theCUBE + NYSE Wired: The FinTech Exchange | Tom Sosnoff, Lossdog

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Tom Sosnoff

Founder, Co-CEO

Lossdog

play_circle_outline Tom Sosnoff's FinTech Exchange Debuts at NYSE: Serial Entrepreneur Launches Career and Portfolio Optimization Platform

play_circle_outline Lossdog mission: democratize labor/pay data and increase transparency.

play_circle_outline AI role: LLMs/agents act as a "genius friend" and employee for users.

play_circle_outline From Underpaid to Optimized: Compensation Aggregation and Mathematical Career Strategies to Maximize Lifetime Earnings

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Tom Sosnoff, Lossdog

Tom Sosnoff

Founder, Co-CEO Lossdog

search

(INTRO)

Gemma Allen

>> Welcome back to theCUBE Studio here at the New York Stock Exchange. I'm Gemma Allen with NYSE Wired. And today for our very first episode of FinTech Exchange Series, we're going to connect all things technology to capital markets right here at the center of global capital markets at the NYSE is Tom Sosnoff, co -founder and co -CEO of tastylive. Welcome, Tom.

Tom Sosnoff

>> Thanks for having me. I didn't know I was the inaugural guest.

Gemma Allen

>> You are an inaugural guest, Tom. You will be on all of our marketing materials for the next while, so thanks.

Tom Sosnoff

>> Be careful what you wish for.

Gemma Allen

>> So this is your maiden voyage on FinTech Exchange, but it's not your maiden voyage as an entrepreneur right this is your third venture this is

Tom Sosnoff

>> yeah like a third fourth or fifth venture something like that yeah

Gemma Allen

>> and much of your work and the premise of what you have developed and built has been around transparency talk about tastylive what exactly is it that you are building and give me somewhat of an origin story for this company

Tom Sosnoff

>> muchof what we've built over the last we're going back like four and a half decades but much of what we built is all about transparency and engagement. Everything we do is on a goodwill model, and it's all based around just getting people involved in finance. And tastylive's no different. It's just not a trading platform like the other platforms we've built. This one, it looks like a trading platform, it kind of walks like a trading platform, but it's actually a platform for optimization of careers and optimization of portfolios.

Gemma Allen

>> And what's fascinating about you is your models are all very much business to consumer, right? Direct to consumer. You're not looking to sell APIs to enterprises or feed them more data. You are trying to democratize that data to the individuals that can leverage that data for their own outcomes.

Tom Sosnoff

>> Yeah, we have built some. In the past, we've built some trading platforms for institutions, and they still exist today. I think Schwab owns the one we built, and I think there's another bank that owns another one we built. But we don't build those things anymore. We just build consumer -facing front -end technology.

Gemma Allen

>> Which in some respects, from what I know of the technology industry over the last 20 years, can be a harder game, right? It can be a tough business model from the perspective of B2C because you don't have these huge enterprise agreements that you can rely on, this huge annuity funding.

Tom Sosnoff

>> I would take a sticky customer over a non -sticky institutional customer any day of the week.

Gemma Allen

>> Well, I love it, Tom, because people like me need people like you to build these products. So, tastylive, very interesting time because what you're essentially doing is you're trying to empower individuals with their own labor data, right? Which they optimize what is possible for them from the perspective of, I guess, wage negotiations or career decisions. Talk about what brought you to this moment, though, because it's an interesting time in the labor market.

