Vlad Tenev

Was that a federal agency we're dealing with or a California agency?

Federal.

Yeah.

All brokers are regulated by a body called FINRA.

It's called an SRO, a self-regulatory organization.

So it has a mandate from the SEC, which is a federal agency to

essentially self-manage the licensure are the people who work their government employees they work for finra yeah again it's like quasi-government but not not formally government because you know the government agencies they don't want to directly oversee every brokerage because there's a lot of them and the sec would have to get quite big so

They oversee FINRA, which regulates the brokerages, and then only the serious stuff escalates to SEC approval.

So we're registered with the SEC, but regulated by FINRA.

Yeah, so...

We had to get licensure, which is another thing that scared people off because this was before FinTech.

Nobody was really getting licensed.

So the solution was we just had to knock on a whole bunch of doors and not give up.

So we probably talked to between 75 and 100 investors to raise the initial million dollars of seed capital.

And yeah, that allowed us to get over the hill, get our license.

Was that the first year, would you say?

Yeah, we raised $3 million between February of 2012 and...

mid 2013 and we got our approval in mid to late 2013 and that was a big moment because then we could start marketing and then we created still haven't built anything still haven't built anything i mean we started we we we ran some experiments it's still setting the stage to allow it to happen exactly so we built a mobile app actually that was sort of like a social network for traders

And we said, okay, the plan initially was if we could create this community of traders and get them engaged and then get our approvals and layer the brokerage on top, this would be a way to make progress during that period.

Before you had permission to be a broker.