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COMING IN HOT TODAY 🔥 

📊 AI stock pick and startup learning: Today’s leader interview with Ananda.
🐣 Getting more eyeballs on your emails: How to write a killer subject line.
🌎 Today’s global economy: Jamie Dimon and a conversation worth hearing.

If you’re interested in sponsoring these emails you can see our different partnership options here.

PARTNERS 💫

LEADER OF THE WEEK 🎙

Excited to present today’s interview. Today we hear from Ananda Aisola, a new buddy of mine from my Sidebar group. If you’ve been with us for a little while you would have seen me talk about Sidebar. I think it will supercharge how effective I am as leader of Athyna over time. It’s group coaching effectively and it’s awesome.

Ananda is a super high performer and is a buddy I met through the group. He and the team at Composer are taking on trading using AI and algorithms. It’s incredible stuff. You’re going to love this one.

Ananda Aisola - COO and Co-Founder of Composer

Ananda is the Chief Operating Officer for Composer, an all in one platform to build trading algorithms with AI, backtest them, then execute.

Previously, he ran multiple operations teams at Ritual and played a crucial role in the company’s international expansion. Before working at startups, Ananda worked in banking and capital markets with experience at RBC and TD Bank.

Composer have processed $1B+ in trading volume, 900,000+ orders and run 3M+ backtests.

If you were to ask your friends to describe you, what do you think they would say?

If you asked my former colleagues and friends how they'd describe me, the two words you'd hear used are tenacity and empathy. I learnt these skills early on, having had to move countries and switch schools every 2-3 years.

This ability to adapt and thrive is a pattern throughout the course of my career, beginning in finance and eventually leading to tech.

Tell us about the problem you are trying to solve? Why this?

Before our official founding, our CEO and co-founder Ben was trying to figure out what to do with his savings after leaving his job. He was really disappointed with all the shelf options, so he started to build his own DIY trading system. At this point, it was really just a labor of love, a side project to distract himself while he wasn't working.

He quickly realized there was a commercial opportunity for two reasons. Firstly, building a DIY system was insanely laborious and time consuming. And secondly, his friends and family, myself included, really wanted to be able to invest in the strategies he was creating. So he realized there was an opportunity to create a web based application that made designing and sharing strategies seamless - think Figma for trading.

Composer exists to make sophisticated trading strategies available to everyone. Incumbents have failed to make sophisticated trading accessible. The trader must convert their idea into an exact set of tickers, quantities and order types. Very onerous! Every platform looks the same, with uninspired design and antiquated technology.

What is your main day to day job as COO?

The job of a startup COO is constantly evolving and adapting to the needs of the business. We’re a small team of 11 so everyone wears many hats. We also operate in a regulated space which requires that everything we ship, market and produce is within guidelines. All this to say no two days are the same.

In the early days on the company the focus was primarily on hiring, speaking with customers and working with our partners and the SEC to ensure a smooth launch. Over the past 18 months as we’ve evolved into a ‘real’ company, post-product-market-fit and monetization. Now the role has evolved to encompass a lot more.

Growth strategy, oversight of our support team, budgeting and financial analysis, compliance and regulatory matters, HR and more.

A big part of the last year has also been spent working with our external legal counsel to obtain registration as a broker-dealer. The process took close to a year but is now complete and opens up a ton of new business opportunities for expansion.

Explain your philosophies around leadership? How do you think about it?

As a small, remote-first company we can’t afford to do a lot of handholding and formal training. My philosophy on leadership has adapted to make sure we succeed as a decentralized company.

I think to leaders should provide as much context as possible. Specifically business context that impacts the product roadmap. Every decision we make comes with trade-offs and it is important to explain to the team why we are choosing to make the decision. This allows the team to use their collective intelligence to tackle the biggest issues with a shared understanding, instead of people trying to solve problems in silos.

For example at the start of 2023 we made the decision to become registered as a broker-dealer. This wasn’t an obvious choice because it significantly increased our operating costs and regulatory burden, at a time when the majority of companies were looking for ways to cut costs. However, as leaders we knew that going down this path would open up many opportunities for growth. This decision also impacted our product roadmap for 2023. Instead of just telling employees this is what we’d decided we held a all-hands to explain to them the thinking behind the decision and why going down this path would make us a better business.

With the team’s buy-in we were able to frantically execute on the roadmap with the goal of hitting our companies targets.

In my opinion leaders need to be able to strategize at a 10,000ft level and then immediately be able to context switch to sweat the details. This is especially true at an early stage where one day you might be working on your 12 month goals/roadmap and the next you’re beta testing the latest version of the app or reviewing the granular details of monthly ad spend or branding assets.

