Inside Hanover Park: Building an AI-Native Service Business, Growing to $15B in Assets

19:24This is a series of insanely hard technical challenges. When you think about the data complexity that we have, let me go do this here. That's very different, obviously value prop than like a legacy fund admin.

19:35Turner Novak:Yeah. Okay. So you've, you've built this environment where the top 0.1 % of engineers want to go. How do you like convince people to join? And then, and maybe another interesting thing to hit on is like, how has that changed over time? Like if somebody listened to this first conversation, they can hear original philosophy. What's changed over the past year? Yeah, I think I want to, I kind of say like growth solves a lot of problems. We went, you know, zero to 15 billion in 21 months since our first line of code. That level of growth proves to a, the most skeptical engineer on the planet, like, Hey, this is working.

20:06And if I have a deep interest in fintech, this could be a compelling and interesting. And the second piece is like what you are, what you prioritize. There's a lot of companies who have a hundred people on the team and like 80 salespeople. That is not the company that I'm building. I have still scaled us to 15 billion of assets with no other salespeople on the team, primarily because I'm like, I'm just a founder with a product and a plan. We don't need an army of salespeople that resonates with the best engineering teams and the best engineers on the planet, because they're thinking like, okay, what is prioritized?

20:37What is hired for? If this is an eng first hacker culture, that matters deeply. When I think about like, how I'm going to be prioritized first class citizen, et cetera, in the type of company I'm at versus an army of salespeople that are like pushing on engineering when it comes to when it comes to building.

20:56Turner Novak:So then how do you guys figure out kind of what to build when you're talking about like the engineering being first class? Like, are you and it sounds like it's literally just you like are you talking to customers are engineers joining calls are engineers like using demoing the products like i know i've seen i think i've seen something or like when i was hanging on the office one day like everyone uploads stuff or something i'm maybe remembering the story wrong but so we have demo night every friday night where literally people are like showing what they're building both to the fund accounting team as well as on the engineering side which is really fun um but kind of how we think about what to build is we have a Slack channel with every customer.

21:33I literally, I said, I live in constant paranoia that my customer, you know, is finding a better solution, just like this Jeff Bezos quote of like, oh my God, live in fear that you're not that your customer is like unhappy that they'll find something better. And so like, we constantly want to be like pushing the envelope to invent on our customer's behalf. And so we take that super seriously when it comes to feedback and being a Slack channel with every customer, our engineering team is like blown away by like how much this matters for the CFO. If we are their most important vendor, the things that we deliver for them can really change everything.

22:03And so like the level of importance creates a sense of urgency, especially on the team. And so, and then on, on what we're building, what we're working on, it's like, you know, we really said, start with the unsexy, automate core financial reporting, automate core fund admin. And then now we built like a series of portfolio management and portfolio monitoring and all the adjacencies that like should live in one place that haven't, but stay tuned for more stuff.

22:26Turner Novak:So can you give me some examples if I'm not super familiar of like what some of those tools might be and like what I'm using them for? Yeah. So say, you know, you invest in Hanover Park at the Series A, you know, you get a set of legal documents or cap table or something like that. Typically, these legacy providers, all they do is like save that brand, those docs randomly. It's in a random box.com or Google Drive or something super random and be like, oh yeah, like I guess I'll look at that if I need to look at it for audit at the end of the year. And they'll like book some super boring accounting stuff that the CFO doesn't care about.

23:01Turner Novak:Sometimes there will be like a share drive that you can access it from like your browser and you can download it. You can download it. And so we said, as we were like, amazing, we have this leverage position because we're doing our fund accounting that we have all those docs in real time. And so you just forward that over email to us and say, hey, I don't need to click 50 buttons in a UI that was built in 2018 to create more work for me as the CFO, I can just delegate to a Hanover Park AI email agent. That email agent reads it, it uploads it, it AI extracts and processes like 150 key terms. And so now I've enriched and been like, hey, not just cost and fair value, I have, how much do I own to this company?

