Title: Exploring Communication Dynamics in Tech with Kate Mason on theCUBE
In this insightful discussion, John Furrier hosts Dr. Kate Mason, author and PhD, from Penguin Random House at the New York Stock Exchange for theCUBE. They explore themes from Mason's latest book, "Powerfully Likable," while examining the impact of communication strategies and the evolving role of women in the tech industry.
Dr. Kate Mason brings a wealth of experience from their tech career and coaching practice to the table. Their expertise includes empowering women in tech to overcome communication barriers and confidently express themselves. This episode of theCUBE, alongside seasoned host John Furrier, delves into the narrative and motivation behind Mason's new book while also touching upon generational shifts influenced by AI and tech democratization.
The video highlights crucial insights, including the importance of authentic communication, the transformational power of effective language use, and the shifting dynamics in workplace interactions post-COVID. According to Mason, recognizing and rectifying minimization behaviors empowers women to leverage their strengths. They also explore the concept of likability, emphasizing its role in successful interpersonal engagements, as discussed with theCUBE analysts.
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In this interview from theCUBE’s NYSE studio, Don Muir, chief executive officer and co-founder of F2 AI, joins theCUBE’s John Furrier to discuss the launch of his new venture and the transformative role of agentic AI in financial markets. Muir explains how F2 was incubated within his previous company, Arc, to solve the manual "grunt work" of financial analysis that plagues investment professionals. He details the strategic decision to spin F2 out as a standalone entity, creating a dedicated platform that serves as an "F1 cockpit for finance." Muir highlights ...Read more
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What can you tell us about your new venture, F2 AI, and what led to its creation following your work with Arc?add
What is the significance or function of the F2 key in financial analysis?add
What was the funding strategy and outcome for the new venture, F2, that was incubated within Arc's debt marketplace?add
What are the current developments and future plans for the company following the recent funding and operational improvements?add
>> I'm John Furrier, host of theCUBE here at our New York Stock Exchange CUBE studio. Of course, we have our CUBE studios in Palo Alto connecting Silicon Valley and Wall Street tech and money, our Mixture of Experts series where the pioneers come in and talk about what they're working on. Of course, we've got a great serial entrepreneur back in theCUBE. Don Muir, the CEO and co-founder of F2 AI. It's actually an extension of his previous venture, were on last time. Great to see you.
Don Muir
>> Great to be here. Thanks for having me, John.>> We got some cutting edge news here, breaking news around what you got going on. Last time we chatted, Arc a company you founded, doing well. Just the growth, I think this illustrates two things. One, entrepreneurship is you're in serial entrepreneur, but also the market is ripe for entrepreneurship. You stumbled upon an opportunity with Arc and now you have expanded the opportunity with a scalable AI play-
Don Muir
>> That's right.>> With F2 AI. So congratulations. Explain. Let's go through the news. So you have a new venture, F2 AI, you were formerly with Arc. Explain what happened.
Don Muir
>> Yeah, absolutely. And so last time we were here, we were chatting about my first company Arc, which I started out of Stanford Business School with my co-founder Nick Lombardo, who's now CEO of Arc. Two of us met at Stanford. We identified a gap in the market, which is that lower middle market companies, specifically venture-backed businesses are being underserved by traditional banks in Silicon Valley. And so we founded Arc on a mission to bring better cash management and debt capital markets to rapid growth software companies in the valley. That business did really well, but while building out this two-sided debt marketplace and alongside the first release of ChatGPT in 2022, I had this aha moment where I could apply agentic AI to scale our debt marketplace. So we really incubated what is now F2 within our $10 billion run rate debt capital markets business.>> And so F2, what is that? There's a meaning behind F2 share. The story is a story by the name. Obviously I get the AI part. F2 is what?
