Marcus, chief strategy officer, talks about building a trading algorithm called Minotaur with Costa. He came from outside finance and describes how they grew the product by listening to customers and evolving what they built.
I think my journey was funny because, you know, I didn't come from a traditional finance background. I got opportunities later in life which led me on that path. But, you know, I started really as a normal guy from a normal working class family, Italian immigrants, you know, we didn't have much money. And I think from a young age, I was really blessed because not having that actually taught me a lot of really beautiful things. Right? So my family taught me that if you have good connections in life, if you have good relationships, if you have food, if you have a roof over your head, you're already successful. Right. I was really interested in was mathematics. Also noticed that there were skills that I had naturally that I didn't acquire, that I had from when I was a kid. And one thing I was very, very good at was remembering numbers, which is really funny because now later in life, I've become an algorithmic developer, right, who's running a trading company, all based on mathematics and numbers. So it was like little things like that that sparked me and eventually helped me find my way. The funny thing with Costa is we come from pretty different backgrounds. We did align right away, and we shared a similar vision, right? And what that vision was to offer a product and something that was realistic, reliable and sustainable and not, you know, selling people a pipe dream of things that aren't achievable. Don't get it twisted. Like, I fell victim to multiple different marketing ploys trying to help my family, buying products that just weren't good. And I think the biggest thing me and Costa aligned on was we wanted to deliver a real product in the initial stages. Right? Our product, to be completely honest with you, like, it's had a lot of growth, like anything, right? Our product, where it started, was nowhere near where it is now. So in the initial stages, you know, the product would work, but at the same time, the product was quite slow in how it could return money. And when we first started dealing with clients, we'd meet some people who were okay with that. But the vast majority of clients needed to see faster returns, not because they wanted to make money quickly, because they wanted to know the product worked. So we had to realize very quickly it wasn't just about what we think is good. We have to put ourselves in the positions, in the shoes of a buyer and understand from a buyer's perspective, what do they actually want to see. So what we had to do was take the algorithm and we had to get it to do the same thing very safely, but take trades in a faster way. And that was really hard because it went against kind of the nature of what we built it to do. But this is where we started looking at developers for the first time, because, remember, I was taking sales calls and then getting off the sales calls and developing and writing the code. So we were doing everything. And also, a big challenge was learning that it's okay to have help, because we tried with just the two of us for a long time, and we were motivated by that, like, we can do it all ourselves. But I realized quickly that that was coming from a place of ego. Once we got rid of that ego and just started hiring the right people to help us, it was incredible how fast it grew. Beautiful thing about Marcus was he was one of our customers, right? He bought our product, and he said, this is amazing. But he said, I bet you guys are losing clients because it's not moving fast enough. And I said, yeah, man, we can't. No one's stuck sticking. You know, only 20% of our clients that are buying are staying because it's not. And Marcus said, what you have is one of the best things I've ever seen, but this can be much better. So Marcus hopped on a call with me, we started talking. The rest is history right from that moment now, he's our chief strategy officer, and he's helped the company grow from being a customer. Man, we've had insane growth over the last couple of years. I mean, we started with two of us. We've got nearly 20 staff now, right? So we just keep growing, but we grow because we focus on how to help our customer before focusing on putting money in our back pocket. Keep growing, but we grow because we focus on how to help our customer before focusing on putting money in our back pocket. It.
