The Foundations of investFeed
The foundations of a team and a business are absolutely critical for future success. A business that does not have sound foundations will be found wanting when “the going gets tough”. Nassim Taleb coined the term antifragile in 2012 and introduced the concept as follows:-
“Some things benefit from shocks; they thrive and grow when exposed to volatility, randomness, disorder, and stressors and love adventure, risk, and uncertainty. Yet, in spite of the ubiquity of the phenomenon, there is no word for the exact opposite of fragile. Let us call it antifragile. Antifragility is beyond resilience or robustness. The resilient resists shocks and stays the same; the antifragile gets better”.
At investFeed, we believe this concept of antifragility applies most certainly to startups. Life is messy, business is complex and despite some of the media gloss put on what can appear from the outside to be overnight startup success, anyone who has actually founded, or been a part of a startup, understands that bucket loads of grit and the beyond-resilience attributes are required.
There is no start-up which follows a smooth path. “Pivot” has to be in the vocabulary, and perhaps many times over. The founders have to have faith in their vision when no one else can see it. Particularly when friends and family start muttering about the stability of a paycheck!
An antifragile team and business thrive in a complex and changing environment. It makes them stronger, hungrier, more determined to prove themselves. At investFeed, our team and our business foundations are antifragile. We have the right mix of real-world startup experience and drive and this puts us in the sweet spot to deliver a scalable solution.
So who laid the investFeed foundations?
investFeed was founded by Ron Chernesky and Drew Freedman in 2014. They self-funded the operational costs to build out a fully functional desktop platform for a community of equity traders and investors. This required the setup of a server farm and the basic functions required for trading.
2015 was a great year for the team, they were a Gala Finalist at the Bezinga Fintech awards in the “Best Use of Crowd” category and they officially beta-launched their platform. By 2016, they had moved to an official global launch, their platform was offered via Browser, iOS, and Android and they offered a range of top brokerages including Robinhood, TD Ameritrade, E*Trade, Scottrade, Fidelity, TradeStation, and Options House.
In addition to brokerage integration, the current investFeed platform offers users portfolio management tools. Investor accounts can be synced to track portfolio performance in one place and allows users to compare their portfolio to others and privately or publicly share portfolios.
This is an operating platform with 15,000+ user sign-ups since inception and over 200,000 live feeds. The foundation is solid and absolutely allows the team to embrace a new social investment network cryptocurrency offering. The whitepaper detailing the plan is now available.
Returning to the concept of antifragility and strong business foundations. As we enter a world where blockchain technology is undoubtedly going to “shock” and “stress” back-office operations as we know them, we at investFeed are embracing that change. We are growing with it and becoming stronger in the face of the reorganization of global financial flows and processes.
Our foundations are strong. Bring on the future.