Tom Sosnoff

>> Well, one of the things, there's a couple of things that brought us here. The genesis of it originally was that most people throughout their careers are underpaid. Most, the average employee is underpaid and the average executive is overpaid. That creates this crazy wealth gap. And we're like, it doesn't make any sense. Why? You can't really regulate out a wealth gap. You can't really mandate a wealth gap disappear. But you can create technology to help to remove the wealth gap. That's what we decided. So that's kind of where it was the genesis of it. and it was essentially to give people context around what they're worth so they can negotiate better and so that they have an idea of hey i'm leaving all this money on the table maybe i should do something else or maybe i should go somewhere else or something like that or maybe i should

Gemma Allen

>> negotiate better now and talk about you say technology to help people understand right but has AI been the fundamental game changer in this

Tom Sosnoff

>> yeah

Gemma Allen

>> talk me through that It's interesting to me that this data is in some respects publicly available because oftentimes we feel like there has been a coveted level of some of this analysis. Again, we can talk about the markets of this world or Marxism versus capitalism, but it seems as though a lot of folks perhaps don't actually realize that this data is available to them.

Tom Sosnoff

>> Well, the coolest thing about AI is that forever, until there was AI, the individuals had essentially, they relied on their own friend group, their own circle, and their own people that they worked with, people that they knew, or whatever's out there socially, to figure out value and just ideas. Well, with AI now, enter into your friend group like somebody with 165 IQ, which is essentially this AI agentic engine. And so your friend group just got a lot smarter. And so because of that, there are all these incredible opportunities being unlocked that have traditionally been locked up. because even if you're smart and everybody, assume everybody is smart, you're talking about IQs generally in the range of 115 or 120 to 130, 135, but now you have this genius friend. And what that does is, however you want to integrate with whatever AI platform you're using, it just adds dimensions that weren't available to you before.

Gemma Allen

>> Well. And this genius friend, this information was always somewhat in the public domain. It's just we didn't know how to scrape it. We didn't know how to necessarily rag this data before. What has unlocked here? Is it that we can, aside from the fact that we can now use LLMs to kind of search the web and trawl different news sources, etc. et cetera, from a business perspective, let's say I'm a large bank and I have always had a certain level of confidentiality around what I pay John and what I pay Paul, right? How is that changing from the perspective of people accessing that data?

Tom Sosnoff

>> You do have a much more sophisticated search engine now and you do have much more sophisticated chatbots, but those aren't the same thing. What really AI has done is it's created this, we call this agentic AI agent, which is essentially like an employee of yours, which you never had before. So it's this brilliant genius friend, but it's also this brilliant genius employee that now works for you. And so you have access to all this really organized instantaneous information. And I don't see how anybody, if used correctly, how it doesn't benefit them, whether it's from engagement purposes or it's context, but it really benefits. And so our goal or objective with tastylive is to bring that all out and bring it to you for free, essentially here. You know what? We're going to throw this on you and you figure out how it fits best with you. Make it work for you.

Gemma Allen

>> So give me a use case, talk me through a profile of a user who maybe hasn't had a pay increase in five years, feeling the effects of inflation like most of us are, maybe like me, still can't afford to buy a house in this country in 2026 and is kind of thinking, okay, what are my options here? What will this give that user? Asking for a friend.

Tom Sosnoff

>> I got you. So you take a step back and you say, listen, you have a lot of years in the workforce ahead of you. And if you're underpaid by maybe it's somewhere between $2 ,000 to let's say $10 ,000 a year, it could be as much as $20 ,000 a year. That comes out to somewhere between on the low end, $2 million dollars over a lifetime and on the high end between 10 and 13 million dollars. And so most people, that's kind of what they're leaving out there because they just don't really know. They don't have comps. And there's a lot of data out there, but they just don't have the comps. And they also don't know how to organize the comps so that they can make it into a mathematical optimization. That's essentially what we do. So we say whether you're 23 years old, 33, 43, It doesn't really matter. It just kind of fits into different income brackets. And then we show you how to basically achieve just a higher level of wealth, potentially, if you do certain things.

Gemma Allen

>> Well. And can you share what are those things?

Tom Sosnoff

>> Well, for some people, it might be completing projects. For other people, it might be just being able to articulate who you are and what you do better than you currently do. For other people, it might be going to get some kind of a license or some kind of a different degree or something like that. So there's a ton of optionality in there, and it really depends on the person, but we do give you lots of ideas.

