Shalin Madan immigrated to the US when he was 6 years old. He spent 20 years in the financial markets, of which he got into when he was a teenager. HIs first and best memory of the industry is when Netspace IPO's, and the stock went up 300% in the first day. Outside of finance and tech, he enjoys cooking, frequents the gym, and loves to travel. He's also a learner, studying philosophy, relationships, and of course, the macro economy.Shalin found himself frustrated with working for others, which drove him into entrepreneurship. When he came across his current venture, he invested in the firm, became a part of it, and eventually, became the last co-founder, in a company administrating funds with cutting edge technology.This is the creation story of Formidium.SponsorsCacheFlyClearQueryKiteworksLinkshttps://formidium.com/https://www.linkedin.com/in/shalin-madan-caia-b00239/Our Sponsors:* Check out Vanta and use my code CODESTORY for a great deal: https://www.vanta.comSupport this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/code-story/donationsAdvertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brandsPrivacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacy
I would just say from a personal standpoint, we live in an amazing time, irrespective of what people think. It is really amazing to see what's happening. I'm bullish. I'm bullish for the future. I'm generally an optimist. I can see technology making our staff's lives better. Not having to say use Excel, which would have been the primary quote unquote technology in our business.
That is, it's amazing to see our staff focusing their time on much more productive items because the technology is taking care of some of the things that made them less productive. My name is Shalam Adan. I am the co-founder and chief growth officer of Formidium.
This is CodeStory. A podcast bringing you interviews with tech visionaries. Six months moonlighting. Nothing on the back end. Who share what it takes to change an industry. I don't exactly know what to do next. It took many goes to get right. Who built the teams that have their back. The company is its people. The teams help each other achieve. Most proud of our team.
Keeping scalability top of mind. All that infrastructure was a pain. Yes, we've been fighting it as we grow. Total waste of time. The stories you don't read in the headlines. It's not an easy thing to achieve. Took it off the shelf and dusted it off and tried to begin. To ride the ups and downs of the startup life. You need to really want it. It's not just about technology.
All this and more on CodeStory. I'm your host, Noah Laphart. And today, how Shaolin Madan is building premier fund management by delivering services through superior technology. This episode is sponsored by KiteWorks. Legacy managed file transfer tools lack proper security, putting sensitive data at risk.
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Shaolin Madan immigrated to the U.S. when he was six years old. He spent 20 years in the financial markets, of which he got into when he was a teenager. His first and best memory of the industry is when Netscape IPO'd and the stock went up 300% in the first day. Outside of finance and tech, he enjoys cooking, frequents the gym, and loves to travel.
He's also a learner, studying philosophy, relationships, and of course, the macro economy. Shallon found himself frustrated with working for others, which drove him into entrepreneurship. When he came across his current venture as a client, he invested in the firm, became part of it, and eventually became the last co-founder in a company administrating funds with cutting-edge technology.
This is the creation story of Formidium.
Formidium is a fund administrator and its core business, but it's also a technology-enabled service provider.
We got started in the fund administration business, and for those who don't know what fund administration is effectively, any type of investment fund, be it a venture capital fund, a hedge fund, a real estate fund, a crypto fund, they need accounting, and that's what a fund administrator provides.
I ran into Formidia as a client, actually one of the first clients, and it was named, I had a different name back then. And I needed these services and I had my own hedge fund. I launched my own hedge fund in 2017. It was a quantitative global macro fund. We often think about technology.
We often think about investing the kind of more glamorous parts of the business, but then we don't realize that we actually need accounting. And some of the accounting use cases in a world of technology have become tremendously complex. And that's what Formidium seeks to solve, solves. And I was quite interested in it, particularly with the ability to steer a firm.
Having been an important staff for many years, I was getting a little frustrated with the people that I worked for. That was the reason I became an entrepreneur as part of it. I had been fortunate enough to at least have some savings and some risk appetite that I
plunge and to be blessed with having good partners and smart partners and a unified vision and be able to execute on that vision was tremendously appealing. I invested in the firm. I became an advisor to the firm, senior advisor. Eventually they asked me to be a co-founder and was invited as the last co-founder and the chief growth officer of the firm.
Let's dive into what you would consider either the company's MVP or your MVP at the company, right? So that first version of either the product or the product as you knew it when you came in and became that co-founder. Tell me about what sort of tools you were using to bring it to life and how long it took you to conceive it.
There was an interesting trend, of course, in the early 2010s of companies moving on to the cloud. What was an interesting gap in this particular part of the industry that we'll call it the back office or the accounting business was that there had not been any migration to the cloud.
