Hoffman (20:13.102)

and at the time I thought like, okay, the need for data is just going to keep growing faster and faster and faster, but I hasn't really played out at least in our case that well, like just the, the need for data has been growing, but it hasn't been growing exponentially. Like what's been your experience in windfall?

Arup Banerjee (20:30.602)

Yeah, so, you know, we consider y'all have location data, you know, we're data, it's a little bit different in terms of at least the industries, you know, people data, if you take a look at some of the very large players in the space, they've been around for 40 or 50 years. So I think the market, yeah, it's a very large market to start off with. Now, has it grown? And to your point, I think that the data market in general has grown and during the pandemic really accelerated the need for data, right? Most people in general,

Auren Hoffman (20:34.348)

Yeah.

Auren Hoffman (20:45.098)

experience of the world and stuff like that.

Arup Banerjee (21:00.012)

couldn't go and do what they historically done, surveys, going out into the world, thinking of that nature. So I think organizations have to rely on data in order to make decisions. Now, when the world opened back up in 2022 and 2024, I think that the data needs potentially shifted back, like, hey, you justify a lot of that. But for TAM, when I think about people data, consumer data, overall data that we're playing in, there's so many different

Auren Hoffman (21:17.528)

Yep.

Arup Banerjee (21:28.524)

like use cases. And I remember you and I actually talked about this like eight years ago around like, you know, investors used to pass on windfall because Hey, your Tams too small. And I was like, I was like, Wait, what are you talking about? Like, I don't actually understand what that is. We actually had a potential investor said that our TAM was $10 million. $10 million revenue like so it doesn't make any sense. But there's a lot of different ways that you can apply a data asset into different industries, right? We're doing sales, marketing, fundraising,

Auren Hoffman (21:38.083)

Right.

Auren Hoffman (21:45.998)

Right, right, right.

Arup Banerjee (21:57.686)

But even if you think about government use cases, know your client, know your consumer clients, recruiting, hedge funds, utilizing that data for trading, there's a lot of different applications of the data asset. So when I think about the addressable market, it also might be where you're applying that data and ensuring that you're meeting your customers where they need it. We've actually taken the framework of like the data market's huge.

Auren Hoffman (22:01.196)

Yeah, yeah, for sure.

Arup Banerjee (22:22.902)

But it's really about the activation of that data that makes it sticky and increases the market size holistically.

Auren Hoffman (22:28.526)

I mean, certainly the dollars spent on data has grown over the last 10 years. I just would have thought it would have grown much faster because, you know, there's this rise of data science, the rise of AI, there's all these great tools that you can use to use data better. People are becoming much more data oriented. So I just would have thought it would have been, you I don't know what the spend is. Let's say the spend on data is growing 10 % a year, 15 % or something like that.

It's probably not growing total more than 15 % a year, the overall pie of the total market. And again, it's a big pie, so it's still a nice market. But I would have thought it would have been growing much faster than that. But I've been definitely very wrong. Just the number of new data buyers is not growing massively, given that all the other revolutions that are happening.

Arup Banerjee (23:22.976)

Yeah, I might think about it kind of similarly. I don't disagree with that. I think I agree with the fact that if you're looking at data buyers in particular, you're not necessarily going to find a lot of that in the industry. It's still going to go to line of business. You're still going to have to sell to somebody who has still been in the industry for 20 plus years, so senior executives. And yes, they are data driven, so to speak. And I use air quotes there. But in general,

Auren Hoffman (23:36.471)

Yep.

Arup Banerjee (23:50.526)

what I believe that most people still, you might hire data scientists, but you simply, your domain expertise is not in data. So you still need somebody to explain it to you to make it easy to actually show you those insights to connect the dots for you. Because even in the last five years with that transformation and the pandemic, most people still don't know the basics of data science. They don't understand classification models or what unsupervised or supervised learning is.

And that's a different thing for the business user versus people who are coming up in.

Auren Hoffman (24:21.836)

Yeah, most people don't even understand the difference between a false positive and a false negative. Like they're really, I mean, that's just, not, we don't live in a super data litter at work.

Arup Banerjee (24:31.192)

Absolutely, which is why I think, you know, if you think about some of the companies that are out there and the data, if they're getting into the world of like, hey, I need to become more data driven, and they have a very poor experience with a data company, well, guess what? The market's not going to continue to grow, because there's a lot of crappy data out there. And so my next

Auren Hoffman (24:47.214)

Yep. There's a lot of bad data. And as you mentioned before, you know, a lot of data, as you mentioned, it's like maybe slightly better than throwing darts, maybe 50 % better than throwing darts, but it's not, it's not super accurate. Yep.