23:39What's the ownership percentage from the cap table? What's the latest valuation, post-money valuation? Who are my co-investors in the deal? Right? Like all these other like important details that should live in one place that don't. And so So we bundled this like, quote unquote, AI portfolio management tool in for free alongside the core fund admin services.

23:56Turner Novak:And I think you mentioned it took you about nine months to kind of make this. Am I remembering that number right? Well, yeah, there's a so this is a very complex technical. Like if you're an engineer listening to this, it's like you want the hardest technical challenges in the most complex industry. Like this is the place for you. We've processed 200 ,000 documents at this point. I'm talking random Indian language docs where AI translating into English and like all this crazy complexity in the pursuit of like, how does the customer lift zero fingers just forward it over to us and let us take care of the rest.

24:32Turner Novak:And so like the what was like the hardest part about doing all this? Is it like natural language processing, like extraction is like organizing it in like a sortable, efficient way? the extraction is really complex because like you know it's really simple if you're doing a series a in the united states like we did but like if you're doing a deal in europe if you're having a a random like mistake made by the lawyers on the cap table okay if we have like a random excel file that doesn't make it in that we don't get access and so there's just like i call it the land of infinite edge cases which is just like highly complex documents that like you know kind of what the answer should be at the end potentially, but it's really, really hard to figure out with all the different legalese that's in there.

25:16And so that was part of the challenge.

25:18Turner Novak:So you walk into the office at Hanover Park in the morning. What's it like? So at 9 a.m. exactly on the dot, I literally walk out of my office and we just have a speaker blasting music. My team will hate this, but it's literally one of two songs every single day for the past 21 months since we found the company. It's One More Time by Daft Punk or it's Levels by VG. There was a period where we shifted a little bit given literally my entire team now says to me, these are the songs that I never wanna hear outside of work ever again, but we do that. And so it's a fun environment where we're like blasting music.

25:55We go right into engineering standup. We then go right into the accounting team standup and we kind of get right into our day. But my goal is like, how do we create this like overwhelming sense of energy and like how much we're building and how much, how fast things are moving.

26:09Turner Novak:Is there a gong in the office? How did you hear about this? You heard about the gong? So, so we have this gong in the office. So we've moved offices three times in under a year. It's been very entertaining for, for everyone involved. I actually haven't seen the new one yet. How close is it? Yeah, it's right. It's right near here. Can I stop by like right after this? I want to see it right after the site and all head to the airport. So we have this, we like in our first office, which was this tiny little office in FIDI, we had this like gong. Anytime we would get a sale, anytime something great would happen, we did this.

26:39Now we've moved offices to much bigger offices and we still have a small gong. We've gotten people to say, why do you have this tiny gong? You need to have a bigger gong, Adam Neumann, We Crash style. We have not upgraded yet, but the gong is very, the only people allowed to bring the gong our one customers. And so we literally had a customer in the office the other day. I told Johnny, I was like, Johnny, I know this sounds really weird. I'm going to now interrupt the entire team of what they're doing. And they have to ring, you have to ring the gong. So he comes over, he rings the gong and the entire team goes wild.

27:15Like literally people

27:16Turner Novak:are cheering. They're about like, I think people are going to jump on top of their desks at this point. And people are getting fired up. Or we ring the gong when it comes to like, we ship some massive product update or or or close the sale and so those are the only people that are allowed to ring it right no outsiders no outsiders i technically cannot ring the gong i'd have to be a customer you'd have to be a customer which i i need to hit that institutional sky i don't have a cfo it's just me we're just just cfos soon soon we'll we'll be on that level soon. And so you had this one guy who I think he biked to work during a snowstorm one time or something like what's the story?

27:55I got to give a shout out to Philip. We we literally it was like a Sunday at 2 p.m. There's a crazy blizzard happening in New York City. And of course, I don't expect people to be in the office like this is like hunker down and survive. somehow Philip decided to go and rent a city bike and bike in a 10 inches snowstorm to the office. And he shows up. He's like, I just biked here. I'm like, how are you alive right now? And he's like, just goes right to like coding. And he's like, I'm good. I'm just biking. So I'm like, okay, this is, this is what we screen for though. We have forces of nature that are figuring stuff out.