Gemma Allen

>> So I guess in some respects, it's almost like a coaching platform as well. Am I correct in saying that or no?

Tom Sosnoff

>> Not really, because we're not big into education and coaching, per se, but we're big into content. So what it really is, is kind of like absorbable, usable content that we hope engages you in something different. Well. So you start to think about things differently.

Gemma Allen

>> So if I was to compare this to another product on the market, is it a little bit Glassdoor meets?

Tom Sosnoff

>> No.

Gemma Allen

>> No? No. You don't want that?

Tom Sosnoff

>> I don't want the Glassdoor or LinkedIn comparisons or anything like that. No.

Gemma Allen

>> But is there a community element to this where people can chat with one another?

Tom Sosnoff

>> There is. Because we build ecosystems. And eventually they become big financial ecosystems. And this is no different. So we think that there is, going into an AI age, the one thing that's going to stand out is your ability to create. Like your domain expertise, your know-how, whatever that is, that's going to be your value proposition. Like that's what's going to separate person A from person B. It's not anymore going to be who's a better technologist or who's a better engineer or who's got a better degree. It's really going to be who's the most creative, who's the most innovative, and who has the most domain expertise that as a firm we can monetize.

Gemma Allen

>> I guess to bring that to life or to leverage or optimize that, it's who can tell their own story, right? That's a huge part of any conversation.

Tom Sosnoff

>> Articulation. Articulation. Those who can articulate things, whatever that is. You can articulate your strengths. You can articulate what you do. Those who can articulate are the most valuable employees. Those who can articulate and those who can make quick decisions.

Gemma Allen

>> I love that. Okay, well, let's talk about that for a second because one thing I read in the brief, which really is a bit of my own sweet spot because I write a lot about women in technology and women broadly. Women have obviously suffered a lot in this system or this ecosystem that we've grown up in, right? There has been an ongoing wage gap.

Tom Sosnoff

>> Yep.

Gemma Allen

>> between men and women and i talked to a lot of women about this and i've come to realize that yeah part of it is a system it's systemically stacked a particular way and a lot of it is social conditioning right it's that you don't want to be seen to be bothersome even when we talk about women sharing data with each other some women don't because they're embarrassed right that's an actual data fact

Tom Sosnoff

>> yeah

Gemma Allen

>> how do you see a product like this changing so that's a fun question because one of the things that the

Tom Sosnoff

>> new technology today does, and one of the things that I think is amazing about all the AI discussions and stuff that's being released, is that AI essentially is a piece of technology that arbs out inefficiencies. and everything you just mentioned is because of workplace inefficiencies. the wage gap, the pay gap, the opportunity gap and all that kind of stuff is because the marketplace is currently inefficient. So think about AI taking those inefficiencies out because it's going to standardize and commoditize everything. And hopefully a lot of that stuff goes away. And That's kind of where we think this is all heading. So it becomes, what is your know-how and what is your ability to articulate your know-how more than it is anything else.

Gemma Allen

>> Okay. Let's talk about this economy because I love, in a lot of respects, that you have founded this company at this moment, right? Because there is what we can only describe as somewhat of a psychological war on talent happening right now. People feel stuck. That's documented, right? People are afraid to leave jobs because of the labor market and because of the hype around AI, what it means for the future of the labor force. It's TBD, right? Every day I feel like the message is a little bit different. But what are your thoughts on how that negates people's bargaining power or people's sense of opportunity in this moment? Have you heard or spoken to any folks on your platform where you feel like there is somewhat of a narrative challenge to overcome?