Arup Banerjee (25:01.836)

And that's not their job, right? Their job is to run their business and not actually think about the data side. That's why companies like ours and yours exists, right, to help them out.

Auren Hoffman (25:10.06)

Now, how's AI? Do you think AI is changing the demand for data?

Arup Banerjee (25:16.14)

So I do, I believe that this is, to your point, I don't think it's, it has kind of said, hey, with OpenAI and a lot of these Gen.AI companies has our data market gone from 15 % growth to like 150 %

Auren Hoffman (25:31.542)

Right, hasn't lit it on fire for sure, yeah.

Arup Banerjee (25:34.08)

Definitely not. we actually have our own predictive AI solutions and we've delivered that since 2018. We actually think about AI being an activation of data and that's more of the predictive AI space in particular. But I believe that generally speaking, even if you have predictive AI, even if you think about the gen AI solutions out there, do folks really want to understand some of the underlying data points?

Auren Hoffman (25:45.954)

Yep. Yep.

Arup Banerjee (25:59.562)

Yeah, they want to segment off of that. Even if you get a score and a propensity or some sort of prediction in the future, human beings still want to say, where's the backup? Right? Even if there is those components. And so there has been, even as we built more predictive AI solutions, everybody's actually asking us for more backup data, either to feed that into their own models, so their own segmentation, so their own Gen. AI capabilities for other third party applications. So there's a whole host of things that I believe are in there.

Generally speaking, companies want vendors to do that more so than them doing it internally because they might not have those AI capabilities either. So I think that generally speaking, it is increasing our demand for our data, but we also have the solutions that kind of have a self-fulfilling or a flywheel effect to that as well.

Auren Hoffman (26:46.67)

How do you think about like data co-ops? And I know you guys have been incorporating different types of data co-ops into your solutions. And how do you think other data companies should be thinking about it?

Arup Banerjee (26:59.274)

Yeah, so if I think about how you source data, that's really the biggest differentiation here. Sourcing data for accuracy is the holy grail for companies like ours, which is the input data into the equation to actually have a clean data set that comes out on the other side. That's the whole idea of thinking like medallion architecture, like that Databricks really made popular and ensuring that you clean it along the ways.

Auren Hoffman (27:06.296)

Mm-hmm.

Auren Hoffman (27:12.984)

Yep.

Arup Banerjee (27:27.884)

So when you're looking at things, even like co-ops, consortiums, those actually have a really strong first party data collection component to it. So that's getting sourced from a consumer or an individual, business person, but is it actually also messy? Yeah, it's tremendously messy. Like think about your own CRM for SafeGraph, right? There's a ton of errors in there, like tons and tons of errors.

Auren Hoffman (27:52.109)

Yeah.

Of course, yeah.

Arup Banerjee (27:56.076)

Right, so if you contribute to a co-op, you're basically giving them also inaccurate data that they have to see through and think through. So really when you think about any of those types of sources is about stacking them up for verification, validation, and getting additional signals through. So I think about, even if you have a co-op or sourcing data, it's having multiple threads through it so that you are able to understand the patterns and then therefore make the decision, is this actually the right data point to incorporate? Yes, no.

Auren Hoffman (28:00.855)

Yeah.

Auren Hoffman (28:24.952)

core value of a co-op is kind of this like give to get model. Like you're gonna put in your proprietary data and then this kind of like organization you're giving it to is gonna maybe summarize it or somehow and then kind of give you back. like probably most of us who listened to this podcast have used co-ops for salary benchmarking. Like we'll send the salaries of our employees to some sort of service.

you know, thousands of other companies send the salaries. You know, it's very hard to benchmark. Is it a software engineer level three or software engineer level two? they, you know, where that, but somehow they kind of do it with their own magic. They clean it up and then they send you back. your employees are in the 70th percentile and here's what's going on and here's what's happening. et cetera. That's a very useful service. Like how do you think of it? Cause you've got to give this kind of like, you have to

They're giving you this proprietary data. Obviously when we're giving salary data, it's very proprietary data. It's very, very sensitive data. And you've got to make sure that they're getting value back quickly for giving that in.