28:34Turner Novak:Was the subway like down because there was so much snow or like, what was the subway? way that's what it is he's not a subway guy he's like a bike guy interesting i mean the streets would probably be open like very clear you could probably just keep cruising you probably wouldn't have to stop yeah like maybe yeah it's crazy it's like if if it even got plowed that day so then what do you guys do on friday night so now you have like a friday night thing that you do so we have this thing where we love to celebrate like our product velocity is everything right like we're literally doing multiple releases a day.

29:05I would say compared to many legacy players who call engineering IT and don't actually ship that new product, our goal is like, how do we have the highest product velocity out there? And so we have multiple product releases a day. And what's really fun is we have engineers demo what they built like every few weeks on Friday at like 6 p.m. where they'll literally like, everyone will huddle around what we call the podcasting couch. It's not actually for podcasting. The podcasting couch.

29:29Turner Novak:We should have done this there. Yeah, we should have. All the podcasting couch. But we have this massive couch, which people have gotten excited about, that literally everyone goes onto that couch. And like we demo like the latest and greatest and people go crazy. We're playing music. People are getting fired up about what's going on. And so it's been a fun little ritual to inform the broader team as we've scaled a lot in terms of team in the past six months to like tell everyone what we're working on. So this is not like a like a hackathon, random like side project type of thing. It is you're showing what you built in the product.

30:00Turner Novak:Yeah, exactly. Okay. And you said you're shipping multiple things per day. So is it Friday? You spend like an hour and just everything that was shipped, people just kind of go through and show what they ship? And there's a lot of times when people get feedback. So like, we'll ship something and it'll be like an iteration and the fun accounting team will be like, oh my God, this could be amazing with these two changes or, hey, we get CFO feedback and people are excited. I actually want to start bringing on, bringing customers to the office for these Friday demos to see the latest and greatest. Because like what we've had is like, I had a customer call me and be like, hey, you're our most important vendor.

30:33I love Hanover Park. I don't think anyone's ever said that about a fund admin before. Or like, I love Hanover Park. Can we host a customer conference at the office? And can everyone just like jam and huddle about like what the future of finance can look like in this space? And so we've not done that yet. Stay tuned. But it'd be great to get more like live feedback of these demo nights.

30:53Turner Novak:So when somebody comes across Hanover Park, what is like the reason that they choose Hanover Park versus I mean, there's a couple other options that are out there. Like what is usually the discovery process of finding it and then the decision making process usually? All the problems come from as you're if you're just, you know, a 50 million dollar venture fund and it's super simple and it's one person in a room like things are super simplistic. Like there's not a lot of complexity. But as you scale, all of these manual processes break. And so you're like it went from, oh, I did this one manual process for two hours a month to I'm doing five hours of manual processes a day just to tread water.

31:31And so therein lies the problem with all the legacy players where things are break broken and held together by legacy human duct tape and Excel. Right. And so that's problem one. It's like, oh, my God, I can't scale. Problem two is like, I've heard all these good things about AI chat GPT's out, Claude's out. But what is it even done for CFOs? Nothing. Right. And people are frustrated by that. And so it's a combination of things are breaking while we scale. And oh, my God, like, how can I adopt AI? And so we're kind of at the intersection where it's like, hey, instead of buying a random army of overpriced SaaS tools on one side to like complement a broken system of record, which is your core fund admin today, why don't we marry that into a single source of truth where you can expose all of your data to an MCP via, you know, LM to Claude or Chatechipity or Gemini and like be able to action on your data.

32:22And so it's this like, oh my God, my data is super stale. Everything's broken as we're scaling. I have no idea what's going on. I have no visibility to, oh my God, the only way to duct tape this together is by 20 other SaaS tools. And we solved both those problems.

