Leadership, Growth, and Real-World Lessons with Andrew Lebbos | The Biz To Biz Podcast

You're now watching B2B Vault, the Biz to Biz podcast hosted by Allen Kopelman, powered by Nationwide Payment Systems, the number one solution for payment processing.

Hey everybody, welcome to today's episode of B2B Vault, the Biz to Biz podcast sponsored by NPS One. You can visit our website nationwidepaymentsystems.com today. All my guests are special, but today we have Andrew Lebos. From Benzinga, and we're going to dive into the world of what's going on with Benzinga. What has he done there? How their business has changed, where it's going in the future. And it's cool. I'm in Fort Lauderdale and he's down the street in Miami. And welcome to the show, Andrew.

Thanks for having me. Glad to be on with the neighbor.

All right. So tell us a little bit about your, you know, Benzinga, how long you've been there, and like what's going on at— what's going on there today, what's exciting?

Absolutely. So Benzinga started off in 2009. We wanted to bridge the gap between institutional investors and retail investors. Back then, if you didn't have a Bloomberg terminal, you had no information on a lot of the tech companies we love today— NVIDIA, And pretty much you were left in the dark in regards to any smaller mid-cap stocks. So we started covering the small and mid-cap stocks in a way that retail investors could understand and got very popular very fast. Fast forward a few years, Thinkorswim added us to their platform. And fast forward a few years, 2019, I came on. At the time, we were producing about 100 stories per day. All about the stock market in a way that was written for everyone. And in order to write our news, we were producing a bunch of data, aggregating it from different sources, relationships with CEOs, with analysts. And I came on and I said, hey, why aren't we delivering this data in the same way that a FactSet or Refinitiv is delivering it to partners? So started working with fintechs, built a licensing business, and now it's our, our biggest business line and our focus, you know, helping fintechs across the globe, uh, add cool features and data that investors need to their platforms to enable smarter investment.

So when you're talking about data, for everybody who's listening, it's about when you log into your stock portfolio— we won't mention names of companies— you go in there and you're looking at a stock, and then there's usually like a few— what does Benzinga say? What does this guy say? What does that guy— what are the ratings, right? That's the kind of data that you're talking about.

Yeah, exactly. So imagine you log into your 401k portal, um, and you pull up Apple, for example. There's a logo that pops up. That's a lot of times from Benzinga's data suite. Um, there's a chart. They're getting that from someone. There's fundamentals, earnings, dividends, analyst bank ratings on the stock, and then of course news. And all of those datasets are from folks like Benzinga.

Yeah. So that's, you know, that's exciting. So when we look at, you know, fintech and we talk about, you know, what's going on with fintech, you know, in general, You know, it's become like a worldwide phenomenon. Everything is fintech, right? Every kind of company is some kind of financial technology company. Like we're in the payment space and you're in the data space. And so, you know, so what's the emerging trends going on with in your side of that world?

That's a good question. Specifically in trade tech, um, brokerages and research platforms across the globe want more information about US equities. Anywhere, you know, Eastern Europe, Western Europe, APAC is huge, Africa, LATAM, like even the Nordics, we see a huge demand for— of course, all these brokerages, they offer their country stock, right, the exchanges within their countries. But everybody wants exposure to the US markets, and when they start enabling investing in the US markets, they need the data to support that portion of their, of their site, right? So like, um, you know, if Korea, for example, uh, South Korea is one of the largest holders of NVIDIA stock Wow. Right. They, they all want to buy US stocks. And so those brokerages in South Korea need to add news about US stocks. They need to add analyst ratings so that their users can invest in a smart way. And so we've seen a globalization of US equity investing on a retail level. Of course, the institutions have always invested internationally, but the, the barrier to entry across the globe is really coming down with, with new technologies that have been developed.

So how does, you know, everybody, every podcast I'm on, we're always talking about AI, right? So it's, it's crazy. I always ask AI like any crazy question I can ask AI, right, just to see what the answer is, right? So how, I mean, AI, how is that affecting like what's going on with like the stock market and investing?