Arup Banerjee (29:31.562)

Yeah, and I would probably say that you might not necessarily have to do give to get too much. In fact, if you're actually the benefit is that the underlying data is beneficial and the downstream AI or the predictions are also benefiting by more and more people plugging in, that's really where you get the flywheel. Now to create a co-op is a little bit of a different question because you got to those first members in through the door.

Auren Hoffman (29:52.588)

Yeah, yup.

right away. In that case, it may even be like a single player mode, like you're cleaning the data for them, you're doing some other type of thing, right?

Arup Banerjee (30:03.38)

Yeah, you're servicing them, you're doing it for free. It's setting up kind of the foundation as you build it up over time. But again, the goal is not to rely on one person in the call, because if they remove themselves out of it, then you're kind of not in a good scenario with having accurate data. Again, going back into thinking about the validation.

Auren Hoffman (30:21.388)

Well, assume any good co-op like no one actor is more than a couple percentage of the data or something like that.

Arup Banerjee (30:28.726)

Totally, totally. I would probably posit that, generally speaking, a lot of those co-op models, as long as you're not sharing the raw data with somebody else for compliance reasons, most organizations would probably say, yeah, great. You want to use that, and I get benefits from everybody else going through that. Why wouldn't I want to participate?

Auren Hoffman (30:37.858)

Yeah.

Auren Hoffman (30:46.702)

Yeah. I've had this business idea that I want to serve me if one of our listeners wants to start it with me, let me know. But, where I want to get like every, get, get companies to contribute their DSO data, their days outstanding data from their, like their, their GL or their QuickBooks or whatever they're using. And then every time, you know, before they want to go work with a company, let's say you want to go work with Ford or something versus GM, you're a graphic designer and you can take on one of them.

And turns out, know, maybe GM pays in 25 days, but Ford pays in 60 days or something. All right. Well, I'm going to choose GM because they're, they pay on average better or something like that. Just something like very, very simple way of understanding. there other kinds of like weird data co-ops you've ever kind of like thought about?

Arup Banerjee (31:29.418)

Yeah, yeah.

Arup Banerjee (31:34.198)

You know, for me, it's a lot of it that I think about is around transactions, like intent signal. Like that for me is so powerful of thinking about it from a consumer angle. And in fact, there are other companies out there, right? If you think about even, know, PubeLisys, Epsilon, like how they've thought about their own transactions around retail, like it's so powerful and so like, jealous of like what they've been able to build out.

Auren Hoffman (31:41.058)

Right, yep.

Auren Hoffman (32:02.593)

Yep.

Arup Banerjee (32:03.53)

over many decades associated with that because of the intent that you can actually drive and predict the models from there.

Auren Hoffman (32:10.358)

Yeah, that's interesting. That data is just so valuable. Now, there's these kind of like different types of data companies. There's like kind of like the pure play data companies versus more the predictive kind of data companies, kind of this truth versus religion. Like, how do you see that market and how do you see those markets evolving?

Arup Banerjee (32:32.522)

Yeah, and I remember when you wrote that act, I think I contribute a little bit to that post back in the day. so, you know, when I think about truth and religion, it's interesting. In fact, you need truth to create religion as you go through that process.

Auren Hoffman (32:36.462)

For sure. Yeah.

Auren Hoffman (32:45.293)

Yep.

Yeah, like Experian is the truth of whether you paid your bills on time. FICO is the religion, which is built on that Experian-ish data.

Arup Banerjee (32:57.6)

Yeah, and I think for if you look at somebody like windfall, right, we're not even like I thought about this. Are we truth or are we religion? And to a degree, we're estimating net worth at a point in time. So by the time we've actually estimated it, are we saying that it was truth or the religion part is that we're estimated that week, but they could actually

Auren Hoffman (33:06.114)

Yeah, yeah.

Auren Hoffman (33:10.04)

Correct.

Auren Hoffman (33:15.478)

Yeah, I know you're not estimating someone's net worth five years from now or something, right? Okay. Yeah, you could. That would be an interesting product. You could probably do that like, because like a retiree, maybe their, you know, it may be their networks not going to grow that much, or maybe it will shrink over time. Whereas somebody who's earlier in their career, you could maybe make some sort of prediction that their their networks going to grow quite a bit.

Arup Banerjee (33:20.393)

Exactly.

Arup Banerjee (33:38.144)

Totally. And that is a super, super hard problem, which happened in touch with the partner. Yeah, that one would take a long, long time to kind of develop accurately. But if you think through the truth and religion consideration, like the other data points for any pure play data company, you really need to have that truth consideration. Right? Because if I say that somebody owns the boat or they have multiple properties, they better have that. Otherwise, the trust in the data goes away.

