David Hait | Fintech Entrepreneur: Private Equity Exit

Discover how OptionMetrics founder David Hait revolutionized options data organization, scaled a fintech startup to 60+ employees, and achieved a major acquisition by Leeds Equity Partners.

From his time-consuming experience of preparing options data, fintech entrepreneur David Hait saw an unmet need for it to be better organized, cleaned, and made easier to use by portfolio managers, investors, and academic researchers worldwide. 

In 1999 he founded New York-based OptionMetrics when options trading was less common than it is today, with a record 10.38B U.S. option contracts cleared in 2022. 

David shares his startup challenges and how he grew his firm to 60+ employees, which led to its acquisition by Leeds Equity Partners. 

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Jeanne Gray: I'm Jeanne Gray, founder and publisher of American Entrepreneurship Today, a website that brings news and valuable information to entrepreneurs, innovators, and investors all across America. Our podcast series, Experienced Voices, explores the journeys of very successful people in the entrepreneurial arena who are open to sharing the key elements that led to their great success.

Our guest today on Experienced Voices is fintech entrepreneur David Hite, who founded OptionMetrics in nineteen ninety-nine. David observed a need in the financial services industry for organized, clean, and easy-to-use options data. He shares how he navigated startup challenges, tapped into personal and professional connections for timely funding, grew as an executive to better manage personnel, building a niche company that was acquired by a private equity firm.

Welcome to Experienced Voices, David. 

David Hait: Thank you for having me. 

Jeanne Gray: Great, David. I'm very glad to meet you. Let's, uh, start with having the listeners understand what the service that you provide Wall Street firms. Sure. Um, basically, OptionMetrics is in the business of providing data on the options markets to institutions involved in financial research.

David Hait: That could be brokerage houses, banks, as well as academic institutions, anyone who, uh, u-uses data and does research to see what the markets are doing. So going back to the very beginning, entrepreneurs start companies because they see an opportunity, and that opportunity usually translates into solving a pain point.

Jeanne Gray: What pain point did you see in Wall Street that made you want to solve it and, and take the risk of an entrepreneur? Well, it's interesting. I had, uh, I, I did my doctorate at NYU, and while I was there and doing research, I was very interested in what was going on in the markets, and in the option markets in particular.

David Hait: Um, and I found that there wasn't a lot of data. I mean, uh, you know, in finance, you can do mathematical studies or, or econo- uh, economic studies, and then you can go and look at the market data. There was a lot of historical data available on stock prices, but there was very little or none available on option prices.

And that kind of hindered not just me, but anyone who wanted to research these markets and see better how they operate and what some of the interesting things about them are. Um, so it, it was pretty clear to me, and, uh, not just me, but anyone else who wanted to do research, that this data was hard to get ahold of.

I guess that was kind of the pain point for most people. Then you made the decision to formally start a company. How did you assess both your professional and bus- and per-professional and personal risk in taking that big step? Well, you know, when you go and get a doctorate, the professors on your committee always want you to go into academia, and that didn't seem like the right path for me.

I'm, uh, I'm not the professorial type. Um, the opportunities that were available, uh, in finance would be working for a Wall Street firm. Uh, Wall Street's kind of a funny place. It's a very risky environment. Uh, usually, when you're involved in a trading operation or in a, in a major bank, uh, most of your compensation is based on bonus.

You get a salary and a bonus, and that bonus is, uh, dependent on often other people's opinion of your contribution to the firm. So that right there was a risk, and I think I thought to myself, well, rather than having somebody else in charge of, uh, my career going forward, I'd like to take a little bit more of a hand in my own career and, and take my own risks in terms of how well I do.

So that was kind of the, the idea behind it, I think, in terms of starting a company. On the personal side, you took a look at your own finances and the budget that you were gonna have to set up to get out of the gate. How did you, uh, digest what you thought you would have to go through the, through the first couple of years?

We had some savings, uh, my wife and I, and, um, probably not enough, but we did have some savings. I had done some consulting work, uh, prior to grad school and during grad school. So the feeling was that I could probably consult one or two days a week while starting the company, and that would take care of our basic needs for the most part.

Um, we didn't really have, or the company didn't really have any major expenditures till about a, uh, six months to a year in, and at that point, I went out and tried to get some external financing for that. But the thought was I could sort of, you know, skate along, a little consulting and a little business building at the same time.