And lastly, kill the shit sandwich. When there are wins - celebrate them. When things are not working directly address the root cause and don’t couch the issue in feel good platitudes.

What is your north star metric inside of your company and why?

Unlike the majority of trading/investment platforms, Composer is a freemium monthly subscription service. You have the ability to create and test investment strategies for free, but if you want to trade them we charge a subscription.

The north star metric that we measure against is customer growth.

At a personal level I know if it’s been a good day or a bad one based on; the feeling in my gut that I’ve come to trust it over time, and self-reflection. Self-reflection is a trick I learnt from a former exec coach of mine. The idea was to put aside some time at the end of the day to go through the It-We-I framework.

How do you set goals?

Initially we tried to implement OKRs and it was a complete failure. The process was too time consuming and quarterly planning didn’t really work for us in the early days. We adapted and have begun to set goals on the cadence of monthly and annual. Basically where do we want to be as a business a year from now and where do we want to be in the next month. This has been much more effective as we have a long-term benchmark to focus on and a short term goal that we are rapidly executing against. We then spend some time at the beginning of every month to see how we tracked against the previous month’s targets and then course correct.

How do you build culture?

Culture boils down to three things: who you hire, fire and promote. In making decisions around promotion it isn’t enough just to be a strong performer; you also need to be a force multiplier which is embedded in our cultural values.

The first 20 hires especially have a huge influence on the organization and what shape it takes.

For this reason we have not only a high ‘skill’ bar for our hires but also lean heavily upon reference checks and interviews to ensure fit. Not to say we haven’t made mistakes in this area but we’ve course corrected quickly.

Do you run hybrid, on-site or remote and why?

Composer was formed during the early days of Covid. At the time we had no choice but to start as a remote first organization. Over time we’ve leaned into the advantages of remote work, particularly the ability to hire the best employees located anywhere. We tend to favour hiring people in North America for time zone reasons but have employees based in Europe as well.

While remote work isn’t perfect it has advantages that we’ve leaned into as an organization. Apart from the ability to hire the best talent we also can hire outside of major urban centres. To succeed remotely we select for employees that are intrinsically motivated and have a bias to action.

How do you get the best out of yourselves personally and professionally?

I never attended an elite university or had the connections that come with living in the valley. For a large chunk of my career I pushed myself to succeed for one simple reason: fear. I am extremely competitive and wanted to prove that I could compete and win against the best.

Over the past year my attitude has changed along with the birth of my daughter. While my competitive spirit is still alive it is no longer my sole driving force. My personal and professional goals are now aligned - I want to live my life in such a way that as my daughter grows up, she is proud of me and sees me as a role model.

Wearing as many hats as I do, I’ve learnt over time to ruthlessly prioritize and to empower my team to take on more responsibility. The two non-negotiables for me that make this possible are daily exercise and putting my daughter to bed.

And that's it! You can also learn more about Composer through their website, and check out Ananda on LinkedIn.

TWEET OF THE WEEK 🐣 

Want to learn how to get more eyeballs on your emails. Listen to this guy…

BRAIN FOOD 🧠 

A month or so ago the New York Time DealBook Summit grabbed headlines after Elon told advertisers (and Bob Iger) to go F-themselves. But on the same stage only a few hours earlier JP Morgan’s Jamie Dimon gave a great rundown of his view of the economy today.

As leaders, it’s our job to do our best to see into the future and this particular conversation is worth taking in. For a bonus learning, you can read all of Jamie’s yearly invest letter in our Ultimate Investor Letter Database.

ASK ME ANYTHING 🗣

I want to be a trusted resource for you. If you think anything I know in relation to brand, culture, global teams, sales and growth would help you unblock a problem in your weeks shoot me a line.

Ask in the comments or reply to this email and I will do my best to answer it in a future edition. 🙌🏼

TOOLS WE USE 🛠️

Every week we highlight tools we actually use inside of our business and give them an honest review. Today we are highlighting Notion. We use Notion for everything. Literally everything. It’s most important tool in our stack.

See the full set of tools we use inside of Athyna & Open Source CEO here.

HOW I CAN HELP 🥳

Here are the options I have for us to work together. If any of them are interesting to you - hit me up!

🌏 Hiring global talent: Check out my startup Athyna.
🧰 Want to outperform the competition: See our suite of tools & resources.
👀 Reach thousands of tech leaders: Advertise with us here.

And that’s it! See you next time. ✌️