Auren Hoffman (33:42.026)

Yeah, yeah, super hard. Yeah.

Auren Hoffman (34:04.278)

Right. Yep. Yep.

Arup Banerjee (34:06.284)

Right? There's no impact to the downstream effects associated with it. So in my mind, I think the transformation of a lot of the companies out there is that if you're a pure play data company in general, you kind of have to start meeting and it goes back to the TAM consideration. You kind of start to meet people where they really want to be at, which also means the activation of that data. That could be a prediction in the future that they're either building themselves or that you help them build for them instead.

So I do see that in the future, this kind of the thesis associated with it, it is that spectrum that you've put in kind of your own diagrams here, which is you probably do need more of a continuum and there's probably less and less pure play data companies out

Auren Hoffman (34:50.742)

And how do you think about like, what do you the investors misunderstand about data businesses?

Arup Banerjee (34:58.63)

the fun ones. like I think it's, it's a, this is a fun question, you know, as I've thought about this, and I've been in the data space for, you know, over a decade at work and venture backed businesses. And I think that generally speaking, most people don't really understand data companies, like I think you've written about, you know, what is the financial profile of it, right? You might have high costs and low margins, and then eventually you get to critical mass, and then you start cash flowing pretty, pretty well.

Auren Hoffman (35:21.197)

Yep.

Arup Banerjee (35:27.776)

And especially if you think about co-ops, right, then you have a ton of additional margin because you're not paying for all that data from. And so, you know, like I think that is still misunderstood by investors, like as much as has been written about it and people have talked about it and, you know, educated across the lines. I still don't think that folks are valuing businesses based off of those metrics the same way. Now it really speaks to the second part, which is.

Auren Hoffman (35:32.92)

Correct. Yep.

Auren Hoffman (35:51.244)

And by the way, it's one of the problems there is that just the way accounting rules are, is that a lot of like, if you're buying data for most data companies, and there are some exceptions, but most data companies, they put that data that they bought in cogs, even though it's a fixed cost, they still put it in cogs. And so it looks like in the early days, if you're spending $3 million buying data and you 4 million revenues, it looks like your margins are terrible. But if that 3 million is capped,

and then you can keep selling it, then your margins start to like go up quite a bit over time.

Arup Banerjee (36:23.916)

Exactly. And that's, that's actually the other misunderstood consideration that I think is, is probably there, which is it's actually not cogs. There's a lot of R and D you're building a data asset and that asset has a lot of value and the ability to generate money off of that asset, going back to like the TAM and kind of like, what can you build on top of it? Even if you're thinking about one vector of like looking at for sales and marketing.

Auren Hoffman (36:32.204)

Yeah.

Arup Banerjee (36:48.288)

What if you introduce that recruiting? think Zoom Info has done an actually pretty nice job of having their different operating systems across the asset, which has grown over time, to say, it's the same data set, but I'm going to apply it to different people or different verticals or departments appropriately. Well, again, the asset might not necessarily change or you have to create a new one. And so that is something that I don't think investors are really taking a look at. Now, the industry, I would say, is probably bad at that because if you ask me, how valuable is the WinFall data asset, I'm probably not going to be able to give you a number today either.

right, in terms of being able to calculate that. But that's something that I think, you we all can probably think about, which is that underlying data, even if the company goes to zero, probably has some value that you can have as a residual.

Auren Hoffman (37:18.072)

Yeah.

Auren Hoffman (37:30.882)

Now, I also had thought when we kind of like we were starting our businesses eight years ago, I had thought that maybe there's a way to make a data company winner take most where you can get to 50 % market share and you could do that by, you know, just getting the best product over time, maybe reducing your price over time and taking market from other people. But I found that it has not necessarily been the case that it's still very, very, very competitive.

Maybe even more competitive than the software world, or at least as competitive as the software world. Do you agree with me or do you disagree?

Arup Banerjee (38:08.808)

I think I agree. I don't think it's a winner takes most. It depends on the category in the industry. Like, so like, I don't think that, you know, like we work with, you know, nonprofits, and there's actually multiple vendors in our space. Now, do they have the exact same product? No, they don't. Now, does it sound similar enough where the switching from going from one vendor A to vendor B, they're like, the switching cost is not that high. So like, I'm to take a look at that.

Auren Hoffman (38:13.581)

Yeah.

