Our purpose: To be the best place in the world to discuss and learn about stocks, without fear of being spammed. Startup/business
California,
United States
United States http://www.stockr.com
Described by Forbes as "Bloomberg for the masses," Stockr is a social media platform for the stock market. By combining market data and news with two pillars of scalable networks like Facebook and LinkedIn -- authentic identity and good social technologies -- Stockr is transforming the way individual investors, industry experts and public companies connect and share what’s moving the markets.
No other platform provides market data and modern social tools:
Stockr is building a community of bona fide Wall St. and industry experts, leading to information sharing and content never before available to most investors:
Companies like $AOLS are now paying Stockr to publish and communicate directly with the market:
Team
Vinny Jindal Co-Founder, Chief Executive Officer
Vinny most recently served as a Principal at Boston Millennia Partners, a venture capital firm investing in the life science, IT and business services industries. Previously, Vinny was the Head of Healthcare Equity Research and a Managing Director at ThinkEquity Partners, and a Senior Analyst at Wedbush Morgan Securities. Vinny has also held equity research roles at Origin Capital Management and Lehman Brothers. He holds Masters degrees in Endocrinology and Pharmacology from U.C. Berkeley and Cornell University, respectively, and a B.A. in Integrative Biology from U.C. Berkeley.
Brendon has fifteen years of engineering and management experience in enterprise web software, and has completed over 60 product launches, with an emphasis on the finance, entertainment, and green/eco sectors. Brendon has an extensive background in distributed computing, data-mining, and solving unique scalability problems for the web. Brendon has successfully managed development teams both large and small, applying a firm understanding of product development cycles and effective communication.
Brendon has experience working with a wide spectrum of companies including: Disney / ABC, Paramount Pictures, Sun Microsystems, MySpace Music, and Chase Credit Card Systems.
Julie Silber Director of Investor Relations
Julie brings over ten years of success in executive financial leadership roles to Stockr, including direct experience as a CFO and Controller and as a investor relations executive. More recently, her efforts aided in increasing her client’s stock price by ~60% over a year, including and resulting in two significant buyout bids.
Julie is particularly strong in working with the small cap companies that are interested in coming on board with Stockr. In the past, she has positioned those small cap companies to the financial markets and the institutional investment community with clear and compelling stories, creating a custom strategy that serves the goals of each client's investor relations needs and executing the plan and getting the appropriate meetings and establishing relationships. Her background also includes consulting with numerous clients to formulate strategic investor relations plans and develop investor-focused materials. The result is increased research coverage, exposure, volume, valuation and shareholder value.
Tim Symington Co-Founder, Product Design -Current CFO of INVENT -Founder of Virurl Inc., a real-time advertising platform for the social web
Andrew Pevsner Business Development and Marketing -Previously at Valcent Inc, a firm specializing in equity options, reporting directly to MD on fundamental, technical, and options analysis -Former LHP for LA Dodgers, highest draft pick in Johns Hopkins University history
Amber Henson Community Manager -Former community moderator for Metromix.com, Crackle.com (part of Sony Pictures Enteretainment) and VideoJug.com -Experience in social media and quality control
Tim Arbuckle Senior Software Engineer -Former software engineer for Geodelic Systems, Inc. -Former lead software engineer for Spirent Communications
Brad Whitcomb Web Developer -Former web developer for Geodelic Systems, Inc. -Former web developer for Virtual Corral
Lori Kozlowski Contributing Editor -Former business reporter for the LA Times
ADVISORY BOARD
Adam Townsend - Executive Vice President, Investor Relations at CBS Corporation - Managing Director, Corporate Strategy and Investor Relations, E*Trade Financial
Scott Havens - President of the at Atlantic Media Company - Former Head of Conde Nast Digital (Portfolio.com), Senior Manager of Yahoo! Finance
Michael Jones - Vice President of Publisher Solutions at Yieldbot - Former Head of Audience Development and Business Development, Dow Jones
Michael Pachter - Managing Director, Equity Research, Wedbush Securities
Craig Coblenz - Director of Media Sales for the Southeast at Facebook - Regional Vice President, Partner Marketing at Cendant
Todd Mackay - Former Head of Corporate Development and Controller at E*TRADE Financial Corporation
Business model
Market Opportunity:
Ninety million people seek stock information and guidance online monthly
The Wall Street information industry (Yahoo! Finance, Bloomberg, etc.) is more than $25 billion annually
More than one million retail trades made every day
Over seventy percent of retail investors get trading ideas from their personal network
The investor relations industry spends more than $6 billion annually
Our Goal: Building the Investor Graph
In the same way that Facebook and Google have created a multi-billion dollar industry by building the Social Graph and monetizing consumer/behavioral data, Stockr is uniquely positioned to lead in investor/behavioral data.
