Q4 2024 Update: Growing ForecastOS

Charlie Reese -

Hey y'all!

It's been a while since my last personal newsletter.

Today, I'm excited to update you on:

  1. The status of ForecastOS (which I founded a year ago)
  2. How I'm avoiding getting fat in my 30s
  3. What we're considering for our next car
  4. Embracing my founder personality traits

1. The status of ForecastOS

I founded ForecastOS in September 2023.

The goal of the company remains largely the same: providing data and software solutions to institutional investors and finance professionals. Our offering is a mix of open-source software, financial SaaS (Software as a Service), and data as a service.

Our goal continues to be to build quant-first offerings otherwise similar to the giants in the space, like Bloomberg, FactSet, MSCI, S&P Global, and/or LSEG. It would be an understatement to say that we still have a lot of work to do!

But despite being a small team of 2, we've made good progress in the past year:

A) Our annualized run-rate revenue is over C$200,000, admittedly ahead of where we hoped to be in Q4, and over 10x where we were a year prior.

B) We're ready to kick off a Q1 2025 seed round fundraising process to help us grow the team to 5 to accelerate sales, product, and dataset development.

C) We've reached several meaningful milestones:

  • Our investment system of record application (we call it Skylight) is ready for institutional use
  • We've made +1000 features for ML-driven financial forecasts available. They can be consumed anywhere in 1 line of code through ForecastOS FeatureHub
  • We've advanced our open-source portfolio engineering and backtesting framework InvestOS
  • We've created a couple proprietary financial datasets that we're testing for alpha
  • We've developed a process to price / value datasets
  • We've released a ~13 minute demo building and backtesting an ML-powered market and factor neutral quantitative investment strategy using ForecastOS FeatureHub and InvestOS; what used to take an institutional team a full year now takes minutes!

With the above said, there couldn't be more left to do.

If you know anyone who can help build the next great software and data company for institutional investors and finance professionals - a systematic institutional investor, savvy VC, or quant finance engineer - please let me know!

2. How I'm avoiding getting fat in my 30s

If you've visited my wife and I in BC, you probably know that we have a garage gym. Because of this, I was reluctant to join a gym near our office in Vancouver (despite packing on some wedding-season lbs).

That was a mistake that I have since corrected. I found a great $60 / month gym downtown that's never busy at lunch. I'd tell you, but then it might get busy... so you'll just have to take my word for it.

I'm not sure there is a better way to reinvigorate yourself than a quick lunch workout. I wish I could be an early morning person and work out at 6:00 AM everyday (which I've done with moderate success for various stretches of time), but that habit never seemed to stick for me. Lunch time workouts, however, are easy to stick to.

A quick note: I can't explain why, and I haven't deeply investigated this, but lifting weights meaningfully reduces my stress levels. Picking up heavy things calms the mind in a way that cardio doesn't. Much like cardio gives me energy that lifting weights doesn't.

3. What we're considering for our next car

For the last several years I've been interested in road fatality statistics in relation to the cars people choose to drive.

The data I've seen suggests you're an order of magnitude less likely to die in a midsize luxury SUV vs a common compact car, although there might be some selection bias at play.

To me, it seems sensible to chose to drive a car that meaningfully reduces your chance of early fatality. Heavy cars generally do that, albeit while increasing risk for other road users. Given this, it seems odd that car manufacturers like Rivian are allowed to release +6000 lbs EVs to the masses!

All this is to say: our next car will likely be a Volvo :)

4. Embracing my founder personality traits

I've always (I think rightfully) thought of founders as:

  • difficult,
  • stubborn,
  • machiavellian, and
  • ruthless.

However, when the aforementioned bad traits are mixed with:

  • obsessive work ethic,
  • competitiveness,
  • skill / creativity / curiosity / insight (developed from years of relevant work and exploration),
  • long-term orientation,
  • honesty, and
  • a sense of justice,

you have the makings of a great founder.

My experience has been that you rarely find successful founders without both the good and bad traits I've listed above. Further, I think some of the bad founder traits are just as necessary as the good founder traits.

Without some of the bad traits, it's too easy to be pushed off the ball. If you aren't at least a little stubborn or machiavellian, you're more likely to accept the status quo and/or undersell yourself, both of which are behaviours that are unlikely to lead to success.

Similarly, founders with few of the good traits seem to flame out around seed / series A; it's hard to build a successful business if you don't deeply understand the problem space, aren't deeply committed, and aren't deeply respected by your staff.

All this is to say: I seem to have some of the bad founder traits. I've spent my life working around them, managing them, and apologizing for them. And to be clear, I think people with those traits should cultivate the ability to manage them; if you can't control your behaviour, it controls you.

Fortunately, I seem to also have the good founder traits. And as a founder, I'm finally accepting both the good and bad traits as part of who I am and who I need to be.

I feel fortunate to be in a role where I get the chance to be myself. To put my good and bad traits to work for fun and profit.

It feels natural.

Until next time - your friend in Vancouver,

Charlie