Adrien Navarre.
Building TickerTrends.

When I was maybe 14 or 15, I started a YouTube channel about quantitative finance and automated trading strategies. I had pretty limited knowledge at the time, but almost no one was talking about those topics publicly. The channel grew to tens of thousands of subscribers, and it created a snowball effect where I kept going deeper into financial markets.

Later, while I was studying computer science, I was also working full-time as a software engineer in robotics and machine learning. I would take classes in the morning, work at the robotics company, and then drive to my TickerTrends office around 6 or 7 p.m. and work until midnight or 1 a.m. It was a very extreme setup, but it was also clear to me that this was the company I wanted to build.

Once I went full-time, it still took us about a year and a half to find the part of the business that could really scale. That period was mostly feedback and iteration. As more people used the software, we got better information about what they wanted, which ideas were working, and where we should direct our effort. We still operate that way today. The goal is to keep those cycles as fast as possible so that every improvement gives us information for the next one.

That also affects the kinds of problems we choose to work on. We will often test questions that look extremely difficult, or maybe even impossible, because the way we approach those problems is part of what gives us an advantage. The willingness to enter areas others dismiss, learn from them quickly, and keep going compounds over time.