And so there was an opportunity to effectively run, we'll call it full-scale accounting on a cloud-based system, effectively rebuilding an accounting platform, a fund administration platform from the ground up. So that was the original vision. It continues to be the vision.
I think that the main difference really is the capabilities, the thoughts around automation, obviously the introduction of artificial intelligence. These are all really new factors in the development process. The development, of course, at the beginning was very simple use cases, beginning being like the 2017-18 timeframe.
Trading equities, for example, trading it through a single broker like pretty simple API connection, download the data, clean it, automate it, do the accounting done. What started happening, particularly with the digital asset revolution, was the complexity and the amount of information that needed to be digested by accounting systems was simply not available.
And so we really focused our attention on that and effectively made a pivot in the 2019-2020 timeframe towards becoming a digital asset native platform. So that really is the hallmark of our evolution was focusing our attention on complexity, complex use cases for automation rather than, or I should say, maybe perhaps evolving from the simple use cases.
You kind of dove into a couple here, but I want to maybe settle into a decision or trade-off you had to make in the early days in building for Medium. It could be around approach, and I think you mentioned some of the things there. It could be around acceptance and where you start. Tell me, dive in a little bit more into maybe decisions, trade-offs you had to make.
And specifically, I'm curious about how you coped with those decisions.
So this is really a question I'm going to answer from an entrepreneur example. The difference between maybe how we went about things and how other companies have gone about things is that we did not receive a tremendous amount of external funding. And that caused us to be very careful and circumspect about how we spent our money, as well as how we were going to grow the business.
So oftentimes when you hear technology businesses, especially from Silicon Valley, there's a race to build the technology, perhaps before that technology is needed or there's a true use case for the technology. At least that was my observation. We had a service side to it.
And so the trade-off that we had to make, particularly in 2020, 21, 22, which was an absolute boom year, of course, for many companies, was automation for taking in business and basically using a technology-like process to run a callback. And we decided to do that. We had to do that because we didn't have a war chest to fund it.
But I think that was ultimately the decision because it allowed us to grow a book of business, a recurring book of business within our accounting business, which we have thus far redeployed the sort of cash flows that are generated from the service business into technology with the belief in it. And eventually, yes, a pure technology solution will be the outcome.
Of course, not just in our industry, but every industry. But it's really about the pathway as to how you get there as an entrepreneur.
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You've got, you've got the product as an entrepreneur. You've, you've got it. You, you see the vision moving forward. You've got a little bit of traction. Maybe tell me about how you progress the product and matured it. And I think to wrap it in a box a little bit, you know, and I know there's, there's two sides here. There's technology and services.
I'm curious about roadmap and how those things sort of interplay there in the roadmap and how you go about deciding, okay, this is the main, Next most important thing to build or to address with Formidio.
So is the $64,000 question, right? It's you have a limited number of resources and you have a limited number of needs and desires. The simple answer, of course, is you go with what the highest priority items are. There is a tendency with a lot of firms and people who have vision, I think, to want to build lots of products and think that would be lying perhaps if I didn't say that we
guilty of that as well. But I think that as the company matures, as your vision matures, as your product matures, you really begin to focus on that product and making it better. And that's really what we're thinking.
I also believe that, and we have evolved our processes as well along this line, is that really pairing the engineering team and the people who actually do the work, not just on an electronic email distribution basis, literally physically in the firm, pairing those people together, the people who are building the engineering and the automation around the people who actually do the work,
i think that has been vitally important in terms of accelerating our goals around automation so so i hear you talking about we and and how we do these things tell me about how you built your team and what do you look for in those people to indicate that they're the winning horses to join you so we have a a fairly distributed team globally
In North America, we have a home office in Chicago, but we have people all over the country. And then we have people in Singapore and we have a main office center in India. The firm has always really been focused around leveraging the sort of economy, the scale that we could achieve having that sort of business model. In terms of building the team, it's not easy. It's really not easy.
I think a lot of it, that thinking has changed as well. I always want to try to be as politically correct as possible. But I think that AI is a little bit of a game changer if I'm being blunt. And the philosophies around building a team have adapted, whereby we happen to be located in a secondary city in India.
Those people who know India understand that Bangalore, these are really the main tech centers. We have a very vibrant startup culture. new business formation and fellow professionals. We are located in the accounting capital, which is in another part of the country.
And so it's difficult to perhaps build the sort of teams that maybe some people are used to when you're in a secondary city that's known for accounting. We have been able to do it. It was a long and arduous process. But I think for us, it's really about finding upstanding people who are going to be loyal to the firm. We certainly have shown that loyalty back.