Jeanne Gray: How well were your projections in filling out your first year or two? Did you have a, a dollar amount of revenue you thought you could land and you were close to it? Or, well, I didn't even come close to what I thought we would be in revenue in the first year or two. Well, that would have been the smart approach.

David Hait: When it comes to financial planning, I'm more of, um, close your eyes and press the accelerator and see what happens. Um, so I think that the idea I had was, look, this is a product that I'm pretty sure people are gonna want. I need to get it built, and then I need to go out and start finding people who are interested in.

And I just kind of had a, either a hope or a sense, I'm not sure which, that it would be well received and that it would generate income. I think also the idea was that there was always a fallback because I had a degree and I had experience, so if one or two years down the road this fizzled out, I would just go back to plan B, which would be getting a job and working on Wall Street.

Jeanne Gray: As you were building your prototype, um, I, I assumed you were building some type of model to show someone Did you target or have in mind a testimonial client that you knew you needed the first one to validate your, your model? I knew that I needed a first one, I just didn't know who they were yet. So I had a pretty good idea about the various players on Wall Street and who was doing research and, um, who would be interested in data like this.

David Hait: And so there was a little bit of cold calling that went on, where I would call people and I'd say, "Hey, I'm, I'm building this thing, uh, I thought you might have interested, uh, have interest in it. And we're looking for beta testers, basically. So we'd love to give you our data and have you take a look at it and, and let us know what you think of it."

So that was the approach. When you landed the testimonial client, did you really feel you were able then to leverage that to bring in more business? Was it, is a testimonial client really critical, in other words, that first one or two? Well, the, the, the, the first one was not very well known. Uh, the second one was Bear Stearns, um- Oh, okay.

The, the former Bear Stearns, and I leveraged the hell out of that. I made sure to, anytime I spoke to anyone, Bear Stearns was the second phrase out of my mouth. So. You, you are a wise man, David. Well, that- So- That worked until Bear, Bear Stearns went away. Now it's maybe not such a good thing. Well, that, that's a different story for a different day.

Jeanne Gray: Um, s- what did, uh, landing those first few accounts tell you about your sales cycle as to how quickly you would be able to bring in more and more business to, you know, to finally really ground the business in, in, in projections? I don't think we really felt very comfortable for the first few years. I think it was one sale, then two, then four, then eight, and it was a, it was a slow growth early on.

David Hait: Um, I think that, uh, again, it was, it was kind of plodding along. I, I, you know, I'm a finance guy, and I never really stood... I, I never really understood financial projections. Fi- financial projections involve you having a really good, uh, feeling about the future of the market. And as an economist, you know, markets are random.

Sort of a naive view, perhaps, of, of running a business, but. Well, it sounds more like, uh, let's just move forward, onward, and, and we'll, we'll take it as it comes, uh, for the first few years. Did you see or know where your competition, uh, was located in the industry? I, I-- as, as I mentioned before, there was not a lot of data available for this sort of thing.

There were a couple of big data providers, uh, out there, uh, that provided, uh, data similar to ours as part of their offering. Uh, the thing that we brought to the game was the accuracy and completeness of the data, and a lot of the other data providers who had this data didn't really focus or concentrate on that.

I think we, we took the view that, um, the data was intended for research, and having done research in the financial markets, I kind of understood what people were looking for. I don't think that some of the other data vendors really understood that in terms of the, the uses by our, by our customers. Um, other than that, the main competition was the banks themselves.

They could build this product internally versus buying it from us, and the argument we gave them was, "Look, you, you can get the same stuff from us, but we can do it cheaper because we're doing it once and selling it to a lot of people, and you're doing work that every other bank on the street is doing, so you're, you're replicating effort in some sense."

Jeanne Gray: Well, I imagine the Bear Stearns account gave you a lot of comfort or w-would you say insight so that you were seeing the, the hiccups or the challenges, and you could anticipate that into your next pro-prospective client? Oh, a hundred percent. I had a very good relationship with the head of the options trading desk there who I would speak to, and he would give a lot of feedback about what he liked, what he didn't like, um, what he thought we could add to the product.