Don Muir
>> Yeah, so in my prior life before I dove into entrepreneurship, I used to work in the buy side in private equity and I lived in Excel drowning in financial models and data rooms. My favorite keystroke was actually the F2 key in the keyboard. It's for auditing financial calculations and spreadsheet models. And so when I was building this business, we developed technology that makes us the category leader in financial analysis of complex unstructured financial data. And so when you think about what the core function of an analyst is that's leveraging our product, it's running that financial analysis. F2 speaks to the auditability and building trust with our users showing that we have 99% accuracy on that financial analysis. We're going to prove that by making it auditable and referenceable all the way back to the source files.>> Okay, that's awesome. I'm going to come back to some of the things on F2, but just to kind of close out the Arc and the new venture, shared space, kind of working together still, but separate entities. You got investors, you raised some capital.
Don Muir
>> Yeah, yeah, exactly. So two completely separate businesses. When we opened the funding round for F2, again, which we incubated within Arc's 10 billion debt marketplace, we turned that hat over to Arc's insiders to say, "Hey, you guys have supported me for so long. You're going to have the first opportunity to invest in the new venture." And they oversubscribed, but became a $10 million funding round. 20 folks from the Arc team who are working exclusively in the AI product joined me at F2. Nick stepped in the CEO role of Arc. That business is scaling 100% plus year-over-year.>> Didn't know what he was getting into. Nick, -
Don Muir
>> You're going to have to have him on next.>> Yeah, I definitely want to have him on. Did you ask for that promotion? It's tough VC, I'm only kidding. But this is symbionic. This is something that you guys have been building. So it's a growing market. So he's going to hold the fort down at Arc.
Don Muir
>> That's right.>> You're going to do F2 AI. You guys sharing space, you guys hanging out? I mean New York's a small circle of friends. What's the situation?
Don Muir
>> Yeah, so we're taking the SpaceX-Tesla approach to collaborating across teams. We've developed proprietary AI technology that's actually valuable for two very different ICP. And so at Arc, concurrent with our announcement on Tuesday of F2's funding round, Arc launched a CFO AI agent for the startup suite. Theses CFOs and finance teams at startups are under-resourced. Now they can leverage our same agentic AI product to run FP&A analysis, runway and burn analysis all at their fingertips using the same AI that we're selling into financial institutions at F2 as two completely separate businesses.>> I mean, look, I just put my business school hat on. Nice segmentation, two growing markets, why get in the way, decouple, growth?
Don Muir
>> F2 was experiencing so much explosive growth and so much traction with customers, it really just took on a life of its own. We needed to capitalize it and have completely dedicated focus to win the space.>> I like the synergy too. Fellow travelers, founders, divide and conquer.
Don Muir
>> That's right.>> Different cap tables that everyone can see we're on the field together.
Don Muir
>> And Nick and I have never been closer. He's now CEO of Arc at our SF HQ. I'm CEO of F2 at our New York HQ and we're kind of living on airplanes between the two coasts.>> That's awesome. We got our Palo Alto studio. We have to go up to SF. San Francisco's back. We were just up there and not really down, but it was a little bit down period. Everyone kind of moved to New York, but AI's hot there, it's hot here. Talk about F2 because this is really interesting. This is part of the New York scene that I've noticed is the Crypto Trailblazer series is hot, robotics is hot and agents are hot. Why? Because there's a lot of enterprises here. They want workflows automated.
Don Muir
>> That's right.>> You mentioned F2, if I'm reading between the lines, you're probably like, eliminate the grind and automate the value where the human can apply. Is that the basis of the-
Don Muir
>> That's exactly right. I'm building the product that I wish I had at 3:00 A.M. on a Friday night in the bullpen at my private equity fund back in the day. So there's no better place to do that but here in New York. We've met with 800 financial institutions over the last six months alone. Every single of one of them has a mandate to apply AI to automate out those menial tasks and deliver leverage back to the teams. That's exactly what we're building up to.>> All right, so what are some of the early prospects for you on the mission? You got the funding, you got everything cleaned up, everything's clean with the cap table, everything's going great with the venture. What's the plan?