But people who are really looking for a nice life. It's a totally different answer, I think, than what others might give. But it's people who want to perhaps grow a family, who want to live in the same city and not have problems.
Those are the types of people that we try to find, because I think that in this very volatile world that we live in, having your staff stick around is vitally important in terms of getting the job done.
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For over 20 years, CashFly has held a track record for high-performing, ultra-reliable content delivery. While competitors call themselves fast or use cute animal names, only CashFly holds the record of being the fastest and serves customers like Adobe, the NFL, or Roblox, where content is created by users and must be delivered in real time.
For the first time ever, CodeStory listeners can get a 5TB CDN for free. Yep, you heard that right. Free. Learn more at cashfly.com slash codestory. That's C-A-C-H-E-F-L-Y dot com slash codestory. So this will be interesting given there's two sides to Formidium. I'm curious about scalability and I'm just going to ask it sort of plainly and let you take it away.
Was Formidium built to scale from day one, either from a product perspective or from a services perspective? Or have there been areas where you've had to fight it as you've grown?
It's always been built to scale. One of the questions and criticisms that we got early on from venture capitalists was they didn't believe in scale. And to give you a sense of how our business has grown, we effectively saw 2,000% between the years 2020 and say call it mid-2022. And we increased our staff at that time tremendously as well. And that goes back to the point
Do you turn down business in order to basically pump your chest and call yourself a technology firm? Or do you take perhaps a more pragmatic approach and you take on business? Do you increase that, perhaps not look like what people think of a technology firm should look like, but then use that as your core foundation to build it?
So in other words, service expertise, tech team alongside, parlay the service expertise into the technology. And that's the approach that we took, partly by necessity, right? If you don't have outside funding, you have to fund your operations one way or another. It has always been our goal to scale.
It's always been our goal to be the quote unquote Amazon of our business to offer services to the guy who has a $500,000 special purpose vehicle that he wants to invest in, say, SpaceX, or to service a multi-billion dollar business. That's always been our business model. And the only way we knew we would get to that point is through a technology solution. It's like building a house, right?
First, you build the foundation, you put the frame up, and then you start putting the bricks or whatever your siding is, and you build it. And that's exactly how we built this company. Again, not without turbulence. It's been a rather turbulent time, I would say, especially the last couple of years. But we've still, through that, been able to grow, thank God.
I think that the introduction of a lot of the tools that we brought on with respect to the technology has allowed us to take on more business and make our existing staff much more efficient. I would just say from a personal standpoint, we live in an amazing time. Irrespective of what people think, it is really amazing to see what's happening. I'm bullish. I'm bullish for the future.
I'm generally an optimist. I can see technology making our staff's lives better. Not having to say use Excel, which would have been to the memory, but a little technology in our business. That is, it's amazing to see our staff focusing their time on much more productive items because the technology is taking care of some of the things that made them less productive.
As you step out on the balcony, you look across all that you have built with Formidium. What are you most proud of?
The fact that we were able to build this firm. from the ground up, almost completely boosts Fred, which I think in this day and age is almost unheard of. And when I say build it, as a leader in fund administration, but in particular, the most complex areas of the county, which in this case is Cripple. We are absolutely considered the leader in that space of technology and know-how standards.
I'm super proud of that. I'm super proud of that I was able to participate in a hyper growth situation. I've never been in a hyper growth situation as either an employee or let alone a founder. And to be able to navigate, only have a few bruises and a few cuts and nicks after that in terms of the indigestion that inevitably occurs. I'm super proud of that.
We are going to be around Touchwood in a few years and Think like a rocket ship when you're starting a business. You have to escape the atmosphere in order to get into space and to your momentum kind of work on itself, I should say. If you don't, by the way, you come crashing back into the ground, which is what happens with a lot of businesses.
I'm proud that we have escaped the atmosphere in business parlance.
Let's flip the script a little bit. Tell me about a mistake you made and how you and your team responded to it.
During COVID, it was extremely difficult to find people, hire people. And I think our process, we didn't really have much of a process. It's pretty much, are you interested in hiring? Okay, come on board. We ballooned the firm to a pretty large number of people. We hired a thousand people in the span of 18 months. I don't even know how that's possible when I think about it, but we did it.
If you recall, COVID was bad enough in the United States, everything that was going on, but it was actually exponentially worse around the world. So we hired way too many people. Whether you have automation or not, we just didn't have a grasp of our numbers. The last few years have been a process of rationalizing and reconciling that mistake.