Auren Hoffman (38:24.878)

Yeah, of course not.

Auren Hoffman (38:34.006)

Yeah, it's kind of solves a similar problem, essentially. Right. Yeah. Yeah.

Arup Banerjee (38:38.442)

it's good enough and if it's not that good enough, maybe I'll switch back to that in three years and that company will still be around. But right, that doesn't help you with recurring revenue, it doesn't help you with GRR, NRR, valuation metrics. And so you really need to make sure that you understand what that differentiation looks like, at least the way that I think about it. And so for the winner takes most markets, I believe that it can happen in subverticals, but probably not across all of the verticals that you might be taking a look at, depending on the use cases.

Auren Hoffman (38:41.944)

Yep.

Arup Banerjee (39:07.648)

But for me, I think the way that you do it and to maintain that growth in market share is again, probably going to the stickiness of the workload. Once you actually convince somebody that you have an asset or a moat around your data that nobody else can touch, that's when you start to see this really growth accelerate and ultimately making sure that you do have, whoa, that's really different. I actually have to go to somebody like WinFall because nobody else on the planet.

you know, is able to do X, Y or Z.

Auren Hoffman (39:38.722)

Yeah, I would, if you asked me five years ago, would like the company I most admire who's, been doing great job in the data world. mentioned him earlier, you mentioned him earlier Zoom info. Yet, I mean, there's just been so many new competitors in that space and a lot of people going after the Zoom info customers. You've got like the Apollos and the Lushas and all these other like very, very long tail of companies.

Even then, I think one of the best run data companies, one of the most successful data companies, probably the most successful data company that's been started in the last 20 years, even they have had a lot of headwinds and a lot of competitive pressure. So it's hard to just maintain that core position in the market.

Arup Banerjee (40:27.596)

Well, think you probably one thing that is hard holistically and I'm probably investors are somewhat aware of this is that, you know, like that data asset has to be good every week, right? Whatever software that even zoom info builds on top of it, if the data is perceived to be poor. And again, it's a perception. It doesn't necessarily mean it's poor. Maybe it talks the board. It's like 95 % accurate. Yeah.

Auren Hoffman (40:40.279)

Yep.

Auren Hoffman (40:49.304)

Correct. That's right. Yep. But it's the one thing they looked at. Yeah.

Arup Banerjee (40:54.764)

I used to do this where we I used to be in the B2B data space as well. And if you gave somebody a list of 100 records, and the first five they got, you the phone number didn't connect, the rest of the list could be 95, 100 % accurate, right? But that was not matter whatsoever. So you know, I think that the struggles and I think zoom info probably still has the one of the best data sets out there, that the perception might be that they don't. And so those are

Auren Hoffman (41:07.626)

Right, doesn't matter. Yep. Yep.

Auren Hoffman (41:17.645)

Yeah.

Auren Hoffman (41:20.972)

Yeah. Or the perception is their premium price isn't worth it or something. And maybe it is. Maybe people do think it's the best, but they're willing to go for the number two or three player if they're half the price or something.

Arup Banerjee (41:32.394)

And that probably speaks a little bit to the switching costs, right? Maybe it's not as picky as it probably could be, but then if you're, for example, if your sales reps are screaming bloody murder afterwards, they're probably not, you're not gonna switch.

Auren Hoffman (41:34.796)

Yeah, switching is low for data.

Auren Hoffman (41:45.262)

Yeah. Now you tweeted, you said that the easiest way to get hired in tech right now is to say, I'm excited about being in the office five days a week. And, and, know, your CEO, he was doing a lot of hiring. Like, how do you think about like how employees should be looking for jobs?

Arup Banerjee (42:05.612)

You know, it's industry in our world in tech and I'm based in San Francisco, right? So like just to kind of set the stage, we have offices in San Francisco, we have offices in Denver, and we have offices in Salt Lake City. So we actually have three physical locations, which effectively is a hybrid environment. So even if you go into the office five days a week,

Auren Hoffman (42:21.922)

Yep. You're going to be on meetings on, you know, on video as well. Right.

Arup Banerjee (42:28.096)

Right, and this is what companies had had to solve for for a long time, know, telepresence, Cisco, like all the likes associated with that. So, you know, what I'm probably not saying is like, hey, everybody needs to be co-located in a space at all points in time and kind of be changed to their desk. That's not what I think like the intent of that is. I think a lot of the intent is saying in today's world, there's a lot of people that, you know, are prioritizing work from home or flexibility, but then you go, well, what is...