32:38Turner Novak:Isn't it really hard to switch a fund admin though? Like it's gotta be one of the most difficult problems in the history of humanity. So I joke, I literally, I'll be on like a first call with a CFO and I'll be like, look, I know I'm asking you to marry me on the first date. but here's what we're doing, right? Because like it is a, and I take that like insanely seriously of like the level of trust that our customers put in us. Like that's what keeps me up at night, right? Like how much I care about their trust and what that matters. And so one, it's a massive decision. Two is, oh my God, Hanover Park's amazing, but isn't it such a pain in the ass to switch?

33:14That's literally what everyone says.

33:15Turner Novak:That seems like that would be the disqualifier. Like seems cool, but like, I don't want to do this. I don't want to deal with this. I'm not going to put up with this. And so I literally tell our team, Like we're building a one-click migration future. Today, it's not one-click, obviously. We did migrate someone in only a handful of days, which was pretty crazy. Shout out Mackenzie at Asylum Ventures. She's amazing. And so we did that. But our goal is now like what's possible with AI is like, you know, there's a lot of long horizon agents that can run for hours and hours and days and days. And we're experimenting right now on how that can supercharge migration.

33:47And so I see a future where we get to one-click migration.

33:50Turner Novak:Really? What needs to happen, you think, to get there? Just do the models have to get better? Does the context windows have to get longer? I think it's just if you're a world-class engineer that's looking at this, this is an example of a really fun technical challenge to work on, which is a super challenging technical problem wrangling the most complex financial data in the world. It's really just like ENG bandwidth plus some pushes on the frontier of like, how do we think about these like long running agents that need to operate over days and weeks, not minutes? So that is probably like the big kind of just like overarching problem that people are trying to solve right now is like cracking how to speed this up.

34:29Yeah, I think it's a massive problem that like traditionally people like hired an army of humans to solve it. And it's like, well, if that doesn't deliver a 10x better experience, like what would and I think there's an opportunity to do that.

34:40Turner Novak:And I know there was a time where you I think when you when you first kind of started the company or getting customers. And it's even like harder ask back when you started it. You I think you promised that you'd literally sleep in people's office until the migration was done. Is that still a thing that you promised? So people have been like, don't sleep in my office. What are you talking about? I don't want you here, Chris. I don't want to spend more time with you. So it did. I'll never forget, though, one of our earliest customers. And like, by the way, I have like a crazy place in my heart for like our earliest customers that trusted us with their most important financial data.

35:13And I was one of our earlier customers and I'm on a call with him on like a Tuesday. And he's like, and I'm like, Hey, where do you, where do you live? Where are you? And he's like, why are you asking me where I live? And he's like, he's like, I'm in this like random town in Florida. And I'm like, okay, I'm booking a flight right now. I'm coming down to fly. This was like the first call. He's like, who, who is this guy? I'm like, he wasn't a customer yet. No, the prospective customer. And I'm literally booked a flight and I go and literally me and him spend like five hours at his house. I'd like to like two in the morning, basically like talking about how the future of finance is possible.

35:48They became one of our earlier like key critical customers and has been like a massive advocate for us. So it's credit to them and kind of like what happened. But in the early days, like do whatever it takes to win.

35:59Turner Novak:What did you talk about in that five hours? Like what was the biggest takeaway? Everything that was broken about the current system. He had been using a legacy fund admin. He had been duct taping additional tools on top. And because a lot of the problems is like, oh, my God, this might be surprising for the audience, but like CFOs don't have visibility in real time of anything that's going on. That's crazy. Think about you're making$100 million investment decisions, but you don't know what's going on today with your data. And so he was constantly struggling with, I have no idea what's going on.

36:30I'm asking these humans to book cash and do super basic things. it gets delayed by weeks and weeks and weeks and months. And I tried to buy another SaaS tool, but it had the same problem because it didn't talk to my underlying data, right? So it was just a frustration layer. And with what's possible with AI now, like I think now is the time where we should solve that problem.