Tom Sosnoff

>> So I hear you, but I'm also a product of my own experience. So when I got out of college, interest rates were 20%. Unemployment was like nine and a half, and there were no jobs. So when I hear people say, oh, this is the worst economy ever for new graduates, I'm like, you know what? Just go back about four decades. It was 100 times worse. You can't even imagine. The whole reason that I started out as an option trader was because the only interview I got out of college was on Wall Street, and I got a job. Well. And so I went from being this political science major who was going to be something else to working on Wall Street for the next 40 years because that was the only interview I ever got. So I don't look at what's happening today as this situation which is dire by any stretch. I think that the opportunities out there for young people that are smart, that can articulate things, and that are willing to learn and take risks and work hard, I think they're probably better than ever now so I look at the world maybe it's a glass half full and maybe we've been around but every business we've built thinkorswim in 1999 2000 was the dot-com crash tastytrade when we built that was 2010 2011 the fiscal cliff and the whole world was falling apart and then we started this just after the pandemic and everything else so I love when everybody else is in chaos that's the best opportunity.

Gemma Allen

>> Traders buy the dip. Tom builds in the dip, right? Which I love. No, I think it's really important. And I do think you're right, Tom. So much of this labor market is also psychological, right? It's important that you reassure yourself above all else.

Tom Sosnoff

>> Well, sometimes people read like they're reading their own obituary. They're reading way too much into this, to scare themselves. Yeah. And I think things are, I get everything that's going on out there. And I understand, it's tough.

Gemma Allen

>> tough but on the other side it's always tough yeah it's never easy 20 % interest rates now we kind of forget that that ever existed right because we grew up you know last two decades or so in a very different

Tom Sosnoff

>> world. Before you were born

Gemma Allen

>> I know it's crazy okay so one thing that interested me when I also read the brief is you guys have done some interesting guerrilla marketing in launching this product right you've spent some you put some cash out there in terms of attracting subscribers and members. I love that. I love guerrilla marketing in all its forms. And I think it's fantastic. Talk a little bit about how you think about the kind of LTV math behind that, especially in the B2C business to consumer space.

Tom Sosnoff

>> Well, we have a lot of experience doing this. So we've built two billion dollar companies and we've also built a couple of hundred million dollar plus companies. So we have a lot of experience in building stuff around models that we call goodwill models, meaning I give you my technology. I'm not going to charge you for it. There's no subscription. You can have everything. And then you're like, well, what's the catch? There's no catch. It's goodwill marketing. And hopefully long -term, you'll use our technology. That's it. And we love that model. The other side to it is just to get tastylive off the ground. This time I decided to give away a million dollars and I gave it away in crypto only because it was the only thing I could give away legally.So we gave away a million dollars in crypto

Gemma Allen

>> and that was kind of fun i love it okay well Tom it's a fascinating company talk me through the journey where are you guys at and i'm sure you're steadily growingthis is bootstrapped

Tom Sosnoff

>> what are the kind of what's ahead like what we're oh yeah

Gemma Allen

>> give me the commercials here

Tom Sosnoff

>> we're totally bootstrapped but we're in a good position because we've had a lot of exits so that's not the hard partbut we're in our infancy. The team is young, they're smart, and we're building a much bigger financial ecosystem around it. tastylive's kind of like a powerful content marketing engine. We stream thousands of hours of content and we build and we do everything from tons of podcasts like this. And then we have our own streaming network. And then we also do lots of produced stuff. Like we have hundreds of millions of views on stuff that we've done over the last 15 years. I think it's close to 2 billion views. Well. So we have this following. Even though we like to say we're king of the crazies or king of the dipshits or whatever you want to say. But if you're an active trader, you've seen our stuff. And that's – we cater to a very active marketplace. So active option traders, active futures traders, active crypto traders, active prediction market traders. So we cater to anybody who's speculative and active.

Gemma Allen

>> That was actually my last question to you. Profile of typical subscriber member on the platform. Are these people at a particular point in their career? Are they people with a particular skill set? Are they earning in a particular band? What are you seeing?

Tom Sosnoff

>> No, they're just, they like speculation and risk. That's kind of our calling card. So it's people that, not necessarily gamblers, but people that like marketplace and strategic risk.

Gemma Allen

>> Okay. Well, Tom Sosnoff, king of the crazies yourself. Fascinating chat. Thank you so much for joining us on theCUBE.