Yeah, there's pros and cons to it for sure. As a data vendor, I'll talk about like our backend first and then I'll talk about how it's affecting the front ends. As a data vendor, it's helped us bring products to market much faster, right? A lot of the grunt work or the QA can be automated It's helped us scale volume as well because it's saving time for our data teams, our engineering teams. I think that we're in a— Benzinga is in a really unique position where we're large enough, we're at scale where we have a lot of enterprise logos, enterprise partners, but we're still small and new enough that we're not entrenched in legacy platforms. A tech perspective, we're really nimble and, and able to use all of the new technologies that are being launched. So in that sense, I'm super grateful for AI. Um, in another sense, uh, AI needs strong data inputs. So when I was building out the plan for 2024, 2025, you know, we were focusing on retail brokerage platforms. That's the, you know, majority of our clients. Our fastest growing segment is now AI models, AI startups. They all need, you know, raw text news or conference call transcripts. Analyst ratings is very popular with the AI companies. And again, we're in a unique position where we are open and flexible to working with these companies. A lot of our competitors, they don't want to license to the AI companies. They don't want anyone to use the data with AI. Our legal team was on it. We figured out a way to do it. And it's been a really good growth lever for us as a company. On the flip side, we're talking about cons. You know, some of the commoditized datasets, I think, you know, there's players that are entering the space that are vibe coding or, you know, automating a lot of different endpoints. Some of their quality is very good, some of it's very bad, but a lot of the commoditized stuff, um, will, will be driven down in price. We understand that, and, and we, we are creating proprietary datasets, uh, you know, proprietary insights in order to continue providing value to our, to our users. Um, we've also seen some startups that have tried and failed to produce news, right? Like, you know, AI is writing all our emails. Why can't it write stock news? But it's really easy to see the stock news. It doesn't provide good engagement on brokerage platforms. And the large banks of the world, they realize that it's not at the point where you can have an AI news desk and start breaking stories, right? Like, we have 50 writers in-house. They're on the ground, they're at the conferences, they're calling CEOs, they're calling sell-side banks, getting novel breaking insights. It becomes a differentiator for us, you know?

Yeah, that's one thing with AI I've noticed. Like now some platforms will have on it when they post a story, it'll say, oh, generated by AI. And I'm like, man, that's like super scary. Like if you're not careful, you don't know what you're reading. And, you know, agentic commerce was— as was get— was be— it's like a really hot topic, you know. I don't— I'm not sure I want to go like into, you know, OpenAI, ChatGPT, or Claude and go, hey, here's 10 grand, you know, or 50 grand, uh, you know, go buy me some stocks, here's the login to my Schwab account. I mean, that's kind of scary, right?

Yeah, um, there, I mean, like, Y Combinator, for example, uh, is, is very bullish on AI hedge funds. Um, I know some people in the industry that are building like trading powered by AI. Maybe one day we'll get there. I don't think that we're there yet, honestly.

No, I mean, I saw OpenAI, they were promoting this big thing where you're going to be able to go on ChatGPT, and they were linking up all these Shopify stores, and then the plug got pulled on it. They pulled the plug. They're like, no way, we're not doing that, because there was a— I bet you they came across some kind of liability issue, like, oh, somebody's going to go in there and the AI is going to go bananas and spend $10,000 on Allen's credit card, right?

Yeah, once, once, once you start purchasing, like once you start transacting, I think we're very far off from a world where AI is transacting without human approval. Like that, that is going to be a very hard boundary for companies to break down. Of course they're working towards it, but I mean, we talk about it internally, right? Like, and even my friends and I talk about it, you know, with our job, with the whole, uh, Citrini research piece and Citadel countered it, that whole thing. And the decision makers will— as long as humans are on Earth, they're going to want to be the decision makers. At the end of the day, someone's going to need to sign off on it.

Yeah, I had one of those Alexas in my house, and it was in a room where there was a TV. And Alexa is going, "Oh, Rocky needs more treats based on when the last time. Do you want to order more treats?" Well, the next thing I look at my phone, there's an order from Amazon. I'm like, whoa, whoa, whoa. I had to go call— I had to like get online and like tell— and I had to unplug that thing because it did it to me twice. I was like, I didn't order all that stuff, you know. And they heard the TV say yes, and I was like, no way, man, that's like too crazy. So Alexa's unplugged. I have to put it somewhere where there's no television because it, it listens to things in your conversation. And so you got to be careful. So when you talk about like the bit, you know, your company went through a huge shift. So all of a sudden here's this like news platform going over to data, and how has that changed the, you know, the income of the company? Because now it's, you know, the APIs and the data, that seems to be the main portion of your business?

