What I Learned in 3 Years at OpenBB

The OpenBB journey started officially 3 years ago.

So I want to celebrate it by sharing 36 lessons I learned over the past 36 months as a founder and CEO of a fintech company.

The OpenBB journey started officially 3 years ago.

So I want to celebrate it by sharing 36 lessons I learned over the past 36 months as a founder and CEO of a fintech company.

1. Be curious.

2. Talk to users.

3. Protect your time.

4. Do the right thing.

5. Culture is everything.

6. Energy is contagious.

7. Hire slow and fire fast.

8. Write everything down.

9. Reward people who care.

10. Celebrate every little win.

11. Work on your storytelling.

12. Ship often and iterate fast.

13. Listen more than you speak.

14. Be comfortable with saying no.

15. When in doubt, there's no doubt.

16. Over communicate with the team.

17. Have an inherent sense of urgency.

18. Don't overthink, estimate and iterate.

19. Failing is ok, not learning from it isn't.

20. Measure success by impact, not effort.

21. Do not run away from hard conversations.

22. Having common sense is a very powerful skill.

23. How you do anything is how you do everything.

24. It's not because you can build it that you should.

25. Seeing your vision materialize gives goosebumps.

26. Be so excited in your product that users can feel it.

27. Lack of focus is likely the biggest risk you face as a company.

28. It turns out that there's a ton of data in your gut feeling.

29. Make people accountable for both successes and failures.

30. Hiring is the most important thing you will do at your company.

31. Create a culture where feedback is not only welcome but expected.

32. Work side-by-side with the team on things that are considered "boring".

33. Be there for your team when they need you, they will repay you with loyalty.

34. One of the worst things you can do is optimizing something that shouldn't exist.

35. Vast majority of decisions are 2-way door decisions. Make a decision and move on.

36. Startups are hard and fun. Working with people you like makes it less hard and more fun.

In the past 3 years, we have:

• The open source repo has been starred over 28,000 times and 220 contributors
• The OG OpenBB Terminal installer was downloaded over 150k times
• Refactored that application to a platform that could be pip installable
• Enabled users to fully automate their research workflow in a script
• Open-sourced an LLM-powered financial analyst agent built on top of the OpenBB platform
• Made an OpenBB Bot that run over 4M commands in 20k+ servers with 50k+ users
• Developed an Add-in for Excel
• Grew to a team of 16
• Built a community of over 100k people
• And finally, we built the foundation of the first AI-powered financial terminal - more on this very very soon.

Personally, during that timeline:

• I got a second dog
• Visited US for the first time
• Got married on that first visit
• Left London to move to the Bay area a couple weeks after
• Moved to NYC
• Started boxing regularly

We are more locked in than ever before.

Can’t wait for the next 3 years. 🥂