Auren Hoffman (42:33.677)

Yep.

Arup Banerjee (42:55.308)

work from home and it might get into, well, I want to make sure I can go to my doctor's appointments and like take my care to be serviced in. Well, you can still do that if you go to an office, you know, five days a week, that's what you used to do. If you look back pre pandemic, or if you thought about in 2018, and somebody said, hey, can you work from home one day a week, you would have thought it was the best thing on the planet, right? And, and not necessarily thinking, my gosh, this is an evil company that is requiring me to come in and collaborate with my, you know, teammates, you know,

Auren Hoffman (43:06.861)

Yep.

Auren Hoffman (43:21.504)

Right, right, yeah.

Arup Banerjee (43:23.852)

So, for me, I believe that it's less about them coming in five days a week, but it's a signal of their commitment of saying, I would love to come in. I want to be excited. I'm here because I want to work on this hard problem. And especially in the startup world, or as we're going through our own growth and reflection of windfall, we want to make sure that we have the right people here that are unified to the cause and can really make a difference every day.

Auren Hoffman (43:32.951)

Yeah.

Arup Banerjee (43:47.838)

And so that's kind of like how I think about that signal, not necessarily that again, I'm going to change them to their desk like five days a week. But again, it's a great signal. Now I do probably.

Auren Hoffman (43:53.784)

Yeah.

Now, by the way, like, I mean, you and I back in the day, we both used to go to office seven days a week. yeah, it's like five days is like a good drop back from that.

Arup Banerjee (44:06.164)

Yeah, and I think to that point, there are some people that really like the office. I've actually lost employees because we did not open offices in certain locations and they said they want to go to the office five days a week.

Auren Hoffman (44:11.768)

Yeah.

Auren Hoffman (44:17.39)

Of course, yeah, it's understandable. We lost somebody like that too once who was great, but they're like, I gotta be in the office and you don't have an office where I work.

Arup Banerjee (44:24.576)

Totally. And I think there is another part of this, which I think is a true statement, which is younger folks that are just graduated from college or that got jobs during the pandemic, coming and figuring out how to work in a professional setting is something that is actually beneficial to be in an office. I think if you're...

Auren Hoffman (44:41.346)

Well, yeah, that you really are. If you're not in an office at any level, I think you're growing slower. So, you know, so if you're working remote, I think that's fine. It's great. And I work remote, but but your your your rate of growth is going to be slower than if you were than you were in an office. And so you have to decide what you're prioritizing.

Arup Banerjee (45:02.352)

And that might be a difference in your opinion, it also overlasts like three years. Cause I think in the pandemic, like a lot of people said, hey, this is great. But we were all chained inside. We had no choice. Right? Exactly. And so I think that that was kind of almost, that was a false positive in terms of the signal of work from home or remote work versus thinking about like what the steady stage should be.

Auren Hoffman (45:10.818)

We had no, and also we had no choice. So yeah, yeah, yeah.

Auren Hoffman (45:24.066)

No, I think it was a promise. A lot of big companies is, well, you may have to go to an office. So you go to the office in London or something like that. But like the team you work with is in New York and, you know, Philadelphia and in Berlin or so you might be knowing in your office, you actually are working, actually working with every day. So to me, that's not like it has some, maybe some value. but.

You're not actually interacting with it. sometimes you don't even know. Sometimes people go to office, like they don't even know their colleagues that well. Like the real colleagues are people who work in other offices that to me, that's like, actually want to be physically collaborating with people who you, and you want to be sitting not even in the same building, but ideally like at the same table with somebody else who you're collaborating with.

Arup Banerjee (46:12.044)

100 % agree with you. And I think there is probably still benefit for that person in London though, because if you talk about the water cooler chat, I think it is not as big as the collaboration. we actually had folks that had went to WeWorks, right? They wanted to go to the office and say, great, go get energy. Well, nobody around them was talking about the same things that they were talking about. So it was a waste of time. Now you still learn through osmosis or can speak to other colleagues, learn about the company. Again, you're just like in that mindset.

Auren Hoffman (46:16.492)

Yeah, that's true. Good point. Yeah.

Auren Hoffman (46:31.681)

Yeah, yeah.