Yeah, it's our priority. So I'll do a little history, a little Benzinga history lesson. So I joined in 2019, we had about 30 people. We were primarily a media site, right? The majority of our activities, our resources were dedicated to Benzinga.com, trying to break news, trying to gain views, etc. Um, in 2020, we all know COVID hit. Um, we scaled down our events business, we scaled down some, some other parts of the business. We got down to like 18 employees. Um, and then the retail trading boom happened, and everyone was at home, they were trading, everyone was interested in, you know, managing their own wealth, uh, you know, doing their own research. A bunch of brokerages popped up, right? Like, um, the Robinhoods of the world grew exponentially. eToro, you know, even Fidelity went primarily mobile. Um, it was a wild time, you know, and right before that, commission-free trading hit. And so it was, I mean, it was just like a good series of events for trade tech. Um, at that time, we were pretty much, you know, we had our news feed, we had like analyst ratings, dividends, earnings. Was pretty much our main offerings. And we were primarily working with the big enterprises. The president at the time, Luke Jacoby, he and I, we— I was living downtown and he was living close to it and we kind of broke COVID law and we started going to the office together and he and I were working nonstop and we repackaged our different data offerings to allow for startup use. And, you know, midsize use where a lot of the, a lot of our competitors just give enterprise pricing. You either can afford it or not. We wanted to kind of foster this fintech wave and, you know, break down the barrier to entry for new companies. And so that helped us explode the licensing business. And then we started adding new products that we were already obtaining for our newsfeed, started breaking them out into smarter products. And then, you know, slowly it started to snowball referrals of different companies. And then one enterprise, you know, adds our dataset, their competitor needs to add it to try to help with their market share. You know, the word started spreading internationally and it's slowly but surely become our focus as a company. The thing I'll say though is that The Benzinga API suite is powered by our news desk. And so the news desk is the core, it's the backbone of our business, right? Like they're producing 200, 300 stories per day, 1,000 headlines, breaking headlines per day. And that's what you see on the Benzinga.com site. That's what you can also license it and put it on your platform. And so our media site has grown and it will continue to grow from a viewership perspective. Um, we just focused internally, you know, on, on licensing that data and content, uh, over the past couple of years.

Yeah, data is definitely king. When people— when I talk to people, I tell them all the time, I go, when you see these huge payment companies, Stripe, Square, PayPal, don't look at them. They're not really payment companies. These, these companies are collecting data. And if you don't think they're collecting data you can forget it because that's their main business. So let's ask this. So if I'm a fintech founder today, I'm sitting on a pile of valuable data. What's the one thing that I'm probably underestimating about taking that data and turning it into a revenue engine?

That's a great question. And there's a bunch of consultants that are popping up in the space that are helping with just that. Um, the, the quantitative hedge funds are so intelligent, and the way that they use data is so interesting. Like, you'd be surprised what data is of value to them and, um, could help with their investing models. That's the first thing that I would, I would think about, right? I would think, you know, can I structure this data As long as it's compliant, of course. And would a quantitative hedge fund want to purchase this data from my company? The second thing I would look at is depending on what the data is, would this data— if someone could visualize this data in a graph or in a table, would it help with their investing decisions? Right. And that's, that's kind of how we assess our data feeds, right? Like one example, benzinger.com, we get like 15 million monthly active readers. We figured it might be interesting to see like trending stocks on our site, like what, what stocks are exploding in traffic out of nowhere. And when we were looking at it, we were looking at it for our own news desk. We thought to ourselves, would this information be interesting to investors, right? Should investors know like this random industrial stock has 100x'd in traffic over the last week? We decided yes, and Trending Tickers is now a huge product for us. So I guess long story short, I would try to put myself in the shoes of the retail investor and think, is this data of value? And frankly, all of us— I mean, I don't know who's all listening to the podcast, but a lot of us, myself included, uh, we are the retail investors. So like, would this data help in your investing decision-making? If the answer is yes, then you might have a play.

So, you know, another big subject, financial related, that crosses into everything going, you know, things we're thinking about here at Nationwide Payment Systems and things being discussed in the fintech world in general is cryptocurrency. Is that something that you guys are tracking also?

Yes, definitely. So one of the reasons that we've grown is because we're, we're not afraid to cover the things that like the emerging markets, you know, the scarier topics. Right. And I understand from, you know, the large incumbent news providers, they're a little skittish in terms of, you know, crypto, or at one point the marijuana stocks or the psychedelic stocks. Um, you know, if you— across the, across the industry, there's, there's a pause when it comes to those things. We, we kind of dive, dive headfirst into that type of stuff. And if, if there's, if there's a money-making opportunity or if there's movement in investing, then we'll cover it. Um, and so we've been covering crypto for a very long time. We focus on the major coins, of course, right? The ones with validity. We don't want to misguide our readers or subscribers. But if something crazy in the market happens, we'll cover it for sure. And if you think about the brokerages that we work with from the licensing side, the majority of them have a crypto offering. It's usually like the top 10 coins in volume, or even if it's like an ETF for Bitcoin, right? Like, right, everybody, everybody has something available to their investors. Um, we provide the logos for all of the crypto coins to a lot of the platforms. Uh, we provide news coverage. The other datasets are a little harder to produce, right? Because Ethereum doesn't have quarterly earnings or, you know, analyst coverage, stuff like that. Um, but we, we cover where we can. Yes.