David Hait: So that first six months or so, I'd say that was very useful. I, I often see with entrepreneurs as they're going through the startup phase that they're really becoming a, an evangelist of what their, their, their vision is. So not only are you evangelizing to your first customers, but you're also evangelizing probably, you know, to your spouse, but, but also to any of the talent, um, that...

Jeanne Gray: or even prospective, um, outside service providers, you know, marketing firms. So how did you feel in that first one or two, three years that you sold to others your, your model and your vision that got them on board when m-many people see startups as just risk? I-it's interesting. We made a decision early on to focus heavily on the academic market, and in fact, my alma mater, NYU, I gave the data to for free for many years.

David Hait: Um, the idea there was that given that there was this need within academia, uh, we thought that we could get a few key, uh, academic researchers to take our data and use it to write journal articles, and that those articles would be sort of a free public relations for us. Um, and that strategy worked out very well for us.

As soon as, um, universities and business schools found out that this data was available for research, everybody got very excited about it and started generating a lot of buzz about it. And that was on the academic side. Um That's very strategic in how you approached giving something away for free, which we all know today it's the freemium model.

Jeanne Gray: You were, you were a man ahead of your time. Um, did you- Well, it was only, it was only that one institution. Okay. The, the others, we gave them discounts, but they did have to pay something. But there are some people, maybe before the freemium model became so prevalent today, who would never think to give anything away.

That, that itself becomes a hurdle for getting that, those first few clients. Ha. I've heard you mention, you know, a, a, a friend or a connection at, on an options desk and then going back to your, uh, alma mater. Uh, looking back or looking as to how other entrepreneurs do a startup, how important is relationship building versus or occurring at a time when an entrepreneur is really working in isolation?

David Hait: I, m- it's my observation, I think, and I, you know, I'm coming from both sides. I was a technologist and now I'm in finance. Um, I think that technologists and engineers tend to focus very much on the technology. They get very excited about what they're building, and they try to make it perfect and get all the features that they think are important.

And I think that it, it seems that not as much time is spent in terms of understanding your customers, your potential customers, and, and your network of connections, as you said, the people who can find you the customers. I think that, uh, technologists often build things that they think are wonderful, but it doesn't necessarily align to the things that would get their potential customers excited.

So I think it's a very important thing to really listen very closely to your potential market How did you take the next steps of making the company m- more than just you? So, so you spent months, you know, building the prototype or the first model. Uh, you went out trying to find those testimonial clients, but now you had to look down the road.

Jeanne Gray: Things may get starting to become overwhelming, possibly where you're, you're doing-- wearing too many hats. What was-- what are-- what, what were some of your first steps of reaching out and saying, "I've got to hand this off," or, "I've got to find this specific talent to get through this next challenge period"?

David Hait: Well, the, the business, uh, producing the data, that's heavy on the computer operations side. There's a lot of, uh, servers and things like that that have to run all the time, and Wall Street tends to be very demanding about technology. If something is not available on the internet, they get very upset. So the first hire was a, uh, an IT guy to help me in making sure that the technology keeps running and that the programs, uh, have bug fixes and things like that.

And I held off on that until I had enough customers where I was generating enough revenue that I thought I could put this guy on a payroll and not have to lay him off six months later. Um, so he was the first hire, and that helped out quite a bit because that took a lot of the day-to-day IT type pressure off.

Uh, the second hire was a salesperson, a dedicated salesperson, and she was paid mainly on commission. And so that was a great model because I had someone who was very hungry, very eager to go out and sell, and her potential, uh, pay from that was, was very high. She could do very well. And she was excited about that.

Um, and that took a lot of the, um, the pressure off of me to go out and find clients. Uh, she would find the customers. She would do the pitch. Often, she would bring me in to give sort of the technical background or the, the product-specific knowledge, and we did very well with that, with that model Often the next step is finding a partner, a strategic partner who may even bring in some money or going after some outside funding.

Jeanne Gray: So at what point, what crossroad did you hit where it became about the financials? There was a, an acquisition of data that was required to jumpstart the thing. We needed to get some files, some old historical data from a firm and sign up for, uh, sources of data through vendors, data vendors that would give us our raw data.