Auren Hoffman (46:38.478)

Yeah. Yeah. Or you just might wear like, I mean, I wear this shirt every day, even though I work from home. and just cause when I put this on, you know, it's a button down blue shirt for people who are listening. When I put this on, I just feel like I'm, working. I'm going to work. Whereas like on the weekends, if I'm not really working, I'll wear a t-shirt or something. And then it's not really, so there's something like psychological. Maybe if you show up at the we work, you're like, I'm going to work. I'm here to do work. I'm not here to like, you know, look at tick tock or something.

Arup Banerjee (47:08.424)

Exactly right. Exactly right.

Auren Hoffman (47:10.478)

Alright, a couple of personal questions. What is a conspiracy theory that you believe?

Arup Banerjee (47:15.948)

Yeah, so, you know, I'm probably, I wrestled a lot with this because I've watched some of the other World of Dazz, you know, podcasts as well. You know, I kept on going back. I grew up, you know, a pretty big basketball fan. I went to Duke for undergrad. I, you know, I have season tickets to the Warriors and things of that nature. I'm a huge Michael Jordan fan. And so one of the things, you know, when I was growing up, I was probably 10 years old when he retired for the first time. And I was like,

Auren Hoffman (47:36.238)

Mm-hmm.

Arup Banerjee (47:43.542)

completely gutted. Like I was, you know, that was the best thing ever to watch Michael Jordan on the court and things of that nature.

Auren Hoffman (47:48.799)

You were gutted when he retired for the first time. You were like, my hero is leaving.

Arup Banerjee (47:53.226)

Yeah, exactly. And so, you know, the conspiracy theory there is that he was forced to retire because of all his gambling debts and they wanted to make sure that his image, his persona, the NBA all looked really great versus a bunch of, you know, his, actually wanting to retire to go, you know, play baseball or whatever likes along those lines. you know, losing a lot of those years. And then we came back, he eventually played for the Wizards when I was actually there and could go see him in person a lot more frequently. Like so.

Auren Hoffman (48:03.95)

Auren Hoffman (48:17.123)

Yeah.

Arup Banerjee (48:22.932)

always thinking about what would have happened, you know, that's one of the conspiracy theories that like still sticks in my mind.

Auren Hoffman (48:28.702)

He did retire in his prime, right? Like, I mean, he was still quite amazing when he could have done quite a few more years of basketball. It was kind of like interesting, though I don't fault him. There are a lot of people who, you know, go out on top, Jerry Seinfeld or something like that. And maybe that's a really good thing.

Arup Banerjee (48:47.05)

Yeah, it could be, although he came back, right?

Auren Hoffman (48:49.132)

Yeah, that's a point. It's true. Everyone comes back. Yeah. Our last question, we ask all of our guests, what conventional wisdom or advice do you think is generally bad advice?

Arup Banerjee (48:59.808)

Yeah, so I think that for me, was thinking through what some people say, which is, if you want to be your own boss, go start a company. And to me, I went, wow, after doing this, like running a startup for last eight years, said, like being a CEO is not being your own boss and like clocking in, clocking out. You have your board, you have investors, you have employees.

Auren Hoffman (49:26.358)

Yeah, your employees, you're kind of working for your employees. They're not working for you. You're working for your employees. Yeah. Yeah.

Arup Banerjee (49:32.268)

And as you grow over time, that becomes even more responsibility. That becomes even more on your shoulders. Like everything else along those lines, it just adds up the pressure, right? So like being your own boss as a CEO and starting your own company, the only time you really should probably do that is like, you're convinced that you're the best person to solve that problem. You have a burning desire to work on that every day. And like, you won't stop until like it gets done. Like those are good reasons to go start a company. If you want to have that, you know, be your own boss and

Auren Hoffman (49:38.274)

Yeah.

Arup Banerjee (50:01.921)

not necessarily work. Like my advice would probably say, go be a salesperson, go into that career, three extra quota, like nobody's going to bother you. Like if you're a B2B salesman.

Auren Hoffman (50:06.975)

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Auren Hoffman (50:11.308)

Yeah, yeah. Or just be a great individual contributor engineer and just like do cool stuff. you know, it's interesting because there are certain you're not I don't think you're one of these people. I was one of these people when I'm younger, but I'm less so today. But there are people who are just like not socially conducive to having a boss. They're just not going to play well in a larger organization and.

Arup Banerjee (50:17.046)

Totally. Totally.