Tom Sosnoff

>> Thank you for having me.

Gemma Allen

>> I'm Gemma Allen. This is theCUBE Studio here at the New York Stock Exchange. We connect Silicon Valley to Wall Street. This was episode one of our FinTech Exchange Series, and we are going to talk to some of the best minds in the industry over the next number of months. So stay tuned and thanks for watching. Thank you.

Tom Sosnoff, Lossdog

search

(INTRO)

Gemma Allen

>> Welcome back to theCUBE Studio here at the New York Stock Exchange. I'm Gemma Allen with NYSE Wired. And today for our very first episode of FinTech Exchange Series, we're going to connect all things technology to capital markets right here at the center of global capital markets at the NYSE is Tom Sosnoff, co -founder and co -CEO of tastylive. Welcome, Tom.

Tom Sosnoff

>> Thanks for having me. I didn't know I was the inaugural guest.

Gemma Allen

>> You are an inaugural guest, Tom. You will be on all of our marketing materials for the next while, so thanks.

Tom Sosnoff

>> Be careful what you wish for.

Gemma Allen

>> So this is your maiden voyage on FinTech Exchange, but it's not your maiden voyage as an entrepreneur right this is your third venture this is

Tom Sosnoff

>> yeah like a third fourth or fifth venture something like that yeah

Gemma Allen

>> and much of your work and the premise of what you have developed and built has been around transparency talk about tastylive what exactly is it that you are building and give me somewhat of an origin story for this company

Tom Sosnoff

>> muchof what we've built over the last we're going back like four and a half decades but much of what we built is all about transparency and engagement. Everything we do is on a goodwill model, and it's all based around just getting people involved in finance. And tastylive's no different. It's just not a trading platform like the other platforms we've built. This one, it looks like a trading platform, it kind of walks like a trading platform, but it's actually a platform for optimization of careers and optimization of portfolios.

Gemma Allen

>> And what's fascinating about you is your models are all very much business to consumer, right? Direct to consumer. You're not looking to sell APIs to enterprises or feed them more data. You are trying to democratize that data to the individuals that can leverage that data for their own outcomes.

Tom Sosnoff

>> Yeah, we have built some. In the past, we've built some trading platforms for institutions, and they still exist today. I think Schwab owns the one we built, and I think there's another bank that owns another one we built. But we don't build those things anymore. We just build consumer -facing front -end technology.

Gemma Allen

>> Which in some respects, from what I know of the technology industry over the last 20 years, can be a harder game, right? It can be a tough business model from the perspective of B2C because you don't have these huge enterprise agreements that you can rely on, this huge annuity funding.

Tom Sosnoff

>> I would take a sticky customer over a non -sticky institutional customer any day of the week.

Gemma Allen

>> Well, I love it, Tom, because people like me need people like you to build these products. So, tastylive, very interesting time because what you're essentially doing is you're trying to empower individuals with their own labor data, right? Which they optimize what is possible for them from the perspective of, I guess, wage negotiations or career decisions. Talk about what brought you to this moment, though, because it's an interesting time in the labor market.

Tom Sosnoff

>> Well, one of the things, there's a couple of things that brought us here. The genesis of it originally was that most people throughout their careers are underpaid. Most, the average employee is underpaid and the average executive is overpaid. That creates this crazy wealth gap. And we're like, it doesn't make any sense. Why? You can't really regulate out a wealth gap. You can't really mandate a wealth gap disappear. But you can create technology to help to remove the wealth gap. That's what we decided. So that's kind of where it was the genesis of it. and it was essentially to give people context around what they're worth so they can negotiate better and so that they have an idea of hey i'm leaving all this money on the table maybe i should do something else or maybe i should go somewhere else or something like that or maybe i should

Gemma Allen

>> negotiate better now and talk about you say technology to help people understand right but has AI been the fundamental game changer in this

Tom Sosnoff

>> yeah

Gemma Allen

>> talk me through that It's interesting to me that this data is in some respects publicly available because oftentimes we feel like there has been a coveted level of some of this analysis. Again, we can talk about the markets of this world or Marxism versus capitalism, but it seems as though a lot of folks perhaps don't actually realize that this data is available to them.