Don Muir
>> So we have our first, call it 50 enterprise customers. We're the category leader in private credit today. Again, given the roots within our capital markets, we had 300 private credit funds in the marketplace. Those are quickly becoming our first customers at F2. Now we're really focused on product. We're releasing our 2.0 model in just four weeks. It's going to be a game changer in the industry. I'm excited to tell you about it when we're live. But it's about bringing more deal teams into the platform, finding a low hanging fruit to automate away those menial tasks. And again, just give time and leverage back to teams so they can focus on what matters most for their business.>> You're going to create more access in the private equity and financial markets. So I mean, literally I could have a CUBE team, investment team to compete with private equity, hypothetically, but you're basically lowering the threshold. If you got IP in the brain and smart people, you're basically creating the mechanisms.
Don Muir
>> We're actually seeing the dawn of the AI native private credit fund and private equity fund. We're seeing new funds raising hundreds of millions of dollars of LP capital and keeping their teams incredibly lean where they're focused just on strategy and capital allocation rather than kind of the grunt work of crunching numbers that's associated with the processes of the past.>> Grunt work, grind, toil, undifferentiated, heavy lifting.
Don Muir
>> Totally.>> These are the words. Okay, so I want to pick up on this because we're doing a whole thing on AI native ventures. We saw the cloud native wave come in with the rise of AWS, now Google and everybody else. AI native companies, they do things differently. They write code differently, they operate differently, they sell differently. Everything's different. I mean, literally it's a demarcation between old and new. And this is obvious to us, but as people start to realize, where am I in that old way, new way? Because if you're on the wrong side of history here, if you don't close the old chapter and go AI native, you're screwed. Now we've been covering it a lot from the infrastructure side where AI native tech stacks matter. So you can't just take your old IT and make it AI. You need an AI factory.
Don Muir
>> Totally.>> So in your business, what is that new AI crossover? How would you describe old way, new way to an average person? Or if you want to go a little deeper in the tech stack, what would that look like?
Don Muir
>> So first of all, I want to be clear, what we're building, our platform is not designed to displace investment professionals. It's meant to empower them. It's meant to make the user 10 times better, faster, stronger. They're no longer doing the financial spreading iterating endlessly in word docs, on red lines and draft memos. We're putting a vertical agent for finance at their fingertips. They have all of the context of their prior deals. They can quickly run financial analysis and then get to a yes or a no, more importantly, that much faster to focus their time and attention on what's going to move the needle for their LPs. And so we're actually focused on building AI efficiency tools to make IPs better and faster not to displace them. And so that's one key nuance. And you think about fast-forward a few years, you have certain funds who are adopting and leaning in aggressively into adopting the latest technology and those who are laggards. And my prediction is those who are adopting AI are going to outperform on returns and LP dollars will flow those funds.>> I'll rephrase. If you were on the wrong side of high-frequency trading, you're out of business. So that's what I was getting at. I do agree. I mean, first of all, I'm not an advocate of a displacement, but there will be displacement of people who don't adopt AI native techniques. In the tech stack, it's obvious. If you just don't have the right tech stack, you're incompatible with the apps that are going to be out there. So you're an example.
Don Muir
>> Jensen Huang said it best, you're not going to lose your job to AI, you're going to lose your job to your peer who is adopting AI and leveraging that modern technology.>> That is exactly, of course, this other motto with Jensen's laws we coin is spend more, make more. He sells GPUs, implying that the faster horsepower you get, you have more competitive advantage. But that is a thesis. I mean, that is exactly right. Back to AI native. If I'm a fund manager or I'm a prospect, what do I have to do to be AI native? One is mindset, I see that. But what specifically do you prescribe folks when you say you got to lay out your workflows differently, you organize the data differently. What are some of the things that make it AI native versus say non AI native?
Don Muir
>> We believe in the Y Combinator School of Thought that we call building a partially autonomous AI experience. So what that means is we don't want to create end-to-end automation. We want to have our AI agent partner with the human, the investment professional to complete tasks, menial tasks faster, to get to investment decisions faster and more precisely. And so when you're working with F2's AI platform, you have a dedicated F2 agent that's equivalent to a VP on a deal team. You'll ask this F2 agent to run some type of analysis, whether it's a leveraged buyout model or a customer retention analysis. That VP will spawn agentically sub agents who are assigned out and calling different LLMs to complete that task. So what you're really getting at your fingertips is a full AI native deal team working for you, whether you're an analyst associate or an MD.>> And that just gives you more horsepower.