And what do you think about like stablecoin? I, I mean, my opinion on stablecoin is it's just got a long ways to go, but I don't see the— I mean, when people talk about, oh, we need digital currency, I'm like, there's digital currency. I have digital currency on my phone. I got digital currency in my wallet. You know, currency is not walking around with a pile of paper, you know. And a bag of coins anymore, you know. Digital currency is just numbers on a piece of paper. So what, what is the, you know, what do you— what's the whole take on that? Like, all of a sudden we're gonna, gonna get rid of dollars and we're gonna have, uh, you know, everybody's gonna be walking around, you know, with stablecoins on their phone? I mean, we're getting rid of the penny, so, you know, we actually discussed that on the podcast recently, like what's going to happen to all the cash registers, credit card machines, point-of-sale systems. The penny goes away. And we had a guy on who wrote software that he's going to try to get companies to use so they can fix that problem before it's a problem.

Interesting. I'll check that one out. Um, all of, all of my, uh, takes on this, by the way, are Andrew Lebowitz takes, not Benzinga's, right? I do not represent the, uh, the opinion of Benzinga.

Well, you don't give— you're not get— we're not giving any investment advice.

No financial advice.

Let's be clear.

Yes. No investment. Um, I advise to read Benzinga News. That's, that's my only advice that I got. Um, stablecoins. I mean, yeah, I'm kind of with you. Like, I— my, uh, my digital money I don't see my money, right? I get my check and then it goes to my Chase app, and then I use the credit card, and then I pay off the credit card in my Chase app. I never see my cash. Um, there may be a world one day where we move towards, you know, a different form of currency, but I don't foresee it in the short term. I, I don't really see the play there. That might be short— small-minded of me, but, um, I agree with you.

Yeah, I think it's, you know, you know, I think the day when you're gonna, you know, walk into pizza place and everybody's paying with, uh, coin— we, we actually were doing a lot of crypto to fiat transactions when Bitcoin was booming. Even it was at like $25,000 at the time, it was a really booming thing because I called them the crypto bros. All these people who had crypto, and then they're, they're selling it. Because, you know, I actually met a guy one time and he told me, he goes, I had a boss— he had a boss, and he told his boss, he goes, I don't need a lot of money. He goes, what I want you to do is pay me with these Bitcoins. And he got his boss to pay him like a portion of his paycheck, like about 25 or 30% of it, or 50% at some point in time. And Bitcoin, at the time Bitcoin wasn't even $100, and that guy is a gazillionaire.

Wow.

Because he was, you know, it went up and went crazy when it went to $25,000. This guy had tons of Bitcoin and just sold it and retired at a young age. It's kind of crazy. I think back and I go, yeah, I could have bought some Bitcoins at like $100. Who knows? You know, you can't— you don't ever know. It's like, could you dial back and go, yeah, I want to go back 40, 50 years, and you're going to buy Apple penny stock and Yahoo and blah, blah, blah? We can't dial it back. But yeah, I mean, but today data is king and information is king, and that's what people use to figure out, like, how to invest, you know, how to, how to do that. So we're Where do you see, like, what do you see, like, in the, in the future? Like, what's, like, going to be the next— is there, like, an emerging market that you guys are looking at that's gonna pop up? I mean, I know, like, I have some funds that I have and they contain international investments, and now I see that's, like, reversing where those countries are investing into the United States now. So what besides that kind of thing and crypto and other stuff, what kind of emerging markets do you see happening?

Yeah, it's a great question. Um, I, I agree. I also have some exposure to international markets personally. Um, I think the globalization of, of investing is, is a huge trend, right? Like you said, countries want to invest in other countries' stocks, right? Um, and we want to do this. We're doing the same thing from the US externally and then other countries into the US, and it's, it's across borders, right? So, um, borderless investing is happening. Um, we see a lot of interest in prediction markets. Um, it's so early and it's so young, right? But, uh, it's super interesting, and the use cases for it are extremely interesting. Like, of course, there's, there's all of these, you know, all this news about issues around it. That's always going to happen in, in an early market.

Well, when you talk about prediction market, we're talking about like Koushi and these kind of things where it's like borderline gambling, right?