36:48Turner Novak:Speaking of real-time data, I have another portfolio company. She was just on the podcast a couple weeks ago, Artie. They basically enable real-time data, basically syncing between all your databases, the data warehouse. I don't know if you guys have tried it yet, but I'm giving a plug. Oh, this is the plug. I'm giving a plug. This is on pod plug. I have not tried it. It might be interesting. We can maybe talk about it after. I'll throw a link in the show notes if people want to check out that episode. But basically, like their thesis is if you have AI agents that are like doing things automatically, you just need real time data.

37:21Turner Novak:Everything needs to be synced because if something's off by, let's say you have to wait for a sync or the data is off and the agent starts to make a decision, like you're making decisions and it's just doing things with incorrect information. 100%. So you mentioned getting on the plane, you jumped on this plane, went down and talked to the customer in Florida, spent five hours at his house. That's something the first episode, we spent a lot of time talking about like, what you had learned about sales before you started Hanover, you spent some time at Meow. I don't know to what extent we should we should re hit on that stuff.

37:54Turner Novak:And what to what extent we should talk about how you're thinking about understanding how to sell things understanding customers has evolved over time. But it may be interesting for the first people hearing this for the first time. What was Meow and what was your journey like there? Yeah, so ended up joining Series A FinTech that was doing business banking, helped us scale from, call it like 10 to 1 ,000-ish customers, became Chief Revenue Officer of the business. Brandon and Bryce, the founders of Meow, were the first checks almost pre-idea into Hanover Park today. And so, ton of like, you know, respect and credit for them.

38:28But it taught me a lot. It literally like SVB collapsed. We scaled exponentially, you know, closed hundreds of customers, myself personally. And like, you know, I wrote this like almost manifesto, which I call like always get on the plane that I think is like become popular now. I think people are just stealing my tweet and like retweeting it. But it's like you came up with this.

38:46Turner Novak:I came up with this. So I wrote this thing of like always get on the plane. And the key principle is the following. If you are asking someone to trust you with something as important as what we build and what we sell, the fact that if I won't get on the plane to spend four hours in a room with them, like this is a decade long relationship. Yeah. Can they really trust you if you're not going to do that? And it's like, well, I can't build trust over a Zoom call. Right. And so we, I like did this, I popularized it. And now like, it is like one of the key philosophies, especially for us. And so, you know, I was in, there was a 10 person finance team at a massive private equity firm that we're talking to that, like, I literally told them, I was like, I'll just go to your office wherever in random place in California.

39:25And like, I'm going to be there for five hours with their whole finance team. After five hours, you really get a chance to know someone and you build that level of like, let's just be honest with each other about like what the trust and the blunt feedback is. And so I've like obsessively been focused on this always get on the plane thing. I'm glad to see like people are taking it. Yeah.

39:45Turner Novak:So how do you manage that though? Like you're trying to run a company and you're trying to hire and recruit people and then suddenly in two hours, you got a flight, you got to jump on and you're spending two days in a random town in California. So look, time management prioritization, there's just like, there has to be like a level of like, okay, how do we think about what is the highest ROI thing? I think a lot about like, I've taken a lot of inspo from Elon on this of like, what is the limiting factor in the company? And then how do I parachute myself into the biggest problem? And how do I take that and like obsess over that problem until it's solved?

40:20And so, you know, limiting factor is migration. We need to go like parachute in, work with our head of ops, Emily, who joined and like obsess over what is AI native migration look like, right? So at different times, whatever the limiting factors in the company, my job is like jump into battle and figure it out.

40:36Turner Novak:One of the things that you've done really well, people call it founder led sales, where you're like, I think you said you're the only person that's like on the sales team. Still, I don't know how. I'm just a founder with a plan. I'm not even a sales guy. Yeah. So maybe it's like not sales. It's just like trust building. You're trying to understand customers, trying to solve their problems. So what have you, what's been the biggest learnings you've had over the past 21, I was going to say 21 years, 21 months since you, since you wrote the first line of code and started onboarding customers. Yeah, I think for, and we're definitely in founder-led sales mode too long.