Don Muir
>> And it gives you a lot more horsepower.>> So on Monday I interviewed Joe Betts-LaCroix, who's the CEO of Retro Biosciences, just raised 180 million earlier in the year from Sam Altman directly. Rumor has he's going to raise a billion. He's on the OpenAI site and I'm bringing it up to get your reaction to this.
Don Muir
>> Yeah, please.>> He's doing stuff with therapeutics that is very AI native. And the takeaway from that that applies to this is the game has changed so fast. So where it was a year ago and some of the stuff that he's knocking down in terms of real breakthroughs is off the charts. Now what he didn't say, and I was kind of reading the lines, he's probably begging for more compute cycles from the OpenAI because of the demand, but he's moved the needle. But that is a completely different paradigm than what he was living prior to starting the venture. So all that academic work comes in, all that data comes to his fingertips and his PhDs and they're making huge breakthroughs. Okay, now what's that mean here? You're essentially bringing the collective intelligence of data, whether it's previous deals, existing systems, and making it AI enabled to make that-
Don Muir
>> And then customizing that to the workflows of the investment professionals we're partnered with. And so that's the partially autonomous part. We don't want to change your model. We want you to leverage AI and adopt our AI in a malleable way to actually mirror your existing investment committee memos and screening memos and financial models.>> It's like having your own set of interns working for you and scientists. Not the goof on your name, F2, but in the F1 racing, driver wins.
Don Muir
>> That's right. We're building the F1 cockpit for finance.>> Okay, there it is. Explain that, because the human is driving, the human the loop.
Don Muir
>> That's right.>> State of the art IOT. I mean, the cars are tricked out.
Don Muir
>> That's right.>> I mean, it's much different. Explain this. It's a legit questions.
Don Muir
>> So we're not building a point solution. There's a lot of hype and vaporware and the AI for finance space Right now we're building the platform, the operating system. It's exactly what you said. We're equipping deal teams with all of the prior context, the existing access to live data rooms, to prior deals. Not just deals you've done, but deals maybe you haven't done. All of this proprietary data supplemented with second party data like cap IQ, API integrations, or fact set, supplemented with the worldwide web, our vertical agent can search the web with white label sources. All of that context is available in real time for every member of your deal team, equipping you with the modern technology to make better investment decisions. But you're still in the cockpit driving the car.>> And you have a team of people on headset, basically AI agents-
Don Muir
>> That's exactly right.>> Doing heavy lifting. So if you need to go do some research, it comes back super fast, not weeks.
Don Muir
>> And to be clear, the name has nothing to do with F1, but I like the analogy. It's a good one.>> F2, we got that established. Okay, so what's next? Obviously, the news is out. I'm sure phone's ringing off the hook, not that it rings anymore. Techs are blowing up. What's next? You guys probably going to be growing. Was there a plan? Give a plug for what's on your agenda.
Don Muir
>> So right now we're laser focused on launching two point O, which will be available within the next, call it four weeks. We have a full suite of tools that will be available at that time to, again, bring deal teams collaborating in the app to move faster and be better and stronger. That's including a full overhaul of our core agentic system. It's now snappier. It's more powerful. We have a full financial analysis module that's going live. So investing in the core product experience with our AI engineering team based in SF. And then it's all about enterprise deployments, that security that's forward deployed engineering and that's customer success. We're really building out this white glove customer success experience to ensure that these guys are deploying the product in a way that delivers the most leverage to their firms.>> Well, we'll certainly next time the two teams, Arc and F2 are together, we'll do a little powwow, shindig here in New York.
Don Muir
>> Totally. Let's do it.>> Thanks, Don. I appreciate it.
Don Muir
>> I'm excited for it.>> All right-
Don Muir
>> Thanks so much for having me on.>> All right. Mixture of Experts come in, trailblazers all happening here at theCUBE at our NYSE studio. I'm John Furrier, your host of theCUBE. Thanks for watching.