Auren Hoffman (50:38.594)

They, they will react poorly to bosses. I certainly was like that. Maybe I'm still like that. I don't know, but I don't, I, think I'm less like that today than I used to be. As you get older, you're probably less like it. and those people like, you know, and those people, sometimes they make terrible employees, but they could make amazing entrepreneurs, just because they're willing to just kind of make the decisions and not, not have to go with the flow, et cetera. So there is like a little bit of a personality test. I think that's important too.

Arup Banerjee (51:07.564)

Totally, but I would probably go back to saying there was also probably a burning, what have fire within your belly, you wanted to go do something and be sure you can actually go through that. So it has to kind of be married together because you can't just be a jerk and then go start a company, right? You have to be able to make those decisions and kind of think through them appropriately.

Auren Hoffman (51:14.112)

Yep, that's true. Yeah.

Auren Hoffman (51:19.756)

Yeah.

Auren Hoffman (51:23.766)

Yeah, one has to kind of know themself and sometimes when they're 22, it's hard to know yourself. But I think one has to know to make optimal career decisions. It is very much about that person. certain just because there's like a path to go somewhere, whether it's to be an entrepreneur or to be a work in private equity, like pick whatever path you want that path. That path is is is not right for many people.

because of their personality, because of their talents, because of other types of things.

Arup Banerjee (51:54.796)

Yep, 100 % agree.

Auren Hoffman (51:56.686)

So when you're giving career advice to people, how, how can you even do it? Because like, you just, do you feel like, okay, well can't do it because I got to get to know you first, or do you have some general things to help them or how do you do that?

Arup Banerjee (52:08.556)

Yeah, you know, like, it's really, I'm sure you get this from time to time where somebody's like, Hey, I want to go work at a startup. want to like, I'm going to become chief of staff. found a really smart person. Like they got to go do this or they got to do that. Like in my mind, I usually go, okay, cool. Like tell me a little bit, just, I don't need too much time, but I'll kind of say, well, why do you want to join a startup? Like, what are you going to get out of it? where else are you looking? I'm also looking at Google and Facebook. Sorry.

Auren Hoffman (52:29.485)

Yeah.

Auren Hoffman (52:34.638)

You're not going to start up. That's my favorite. I want to go to a startup and I'm at I'm interviewing at Google. I'm like, okay, you don't really want to go to the startup. You clearly are not interested in going to the startup.

Arup Banerjee (52:46.22)

Or they're so young and they just don't understand the difference of it and they're passing by net. Or, you know, like even taking the flip side saying, yes, I'm looking at all startups. Are they B2B or B2C? well, half and half. And I'm like, nope, I understand what you're talking about right now. I'll use that and I'll probably take time out and I'll say, why don't you think about that for a little bit, do a little bit more research and kind of think about what really excites you or think about a project of what really excites you. And then let's determine what that kind of comes out with. In fact,

Auren Hoffman (52:49.134)

Right, Totally, yeah.

Auren Hoffman (52:58.272)

Yeah, yeah.

Arup Banerjee (53:15.37)

you know, I think to your point of young versus old, that also changes. I got advice when I was really young that I was incredibly introverted when I was at work and that I would not like crack jokes and that I wouldn't be in a room and be able to talk. If, if you know, my team's listening to this, they're going to be like, that's crazy. Aruku will talk all day. And so like, you know, there are different types of also, you know, what you find and know yourself. I think you mentioned that a little bit earlier. It's like, that probably comes out as you figure out where you really start.

Auren Hoffman (53:42.85)

Yeah, you get low, you get some more confidence or something. It's interesting. had this person reach out to me pretty recently and they had a very narrow box of what they're looking for. They're looking for like things in like the space industry, outer space type of thing. And it was very, very narrow. And I loved it because it was like, it was like, they were clearly passionate about this particular industry. They weren't in the industry, but they had read a ton about it and was fairly knowledgeable about it. And they, that's the only thing they were looking for. They just want to get into like.

I was like, this is great. You're gonna do extremely well in your career. You wanna put yourself almost in that smallest box possible when you're looking for a job.

Arup Banerjee (54:21.888)

Yeah, and if you're able to do that early in your career, that's amazing because then that pays dividends,

Auren Hoffman (54:25.454)

Yeah, that's right. It's hard to do when you're, when you're, when you're 22, you might not yet have a good understanding of it yet. or there's been awesome. Thank you. A root energy for joining us. A world of DAS CEO of windfall. I follow you at a root bond energy. seven on X. I definitely encourage our listeners to engage with you there. This has been a ton of fun.

Arup Banerjee (54:48.534)

Thanks, Warren. Appreciate you having me.