Some of it, yeah. I mean, some of it could, you know, there's an argument for it, um, but a lot of it is, is very applicable to the investing world, right? Like, there's, there's a bunch of different ways that you can hedge your traditional investing with a prediction market odd that might suit you better than an options contract, or, you know, just, just buying or selling a certain stock. Um, there's, there's a bunch of different use cases for it in the, in the traditional investing world outside of just like the sports trading that people are doing. And so we started to cover it, actually. We do like 10 stories a day on prediction markets and how it affects— how it could affect traditional assets, like the crossover between the two. And a simple example that I like to share is like, uh, the Fed interest rate hikes, right? Yeah, there's hundreds of thousands, sometimes millions of dollars in trades on this. Public opinion is usually right. Um, the, the odds of this, you know, a rate hike or, you know, no rate hike is going to affect your portfolio. And so you can use it to make trading decisions. I think it's going to grow as a market itself, and I think it's going to be used more and more for traditional investing uses.

Yeah, that's pretty wild. So as we're finishing up here, people want to find more information about— if you haven't been on Benzinga, Um, I want to ask you one other question. I see, I get a lot of emails from companies, oh, pay us XYZ amount of money, we'll get your article on Benzinga. Is that real or that's BS?

That is absolutely not real. Um, and I, I get just as many emails being at Benzinga asking to get an article placed. Um, so it's funny to hear from the other side. That's hilarious.

Okay, so all right, so we put, we put the kibosh on that. It's fake. Do not spend your money on people telling you they're getting your article on Benzinga. They probably spelled the name wrong, and that's some fake website. It's spelled Benzinga with two G's or two Z's or something, and then they send it to you and you gave them $500. But so if people want to get in touch, they want to read Benzinga, go to the website. They want to get in touch with you hit you up on LinkedIn. Is that the best way?

LinkedIn is great. And if you want to check out the products, benzinga.com/api, it's our— all of our licensing products. And there's a contact form there. Happy to provide trials if people are interested in seeing what we built.

And what kind of companies are usually subscribing to these APIs?

As of late, AI companies across the board. Fintech companies in the tradetech space, you know, uh, research platforms, um, trading applications, media sites that want to add pricing and different, uh, you know, aspects to their site. Anybody that wants to show information about U.S. equities.

All right, cool. And anything else that you want to give us, um, some tips or something? Not— well, you can't give any trading tips. We're not getting trading tips today. Today, but give us like some actionable, like tell us some, give us a nugget on as we part, as we're going to end the podcast, give us some kind of takeaway.

Yeah, fair enough. Um, use AI for as much as you possibly can. Test it, push it. Uh, it is not the same as it was a year ago. I have agents running all day for a bunch of stuff that I would have done manually. It's quadrupled my output. I'm blown away by what it can do at this point. That's, that's my nugget on a business perspective.

Yeah, on a business perspective, I will say this. When I tell people this all the time, young people, I don't care what your age is, if you're not— if you don't know how to use AI, get an account, start messing around with it, figure it out. I don't know, some of the— one thing I'll say is not real. There's no one you can pay money to that can get your company's information like sucked in there. So when somebody types a question, the answer is Allen or the answer is Nationwide Payment Systems. That's— I don't even know. I don't even know if anybody can make that happen, but it can do a lot of other stuff. Research, blog posts, clean stuff up, write code. I mean, I've been messing around with Claude. Man, it blows. Blows my mind what Claude can do. I mean, 100%, like, blows my mind, the whole thing. I was a tester for OpenAI, so I got a test account. I didn't have to pay for it when they first were testing, and I was blown away by what that could do. And there's tons of other, like, AI, um, AI software out there that does SEO and does all kinds of crazy stuff. So I definitely say people that— if you want to keep your job, you're working today, you want to keep your job in the future, learn how to use AI. Would you agree with that?

100%. Try to use it for everything and anything you can.

Every— yeah, it'll talk. Well, I'm— I have friend— I have somebody that told me they talk to it because they— if they're lonely, they talk to the AI. I'm like, that's nuts. I don't want to talk to it.

That's crazy.

Talk to people. Let's not be all closed in and all that. That's why I love having these conversations. All right. Any other parting words, famous statements that you like to say?

No, I appreciate this. And sad to see Florida get knocked out. I hope everybody's brackets doing okay after that. We were just talking about it before the show. And yeah, no, I appreciate this tremendously.

Yeah, I saw like that some post and it said on the official NCAA bracket that there was like the other night after Florida got taken out, and then the night before the guy with the glasses beat the other team, that there was like less than 10 brackets left or something that were still intact. But everything is broken now that Florida— there cannot be a survivor in there, literally it can't be. But I don't know, they keep talking about it and You know, March, it's March Madness time. So I hope everybody enjoyed the podcast today. I always sign off, I say carpe diem, seize the day. And I thank Andrew for coming on the podcast today. And everybody have a great day. Thank you for listening.