David Hait: So that was probably the first major expense. And for that, I did go out to a few people I knew to get outside funding. Um, it was equity investment. It was, you might call it angel investment. Uh, but these were not people I didn't know. One of them was my father-in-law, who was happy to, uh, make an investment, a small investment to get me started.

Uh, and then the other two were colleagues of mine who I had known through my consulting through the years who, um, felt that it would be a, a interesting investment into the company. I think it was about, probably about fifteen, ten to fifteen percent of the equity, uh, went to outside investors that way, and that gave me the cash inflow I needed to jumpstart the data acquisition process.

Jeanne Gray: Well, that's actually a, a, a great story because when you hear the panel discussions, they're always talking about, well, you f- you're getting your first money from, you know, friends and family. Then they laugh and say, from fools. And I, I have sat and listened to some of those panels, and I've heard people mumble to themselves, "Yeah, I will never be able to go to my family for money," um, or, or my friends.

So it's a really, uh, balancing act of tapping into a personal connection and having them write a check. H-how... Did you just feel it was just good karma that you were living with? Or you, you thought about taking that step with them in a very cautious way? So when it comes to family, my father-in-law loved to dabble in the options market.

David Hait: Oh. He was, he, he was, he was not an academic, and he was not a sophisticated investor, but he loved to play the options. Okay. And so he immediately understood at least the nature of the business I was in. Maybe didn't really get the data very much. But he, he, he loved to invest, and he loved to support causes like that.

And he thought, "Well, this seems like an interesting thing." Um, so, you know, we had a very good relationship, and that was fine. Um, in terms of the other two gentlemen, um, we were friends, but more importantly, we were colleagues. We had worked on projects together. I had done some consulting with them. So when they were making an investment, it wasn't an investment based on friendship.

It was an investment based on, um, they had their own businesses they were running, and they thought based on their experience as consultants and entrepreneurs, they thought that my idea, uh, was one that would hold water and that it might be, uh, an interesting opportunity for them. And I mean, in retrospect, they did very well with their investment, so I don't think they have any complaints at this point.

Jeanne Gray: Well, that's what you hear is forewarnings about taking money from investors who are not in your space or in your domain. So it sounds like that was a really nice, uh, marriage that happened with you needing the money and you having colleagues to, to tap into. Did they expect you to report to them? Like, what-- how did that go?

You know, they knew we're giving you X amount of dollars. It was gonna be burned, and there was a milestone that they were hoping or you were both thinking you needed to get to. So how, how did that early part go for you? I, I, I would speak to them often. Um, again, we were colleagues. We, we, we would talk quite a bit about various things, and when there were sales, when there was a new sale, when there was an increase in revenue, I would certainly let, let everyone know.

David Hait: Um, I tried to formalize the relationship with investors early on. I mean, I did send out quarterly reports and things like that in terms of our, our income statement and balance sheet. Um, but it, it wasn't a very formal relationship. They were very happy to see that we were growing. They didn't have any expectations about a growth rate.

I think they were both in it for the longer term. Did you start to see competition then who looked at your, now your, uh, external model for this service and realizing, oh, here's, here's a guy who's doing it independently? He's-- it's the banks are not doing it in-house anymore. Um, who came on the scene, and how much did it worry you?

I've never been very worried about competition. Uh, and, and I don't-- I have a strange philosophy there. I, I think that the feeling that I have about competition is, um, it helps you, it keeps you on your toes, it makes you a better businessman because if someone is coming out and coming out with a product or service that they claim is similar to yours or even better, that gives you ideas about how to improve your product and jump ahead.

Now, that may be a little Pollyannaish view. You know, I, uh, am very optimistic. Um, as it turns out, we did not have a lot of competition for the product itself. We did have a few firms who came up over the years that insisted that they had something similar that they felt was better. Um, we never had really serious challenges, uh, to our data and, and to the product and the services we provided, honestly.

Um, part of that might be because, um, it's a very niche market, and there are some large firms that just didn't feel it was worth investing in. I mean, options, data, small companies, small market. Why should we bother investing in something like that where the, where the return is gonna be so small? So that was the attitude of some of the larger businesses, I think, larger competitors.

Some of the smaller competitors perhaps did not understand the customer base as well as we did, and again, we, we tried to foster that understanding very early on. The academic, uh, piece of it really worked very well because it gave us a lot of cachet, gave us a lot of credibility in terms of the quality of the data.