Tom Sosnoff

>> Well, the coolest thing about AI is that forever, until there was AI, the individuals had essentially, they relied on their own friend group, their own circle, and their own people that they worked with, people that they knew, or whatever's out there socially, to figure out value and just ideas. Well, with AI now, enter into your friend group like somebody with 165 IQ, which is essentially this AI agentic engine. And so your friend group just got a lot smarter. And so because of that, there are all these incredible opportunities being unlocked that have traditionally been locked up. because even if you're smart and everybody, assume everybody is smart, you're talking about IQs generally in the range of 115 or 120 to 130, 135, but now you have this genius friend. And what that does is, however you want to integrate with whatever AI platform you're using, it just adds dimensions that weren't available to you before.

Gemma Allen

>> Well. And this genius friend, this information was always somewhat in the public domain. It's just we didn't know how to scrape it. We didn't know how to necessarily rag this data before. What has unlocked here? Is it that we can, aside from the fact that we can now use LLMs to kind of search the web and trawl different news sources, etc. et cetera, from a business perspective, let's say I'm a large bank and I have always had a certain level of confidentiality around what I pay John and what I pay Paul, right? How is that changing from the perspective of people accessing that data?

Tom Sosnoff

>> You do have a much more sophisticated search engine now and you do have much more sophisticated chatbots, but those aren't the same thing. What really AI has done is it's created this, we call this agentic AI agent, which is essentially like an employee of yours, which you never had before. So it's this brilliant genius friend, but it's also this brilliant genius employee that now works for you. And so you have access to all this really organized instantaneous information. And I don't see how anybody, if used correctly, how it doesn't benefit them, whether it's from engagement purposes or it's context, but it really benefits. And so our goal or objective with tastylive is to bring that all out and bring it to you for free, essentially here. You know what? We're going to throw this on you and you figure out how it fits best with you. Make it work for you.

Gemma Allen

>> So give me a use case, talk me through a profile of a user who maybe hasn't had a pay increase in five years, feeling the effects of inflation like most of us are, maybe like me, still can't afford to buy a house in this country in 2026 and is kind of thinking, okay, what are my options here? What will this give that user? Asking for a friend.

Tom Sosnoff

>> I got you. So you take a step back and you say, listen, you have a lot of years in the workforce ahead of you. And if you're underpaid by maybe it's somewhere between $2 ,000 to let's say $10 ,000 a year, it could be as much as $20 ,000 a year. That comes out to somewhere between on the low end, $2 million dollars over a lifetime and on the high end between 10 and 13 million dollars. And so most people, that's kind of what they're leaving out there because they just don't really know. They don't have comps. And there's a lot of data out there, but they just don't have the comps. And they also don't know how to organize the comps so that they can make it into a mathematical optimization. That's essentially what we do. So we say whether you're 23 years old, 33, 43, It doesn't really matter. It just kind of fits into different income brackets. And then we show you how to basically achieve just a higher level of wealth, potentially, if you do certain things.

Gemma Allen

>> Well. And can you share what are those things?

Tom Sosnoff

>> Well, for some people, it might be completing projects. For other people, it might be just being able to articulate who you are and what you do better than you currently do. For other people, it might be going to get some kind of a license or some kind of a different degree or something like that. So there's a ton of optionality in there, and it really depends on the person, but we do give you lots of ideas.

Gemma Allen

>> So I guess in some respects, it's almost like a coaching platform as well. Am I correct in saying that or no?

Tom Sosnoff

>> Not really, because we're not big into education and coaching, per se, but we're big into content. So what it really is, is kind of like absorbable, usable content that we hope engages you in something different. Well. So you start to think about things differently.

Gemma Allen

>> So if I was to compare this to another product on the market, is it a little bit Glassdoor meets?

