How I became CEO of OpenBB
This post talks about my story of becoming the CEO of OpenBB, the company behind the fastest growing open source project in finance.
Both my parents are Portuguese and emigrated to Switzerland for better conditions. This is where my brother and I were born. We moved back to our small hometown in Portugal when I was 8 years old.
When I was 21 years old I moved to London to pursue my MSc in control systems at the Imperial College. I also joined a semiconductor company as a Software Design Engineer.
In my spare time I learned Python so I could become more proficient in machine learning and artificial intelligence. When my mathematics professor learned of my interest in Python he challenged me to write the code behind his PhD thesis on "Data Science in the Modeling and Forecasting of Financial Time Series: from Classic methodologies to Deep Learning" which combined open source, ML/AI and finance. This was when I first started to realize my passion for financial data.
I was inspired by books like "Rich dad Poor dad" which allowed me to understand that the only way to build true generational wealth is through investing. Now that I started to accumulate more savings through my professional pursuits, and with my finance interest increasing from my thesis work, I wanted to invest my own capital.
What I learned was that investing was a highly cumbersome process. Unlike coding where the tooling (e.g. VSCode) is optimized for efficiency and allows us to automate a lot of processes, investing was highly inefficient and impossible to automate.
I was spending hours doing my own investment research (multiple tabs open researching several different sources on a ticker, screenshot the data to put on a document or share with friends, write my thoughts, and repeat), and this had to be done for every single ticker at different instances of time otherwise the data would become irrelevant.
I learned from Reddit users how they gained insights and performed due diligence. I quickly realized their "workflow" was just as inefficient as mine. I concluded that the only aspect of research that should require user input is the interpretation. As far as I was concerned, all data gathering should be automated.
I began investigating potential investment research tools that allowed automation and couldn't find any, not even the mythical $24k/year Bloomberg terminal. I looked for platforms on GitHub where I could build on top of with no success.
During Covid Christmas break, the flight to visit my parents was cancelled, so I ended up staying at home and sketching/building what would become my own investment research platform. I noticed that there were hundreds of data providers offering free data tiers where the data provided didn't correlate with each other. If I wanted access to paid datasets or more requests per minute it would be as simple as to upgrade my API key to a paid plan.
Over the next two months I built a python based command line interface in my spare time for and released the first lines of code as Open Source under the name "Gamestonk Terminal" since I was an investor in Gamestop and Elon Musk had recently tweeted his now infamous "Gamestonk" tweet.
The project went viral in a couple of minutes on Reddit and HackerNews. In under 24h we had over 4,000 stars on GitHub, and hundreds of messages requesting features, thanking me for the tool, or reporting bugs.
The number of issues and feature requests was overwhelming for a single person working part-time, so I created a Discord group and started building a community of users. Many of those same first users went on to become core maintainers of the project. The community started adding new data sources, new features and even new asset classes to the project - soon after we were supporting crypto, ETFs, options, forex, and macro economy.
My goal was never to build a business/company with this product. My motivation was to create a better investment research platform that was unavailable until then. When we got approached by JJ (from OSS Capital), it was a no-brainer to create OpenBB, as this would allow me to accelerate the product vision and build the world's leading investment research platform.