Um, people in the academic world or in universities are very, very particular about the, uh, quality of the data they use when they do these, these econometric studies. And so we got a lot of good, uh, got a, got a lot of good PR from that. I think that helped us a lot going forward as well. Did the clients act as a good resource in understanding enhancements that you needed to make to the, the product over the years?

Jeanne Gray: Or has it stayed pretty much the same and you've locked in that niche? 'Cause a lot of technologies come on the scene since, since you founded the company. The data is the same. The, the technology improvements are helping us to increase the, the, the speed at which we provide it and the accuracy of, of our calculations and things like that.

David Hait: From the customer's perspective, they're very happy to have the data, uh, clean, accurate, and provided to them in a timely fashion. Um, the improvements we've gotten from our customers tend to be more like, um, could you add this product set or could you add this data set, or is it possible to get, uh, the data delivered in slightly a different way?

So they've been kind of enhancements like that. Um, and they've been very helpful I imagine there must have been some points in the first few years in which it didn't go well. So how did you go down deep and say, "This ain't happening," um, or, "This is daunting," um, and you worked around it? The first year, uh, I think was probably the most difficult because I was working alone, uh, in my apartment at a desk, often late into the night.

Um, again, financial data is very noisy and, um, and by noisy, I mean there's a lot of errors in it. Um, finance people, uh, banks and exchanges and things like that, they never really viewed historical data as important. Uh, if you talk to a finance guy, he'll tell you, "I need to know the price of the stock today.

I need to know the price right now." And if you can tell him the price two weeks ago, his immediate reaction's gonna be, "Well, what do I care about that? That was two weeks ago." There's a, there's a very small group of people within this community that are interested in the historical record. Now, that was the case when the company started, you know, 20-some years ago.

Nowadays, I think people are more attuned to history and analyzing data. We have the big data revolution now, so analyzing historical data is much more important than it used to be. But in those days, the data that I could get, historical and date, and day-to-day updates, people didn't really concern themselves about giving you something that would be kept historically and used going forward.

They were mainly concerned to get a price right. And all the other information about that price, what was the name of the stock, what was the ticker, um, were there anything happening in the market at the time it was quoted, that was kind of secondary. So that first year was spent taking historical data files, very crummy historical data files, and going through bit by bit and reviewing the data and seeing where errors were made, cross-referencing data sets.

It was a lot of manual, uh, editing and, uh, data plugging that went on during that first year. That was a little bit, uh, uh, depressing, I think is probably the best, best adjective for it. S-so you're saying twenty-four/seven for one or two years working by yourself added some stress to your life? Well, I had just come out of a, a graduate program, so I had already had my share of stress up till then.

Nope. I think anyone who's gone, anyone who's gone and gotten a, a, a doctoral degree at any university can share the sentiment, is that you're working very, very hard for four or five years, uh, for a group of people that give you the impression that they don't really appreciate you very much. So after that experience, I kinda-- It's like kinda going through the war, you know.

I already had my, uh, my experience there, so, um- Oh, so you s- you, you survived the test of fire is what you're telling me. I survived the test of fire, and the idea is that this is the name of the game. You just keep plugging, you keep looking at data, you keep working with it, you keep massaging with it, knowing in your heart that the end is in sight somewhere down the road Is there anything today that still keeps you up at night as far as w-- you know, now the, I think you started in nineteen ninety-nine, so, you know, you're twenty-four years, you're almost approaching your twenty-fifth anniversary.

Jeanne Gray: Um, what keeps you up at night now? You've got this established company, but life changes, markets change. Uh, there was a... I heard there was a pandemic. Um, any-anything of, of that magnitude that you had to, you know, work through, you know, in the last couple of years protecting what you built? Not as much in the last couple of years because for two years now, we've been majority-owned by a private equity investment company, so that's taken a lot of my personal risk off the table.

David Hait: Um, prior to that, I was the eighty-five percent owner of the company, and every asset I had in my life basically was the company. So you have to be very, very careful about the decisions you make as a CEO and as an owner, uh, that you don't make a wrong step, and all of a sudden, everything you've worked for for the last twenty years suddenly goes to zero.