Tom Sosnoff

>> No.

Gemma Allen

>> No? No. You don't want that?

Tom Sosnoff

>> I don't want the Glassdoor or LinkedIn comparisons or anything like that. No.

Gemma Allen

>> But is there a community element to this where people can chat with one another?

Tom Sosnoff

>> There is. Because we build ecosystems. And eventually they become big financial ecosystems. And this is no different. So we think that there is, going into an AI age, the one thing that's going to stand out is your ability to create. Like your domain expertise, your know-how, whatever that is, that's going to be your value proposition. Like that's what's going to separate person A from person B. It's not anymore going to be who's a better technologist or who's a better engineer or who's got a better degree. It's really going to be who's the most creative, who's the most innovative, and who has the most domain expertise that as a firm we can monetize.

Gemma Allen

>> I guess to bring that to life or to leverage or optimize that, it's who can tell their own story, right? That's a huge part of any conversation.

Tom Sosnoff

>> Articulation. Articulation. Those who can articulate things, whatever that is. You can articulate your strengths. You can articulate what you do. Those who can articulate are the most valuable employees. Those who can articulate and those who can make quick decisions.

Gemma Allen

>> I love that. Okay, well, let's talk about that for a second because one thing I read in the brief, which really is a bit of my own sweet spot because I write a lot about women in technology and women broadly. Women have obviously suffered a lot in this system or this ecosystem that we've grown up in, right? There has been an ongoing wage gap.

Tom Sosnoff

>> Yep.

Gemma Allen

>> between men and women and i talked to a lot of women about this and i've come to realize that yeah part of it is a system it's systemically stacked a particular way and a lot of it is social conditioning right it's that you don't want to be seen to be bothersome even when we talk about women sharing data with each other some women don't because they're embarrassed right that's an actual data fact

Tom Sosnoff

>> yeah

Gemma Allen

>> how do you see a product like this changing so that's a fun question because one of the things that the

Tom Sosnoff

>> new technology today does, and one of the things that I think is amazing about all the AI discussions and stuff that's being released, is that AI essentially is a piece of technology that arbs out inefficiencies. and everything you just mentioned is because of workplace inefficiencies. the wage gap, the pay gap, the opportunity gap and all that kind of stuff is because the marketplace is currently inefficient. So think about AI taking those inefficiencies out because it's going to standardize and commoditize everything. And hopefully a lot of that stuff goes away. And That's kind of where we think this is all heading. So it becomes, what is your know-how and what is your ability to articulate your know-how more than it is anything else.

Gemma Allen

>> Okay. Let's talk about this economy because I love, in a lot of respects, that you have founded this company at this moment, right? Because there is what we can only describe as somewhat of a psychological war on talent happening right now. People feel stuck. That's documented, right? People are afraid to leave jobs because of the labor market and because of the hype around AI, what it means for the future of the labor force. It's TBD, right? Every day I feel like the message is a little bit different. But what are your thoughts on how that negates people's bargaining power or people's sense of opportunity in this moment? Have you heard or spoken to any folks on your platform where you feel like there is somewhat of a narrative challenge to overcome?

Tom Sosnoff

>> So I hear you, but I'm also a product of my own experience. So when I got out of college, interest rates were 20%. Unemployment was like nine and a half, and there were no jobs. So when I hear people say, oh, this is the worst economy ever for new graduates, I'm like, you know what? Just go back about four decades. It was 100 times worse. You can't even imagine. The whole reason that I started out as an option trader was because the only interview I got out of college was on Wall Street, and I got a job. Well. And so I went from being this political science major who was going to be something else to working on Wall Street for the next 40 years because that was the only interview I ever got. So I don't look at what's happening today as this situation which is dire by any stretch. I think that the opportunities out there for young people that are smart, that can articulate things, and that are willing to learn and take risks and work hard, I think they're probably better than ever now so I look at the world maybe it's a glass half full and maybe we've been around but every business we've built thinkorswim in 1999 2000 was the dot-com crash tastytrade when we built that was 2010 2011 the fiscal cliff and the whole world was falling apart and then we started this just after the pandemic and everything else so I love when everybody else is in chaos that's the best opportunity.