41:08We're at 15 billion of assets on platform. That's probably a little too long. And it's just been, it's been something I've held onto too, just given how critical and customer trust is and how that interacts with like product and on that side. But for me, I've really tried to transition from how do I get our first five, 10, 15 customers into a position of like, how do I make sure that these people can become a raving fans, which I think is like very different philosophy. And like all the worst parts about sales in general of like, I'm just trying to get them like some sales guy with commission.

41:42Obviously, I'm a founder with no commission. And so like, you know, what I think about is like, if our number one goal in 2026 is every customer is a raving fan, that is very, very hard in our industry. That's like the craziest thing ever, right? And so with how unhappy most customers are at their current providers. And so my goal is that how do we set and manage expectations prior to signing any contract to ensure that they can be successful in their first 100 days plus. And so it's a lot of been like, hey, we've proven we can do it with your peers, with your counterparts. Here's five other customers that are exactly like you guys that we can service.

42:17How do we make sure that you're a raving fan in 12 months?

42:19Turner Novak:You mentioned it was different getting the first five to 10 customers and making people raving fans. How did you get the first couple of people on board? Because you had built this general ledger from scratch. You had no customers. And then suddenly you're like, hey, trust us with like to manage your fund. So I got to give a lot of credit. I'm going to give a shout out to Chad at Souza, founder of Souza, Pratouche, Kenny, who's their CFO. I love you, Kenny. You're literally like he was there. We're our first customer. And so I literally was like, hey, we're we're doing this. You're a first investor.

42:55They didn't want to move over everything to start. That's a crazy thing to be like, hey, move over all of your funds to an unknown provider called Hanover Park that you invested in a seed round for the most important thing for your firm, which is all of your LP relationships. And they were literally like, it took some convincing. It took some trust building, but they ended up doing it. And like, that was obviously like a critical kind of like first customer. But like the people after that, it was like, hey, I will literally like do whatever it takes to ensure that this is successful. I don't care if I need to sleep at your office.

43:29I don't care if I need to book the entries myself. It's just all about like, hey, we're taking this journey together. Here's why this can be a super compelling future. But like, look me in the eyes and say, like, I will deliver for you. And that's how we got the first five or 10.

43:45Turner Novak:And you had this concept of, I think it's called polite persistence. Is that the phrase? Yeah. So was there a lot of that? Like you had to continue to be getting in front of people, continuing to. What was that process like? I mean, text, call, carrier pigeon, email, LinkedIn, DM, Twitter. It was really anything. And like, I kind of see like in the earliest days and even now it's like whatever it takes to win, do. And I think like people don't take that seriously enough of like, I think any company, it's like you should have a level of obsession and desperation where it's like I will literally do whatever it physically is possible to make this happen.

44:23And so we've like, I took that very literally, like 10 texting, calling voicemails, whatever. And like, because the reason why I did that is like, I know that this is the right future that you should be moving to. I know this is scary, but like, we got you, we're going to execute well for you and we're going to make this happen. And so that was a lot of the early like trust building plus just like obsessive play persistence.

44:45Turner Novak:How do you avoid being annoying in that process though? Because when I have somebody that's constantly like, hey, did you see this message? Like, hey, I'm just following up. Like, I usually kind of start to tune that out. Like, so how do you how do you not do a lot of jokes? Yeah. Like if someone's like calling you being like, hey, it's like me calling you. Hey, it's me randomly calling you, Turner. I'm sure you're really excited to hear from me right now. Like, you know, there's a little bit of like humor and fun to it of like, hey, it comes off as very authentic if you're actually believe in what you're building and selling versus like some random sales guy who's sending a friendly follow-up 58 times, which no one cares about.

45:22And so that's been a lot of the focus, which is like, how do I build trust while also being persistent?