Um, and that was sort of this general thing I think that would keep me up at night, like, what if something goes wrong? What if somebody announces a really great competitive product tomorrow? What if our data vendors suddenly decide that they don't like us anymore, and they're gonna raise our prices by nine hundred percent?

Those sorts of things. I don't know how rational they were or irrational, um, but certainly, a-a-again, as a sole owner of a company, you've got your entire life invested in it, and so you, you really are very careful about risk. Now, once we received outside investment, um, it's not all, all on my shoulders anymore.

Makes life a lot easier, and it makes running the company a lot easier as well because you can make some decisions about where to focus, where to market, what new products to develop without that, that heavy weight hanging on you, I think. Can you share a little bit about the timeframe of when you began to think about bringing on a, uh, an equity investor a-and why you were thinking about it?

Jeanne Gray: Or did they approach you out of the blue and, and, and forced you to start thinking about something? So from the very beginning when I started the company, the thought always was that the company would be sold at some point in the future, uh, to a larger company. And I, I, I'm not exactly sure why I thought that.

David Hait: I think that, again, it was a niche market, it was very specific, and the idea was, well, we were probably not gonna go public. I didn't see that necessarily there'd be any point in listing it, Option Metrics, on an exchange. Um, I don't think it was the kind of thing that you'd leave to your, your children. I don't think my children were particularly interested in, in this line of work.

Um, so it-- That was always sort of the strategy, was at some point we'd grow big enough and at that big enough level, some large firm like a Bloomberg or an S&P or some other large data vendor might come and say, "Hey, this would be a nice little piece to add as a division, uh, to our company." So that was always the thought.

And as we grew over the years, I kept an eye on our total revenues, and I had a, uh, a relationship with an investment banker here in New York who I met with once a year and gave him an update about our company's progress. And he was supportive in the sense of saying, "Yeah, you're doing well. Keep going, and at some point you'll be big enough where we might wanna consider selling you."

Um, probably the, the piece of it that was the, the final, uh, impetus was there were a couple other companies in the same space as mine, not necessarily competitors, but sort of in the same area, and they were, uh, snapped up by one of the major exchanges. Um, the stock exchanges, uh, have recently discovered that buying and selling securities is not gonna be their major moneymaker going forward anymore.

They need to be in the data business, um, to enhance their, enhance their revenue and, and increase their bottom line. So two colleagues or two other companies that I knew of in, in my space were snatched up by one of the exchanges. And at that time, everyone-- all the other exchanges started waking up and saying, "Hey, this is kind of interesting.

It's a small data firm. Uh, that could be of value to us." And at that time, I got a call from this investment banker gentleman who said, "It might be time for you to go out there and, and look to see what the market is like." Um, and so we took his advice, and we, we kinda put together... You know the investment bankers, they put together a deck.

They put together some nice glossy paperwork, and they send it out to a bunch of people they know. And we got some nibbles. Can you share a little bit more about the dance that goes on between, uh, the company that's acquired and, and, and the large company? It's great that you found an investment bank to act as the intermediary, but there's, there's still things that come up personally in your involvement which create some indigestion, we'll say, or, um, or anxiety about making that move.

Jeanne Gray: So when you were talking to the, you know, the big guy who was gonna possibly acquire your firm, can you recall your mindset about, about doing that? I was very open. I wasn't sure who eventually would step up. And again, I always had in the back of my mind, like a Bloomberg or an S&P, which are huge corporations.

David Hait: I had a feeling that they would come in, and they would say, "Okay, great. We'll take all your customers, we'll take your data, and, uh, you can stay on as a consultant if you want for a year, and then, you know, we don't really need you anymore." So that, that was one possibility, was that I would potentially cash out and walk away.

Um, and I, you know, look, I'm getting up in years. It's not like that would've been the worst situation. Um, we happened to find a, an investment firm, a private equity firm, um, who are the nicest guys I've ever met, and their attitude was, "We love your business. We wanna help you keep growing it. We want you to run it.

Uh, we don't wanna take all your equity. We want you to keep some equity so that you can participate in the further growth of it." And it was just a, it was a very good, uh, uh, intro and relationship, I think, early on, and that's proven to be the case since. It's been two years now. Um, that's proven to be the case going forward.