I guess I like to say that two wrongs don't make a right. You have to basically correct a wrong, and it is what it is. You take responsibility for it. But where we are today, and I think this is why everybody should be rather bullish, is that it doesn't matter, at this point for us, how much automation there is. We need people. We need people to develop.
a service we we just need people in terms of where our staffing levels are i'm very happy with how we've been able to optimize technology our staffing our business in general and get past that mistake i'd also mention that when you are early in a business you will make a lot of mistakes and your reputation can suffer frankly for a couple of years
I remember back in the 90s, back in 95, 96, you would try to call AOL, America Online, by modem and it would always be busy and you'd never be able to get on. They lost a lot of customers. I remember I had to quit AOL and go to somewhere else because I literally couldn't get through.
So in some ways, the company's success can be a turnoff because people who might want to use your service can't use your service and or they're not getting the service that perhaps they wanted in the first place because you're just so busy. Obviously not done intentionally. This is what it is. So I think that we've been able to rectify those mistakes and get past that. And I'm very proud of that.
So this will be super fun to hear the passion in your voice, the excitement. What does the future look like for Formidium, the product side, the service side, and for your whole team?
The product side is that the next evolution of Formidium is so if you are a company that has built internal software to service your own needs, ostensibly there is a market for others to now use your software. That is the evolution of being a service company. to actually selling your technology to your, quote-unquote, competitors.
In other words, we are perfectly willing to have a separate service business separate out our technology as a separate entity and sell it to people who might otherwise compete with us. So I think that's the most exciting part of our evolution is we think that we're at a point now where our technology is very saleable, primarily because it can be used for complex use cases in the accounting world.
we've also built it just as you very well know it is you know just building something that can be put for sale and is usable actually usable not just a nice ui that's powerful that's the vision the vision is to continue what we're doing and start redeploying our resources into kind of the sales and the marketing our software to our peers.
I also think that because of this, the leaps and bounds that we have made in our technology, I think that having disparate solutions in firms with different technologies, it might not make as much sense. It might make more sense for us and others to entertain ways to work together.
closer perhaps joint ventures and mergers and utilizing this technology stack that we have spent a lot of time on and spent a lot of money on and worked on very hard and having what i call a unified brain to to run services that are effectively the same across our industry we're all trying to sell accounting
so why do we have disparate platforms particularly when we have this one platform that is a unified solution it doesn't you don't need to piecemeal three different applications together cobble something together we have a unified solution that it lends itself to having a bigger firm that kind of answers hopefully as well that previous question you asked about scalability i think that is i think the definition of scalability when you can just simply staple on somebody else and use your existing infrastructure
OK, I want to switch to you, Sheldon. Tell me who influences the way that you work. Name a person or many persons or something you look up to and why.
Obviously, the greats. I have been influenced by the greats. I have a tremendous amount of respect. People like Steve Jobs, Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk. I can't say enough in terms of the influence that they have provided to me, to others, to go down this path, because it's not an easy thing.
On the investment side, of course, because I am an investor in terms of my original foundation, Warren Buffett, of course, is a major influence because at the end of the day, as a company founder, you are a capital allocator. You're a resource allocator. And thinking in terms of returns on investment, thinking like an investor is a tremendous skill set for any entrepreneur.
Last question, Shalen. So you're getting on a plane. And you're sitting next to a young entrepreneur who's built the next big thing. They're jazzed about it. They can't wait to show it off to the world and can't wait to show it off to you right there on the plane. What advice do you give that person having gone down this road a bit?
If you don't mind, I'll show myself. But I would, if I like the idea, I'd recommend that they bring me on as an advisor. I think that there's a lot of, and just put myself to it. Yeah. but put myself to the side for a second.
The one thing that I learned, and I learned this as a quote-unquote failed entrepreneur in my first business, is that the cost of having good mentors is so negligible relative to the sort of benefit you can get. Because it really makes no sense to repeat the same mistakes as every entrepreneur, which I made every single mistake in the book lab. That makes me a better person, by the way.
It makes everybody who's made mistakes, I think, is a better person for it. It's just part of life. But the first thing I would recommend is it doesn't matter. Your team matters, of course. But having a mentor and somebody to guide you and accelerate that from zero to one is absolutely the most important thing you can do as an entrepreneur, in my opinion.
That's fantastic advice. Well, Sheldon, thank you for being on the show today. Thank you for telling the creation story of Formidium.
Thanks so much, Noah. It's a pleasure to be here.
And this concludes another chapter of Code Story. Code Story is hosted and produced by Noah Laphart. Be sure to subscribe on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or the podcasting app of your choice. And when you get a chance, leave us a review. Both things help us out tremendously. And thanks again for listening.