Here are Stockr's four major planned revenue streams, rank-ordered by estimated market potential:
1. Companies target users based on investing interests – Stockr will aggregate user data to display targeted messaging to various investor demos 2. Brokerage Revenues – Fees charged to brokerage firms for trades made on the Stockr platform via integration through broker APIs 3. Pay-to-follow fees – Stockr will keep 30% of fees paid to follow other users for their expert information, insights, or trading performance 4.Investor Relations Service – Charge companies to engage current and potential shareholders per a subscription model
Status and Current Focus:
Since the SEC’s recent announcement allowing public companies to use social media for Investor Relations, Stockr has on-boarded 12 companies, including CBS (Fortune 100) and 11 small-cap clients each paying $500 per month. At current growth rates, Stockr is now forecasting profitability this year.
The range of companies currently publishing on the platform demonstrate Stockr's ability to provide value to a broad market of over 22,000 public companies. As an example, CBS chose Stockr to recap their latest earnings call. They then tweeted a link back to the conversation on Stockr, preferring to engage shareholders in a more robust discussion than Twitter allows.
Aeolus Pharmaceuticals is a small-cap biotechnology company and exemplifies how smaller companies benefit from Stockr’s cost effective service. The company is able to engage shareholders more frequently than they can afford to send out a press release and communicate in simpler language than found in their Q’s and K’s.
Competitive advantage
Q: What's the problem?
A: Investing is a social activity without a good social platform. At least 70% of retail investors getting trading ideas from their personal networks. There was nowhere to credibly receive or share that information.
Q: How does Stockr solve that problem?
A: We provide a modern social platform specifically for investors.
Q: Above, we mentioned: "providing all investors the informational and networking tools previously available only to professionals." What are those tools/features?
A: Those features are currently as follows:
1.Newsfeed – real-time updates from people, publications & companies you follow 2.Follow Recommendations – discover relevant investors and companies 3.Watchlist – 5-minute delayed quotes on companies from your curated list 4.Customized Market News – from 900+ sources, tagged by public company 5.Chart and Company Fundamentals – the standard data points investors look for
Q: Why are these tools and features increasingly important for people to have?
A: After Wall St. vs. Main St. and after the 2008 financial crises, it is, more than ever, up to individuals to take control of their investment future. With the wealth of information out there, a person needs help to reign it all in and make sense of the bigger and smaller pictures.
Q: Other sites provide financial information - How does Stockr take this one step further?
A: Yahoo and Google do provide finance information, but their posting boards are lacking. Stockr provides a truly immersive platform, with information plus trusted having conversations that appear right before your eyes.
Q: How are we different from our competitors, like StockTwits?
A: Our competitors sites do not ask their members to use their real names, and therefore all the information that is posted comes from anonymous sources. On Stockr, our members profiles are linked to their Facebook profiles. On our competitors platforms, there is a lot of noise for not a lot of content. On Stockr, users are creating original, long form content and backing up their opinions with external links to news organizations. Instead of merely filtering other channels, Stockr is providing real-time threaded conversations, happening between our intelligent and informed members.
Q: How many public company profiles are on the site? How many are currently being controlled by the company themselves?
A: There are currently 21,000 company profiles on the site - and currently, twelve companies have the ability to post as themselves on their company pages.
Q: Who is our target market - individual investors or is it ultimately the IR departments of companies?
A: Both! At the moment, the majority of Stockr members are individuals, but with the recent SEC ruling on public companies and social media, we are signing on more companies to have their IR departments be in direct contact with those individual Stockr members.
Vinny Jindal