They are very supportive. They're very helpful. Their, uh, interests in growing the firm are perfectly aligned with mine and with my employees. So everyone is happy we're going forward. Um, there's been a certain level of formalization in terms of we now have a chief financial officer. We have, uh, a little bit more careful about how we keep our books and records.

We would've needed to do that anyway, so this was very helpful for them to get us up to that level. I've c-- I have occasionally heard an entrepreneur, uh, describe that process. They've been bought out. They are running the company now as part of a larger entity, and the changes that occur, some of which you just mentioned, actually forces, um, you know, an entrepreneurial mindset to flee.

Jeanne Gray: Uh, it sounds like there was very good karma going on for-- in your mind that whatever structure they were putting around you, you felt comfortable about. I think there's a distinction there between a large strategic buyer and a private equity firm. A large strategic buyer, and I've seen that as well, will come in and say, "Okay, it's our company now.

David Hait: We know what we're doing. Thank you for your service. Uh, we're gonna continue and, and make out of this what we can." Uh, private equity or any other small equity-type investors, their interest is in growth, and, uh, ours has been leaning on our expertise and our, um, and our ideas about how to grow the firm. Um, so there's, there's a distinction, I think, between those two things.

But the- Uh, I don't think we're any, I don't think we're any less entrepreneurial than we were. We're still always pitching ideas about new businesses, new areas to invest in Well, it's interesting that you had two exit paths that you, you could, um, go down, and that the one you ended up with allow, has allowed you to stay at the helm.

Jeanne Gray: And that's a, that's a good point for someone to hear about making that decision to give up part ownership to an outside party. So this has been a really interesting conversation on the fintech side, David, and y- how you jumped in there and, and worked your way through, uh, to today. Is there any advice you would give an entrepreneur as we wrap up that, um, you know, you, you've had plenty of time now to look back over what you've done and, you know, I don't like to use the word regrets, but, you know, something that you...

someone was sitting around drinking a beer with, um, you'd say, "Look, if you're gonna go do this," dot, dot, dot. What, what would you say? I, I think overall that the path we took was a very lucky one. Uh, honestly, uh, I don't know if I necessarily made all the correct decisions. I think that circumstances just turned out for us to be very fortuitous, and I'm very, very happy about that.

David Hait: Um, we grew more slowly than some people might have liked. Um, some people would-- might say, "How, how could you have been in for twenty years and you only got to revenue level of X over those twenty years?" I-- That was our choice, and that was our decision. Um, all of our employees were paid and happy. I was making a profit.

So, uh, we weren't too greedy, we weren't too anxious to jump ahead. So I think that was the good stuff. Um, just from a very practical perspective, I will tell you that, um, when you're an entrepreneur and you start hiring people, um, you sometimes look at these people as your family, these are your employees, they're helping you grow.

At some point, the mindset shifts, and you have to start saying, "These are people I'm paying a salary and bonus to produce for my company." Uh, I-- There are a few that I probably could have been a little bit, uh, faster to get rid of when it wasn't working out. And I think that's a very interesting, uh, thing to look back on, is the shift from entrepreneur, one person, two person, three person firm, to where we are now, which is a sixty-person company.

You, you have to take that shift, uh, to become a manager. And I think a lot of entrepreneurs don't really, uh, uh, do that very easily. In my case, it was tough. It was tough moving from that entrepreneurial family type operation to a, a manager who's in charge of making sure that people are all working, uh, with the goals of the firm in mind.

Um, so as I said, there are probably a few people that, uh, shall we say, overstayed their welcome here, and probably, uh, I could have been a little tougher. Well, I, I think that is, uh, a common problem for, uh, maybe small businesses or businesses that are, um-- have a longer duration before they're hitting a very large size.

Jeanne Gray: You're working with these people many hours each week, uh, and it's a, a personal growth to come to, or the hard decision to part with people that you personally like, but you know, are, are not part of the future of the company. So I, I appreciate you coming on Experience Voices, David, letting me hit you with all these different questions.

Uh, so, uh, again, I, I'd just like to, uh, thank you and stay in touch and see how things keep going well for you. Thank you very much. It's my pleasure to be here. You've been listening to the podcast series Experience Voices hosted by Jeanne Gray, publisher of American Entrepreneurship Today. Sign up for the series at americanentrepreneurship dot com slash podcasts.