Gemma Allen

>> Traders buy the dip. Tom builds in the dip, right? Which I love. No, I think it's really important. And I do think you're right, Tom. So much of this labor market is also psychological, right? It's important that you reassure yourself above all else.

Tom Sosnoff

>> Well, sometimes people read like they're reading their own obituary. They're reading way too much into this, to scare themselves. Yeah. And I think things are, I get everything that's going on out there. And I understand, it's tough.

Gemma Allen

>> tough but on the other side it's always tough yeah it's never easy 20 % interest rates now we kind of forget that that ever existed right because we grew up you know last two decades or so in a very different

Tom Sosnoff

>> world. Before you were born

Gemma Allen

>> I know it's crazy okay so one thing that interested me when I also read the brief is you guys have done some interesting guerrilla marketing in launching this product right you've spent some you put some cash out there in terms of attracting subscribers and members. I love that. I love guerrilla marketing in all its forms. And I think it's fantastic. Talk a little bit about how you think about the kind of LTV math behind that, especially in the B2C business to consumer space.

Tom Sosnoff

>> Well, we have a lot of experience doing this. So we've built two billion dollar companies and we've also built a couple of hundred million dollar plus companies. So we have a lot of experience in building stuff around models that we call goodwill models, meaning I give you my technology. I'm not going to charge you for it. There's no subscription. You can have everything. And then you're like, well, what's the catch? There's no catch. It's goodwill marketing. And hopefully long -term, you'll use our technology. That's it. And we love that model. The other side to it is just to get tastylive off the ground. This time I decided to give away a million dollars and I gave it away in crypto only because it was the only thing I could give away legally.So we gave away a million dollars in crypto

Gemma Allen

>> and that was kind of fun i love it okay well Tom it's a fascinating company talk me through the journey where are you guys at and i'm sure you're steadily growingthis is bootstrapped

Tom Sosnoff

>> what are the kind of what's ahead like what we're oh yeah

Gemma Allen

>> give me the commercials here

Tom Sosnoff

>> we're totally bootstrapped but we're in a good position because we've had a lot of exits so that's not the hard partbut we're in our infancy. The team is young, they're smart, and we're building a much bigger financial ecosystem around it. tastylive's kind of like a powerful content marketing engine. We stream thousands of hours of content and we build and we do everything from tons of podcasts like this. And then we have our own streaming network. And then we also do lots of produced stuff. Like we have hundreds of millions of views on stuff that we've done over the last 15 years. I think it's close to 2 billion views. Well. So we have this following. Even though we like to say we're king of the crazies or king of the dipshits or whatever you want to say. But if you're an active trader, you've seen our stuff. And that's – we cater to a very active marketplace. So active option traders, active futures traders, active crypto traders, active prediction market traders. So we cater to anybody who's speculative and active.

Gemma Allen

>> That was actually my last question to you. Profile of typical subscriber member on the platform. Are these people at a particular point in their career? Are they people with a particular skill set? Are they earning in a particular band? What are you seeing?

Tom Sosnoff

>> No, they're just, they like speculation and risk. That's kind of our calling card. So it's people that, not necessarily gamblers, but people that like marketplace and strategic risk.

Gemma Allen

>> Okay. Well, Tom Sosnoff, king of the crazies yourself. Fascinating chat. Thank you so much for joining us on theCUBE.

Tom Sosnoff

>> Thank you for having me.

Gemma Allen

>> I'm Gemma Allen. This is theCUBE Studio here at the New York Stock Exchange. We connect Silicon Valley to Wall Street. This was episode one of our FinTech Exchange Series, and we are going to talk to some of the best minds in the industry over the next number of months. So stay tuned and thanks for watching. Thank you.