45:29Turner Novak:And so now you're making this transition and making people raving fans. Like, how do you be a raving fan? Like, as a CFO, like, what are you happy about? Like, what are you, what are you telling your friends and the CFO group chat of like, Hanover Park is so great. There's the three elements to raving fan that I think about. One is amazing onboarding deployment migration. That's the one click migration thing we talked about earlier, which is like, how do we make this experience where literally you sign a contract, you give us data access, and you put your feet up on the table and never think about this again.

46:01That is incredibly challenging, right? And we've done this now for customers and people have been like, you told me migration wasn't going to be bad. It's amazing, right? So that's the first piece. The second piece is taking the fund admin services from reactive to proactive. And so how do we use AI to supercharge services delivery by saying, no, I don't need to wait days or weeks or months to see this action happening. I can see things in almost real time. So that's the second piece. And then the third piece is jaw-dropping AI-native product experiences. And so it's not good enough to just deliver fund admin or the core service delivery.

46:38It's how do we unlock and build something magical on top of that data that no one else could offer. Right. And so that's been the three elements and hitting those are things that I like care deeply about tracking and monitoring and focusing on.

46:50Turner Novak:Was there a time when you kind of knew things were kind of working, like you were just getting like the scale sort of tipping towards more positive feedback in like momentum versus not? Yeah, I think like after 5 billion of assets, now we're almost 15 billion. After five, things started moving downhill. ecosystem started to pick up of people being like, have you heard this Hannibal Park thing? Despite us doing not a ton of marketing aside from me tweeting and posting on LinkedIn, right? And so we started to get this like positive momentum and ecosystem of like, oh my God, this could be the future.

47:24The idea of vertically integrating the core accounting system and building all these magical moments on top could be possible. And so that's when things started to kind of snowball. And then now it's just been like, let's make sure we can catch the snowball rolling down the hill.

47:36Turner Novak:And kind of hitting on the content that you post online, you are probably one of the, if somebody were to say who's a founder that's doing founder-led content well, I'd probably send them your profiles and just like check out what Chris is doing, follow his stuff. What's been sort of your process for thinking about things? And then maybe even you started making content online before you even started to Hanover Park. So what's that kind of like whole journey for you been like? Yeah, so the quick primer and background on it is, was a college kid at Yale, literally was like, okay, I was reading it.

48:08And before Sam Altman was cool, in 2020, he wrote this blog post.

48:12Turner Novak:This was pre-JadGPT. Pre-JadGPT, pre-JadGPT, pre-He was cool. He wrote this blog post, How to Be Successful. And I like obsessively read that and was like, this is insanely cool. And I was like, okay, this startup thing might be interesting. But like my dad sells commercial insurance, had no background, no ecosystem, nothing. And I was like, okay, there's really two ways you add value in early stage. Writing code or selling code at the early stages wasn't a good end. So I wanted to figure out distribution sales and said, like, Like, how do I like write compelling content on the internet that like people would actually click on, watch, listen to?

48:41And so I did this whole interview series where I interviewed Emmett Shear at Twitch and, you know, Michael Seibel at YC and, you know, Kevin Ryan who found a MongoDB. And I turned all that into Twitter content that went super viral. And so built the following to a few hundred thousand people over the past few years. And, but like when I started Hanover Park, I was like, I actually don't care about virality, which is a little bit contrarian. Like, it doesn't matter if Elon retweets me, which he did one time, which got me like 50 million views or something, that doesn't matter. It's actually like, if I'm trying to use this as a way in which CFOs find us, I need to write for them, which is obviously a much more niche audience than some random hustle tweet about whatever.

49:22Turner Novak:You're tweeting about the accrual-based accounting method, closing faster. The average person reads that they block you. Please block me. Yeah. They're like, block, Chris. And it's really like the problems that that a CFO faces of like, you're up at two in the morning, your LP calls you and says like, this number's wrong. Do you ever want that problem? No, you don't, right? So it's a lot about that in terms of like how I think about the positioning and how I think about what we're doing. And so like one of our largest customers came inbound off a LinkedIn post that had 10 likes. So it's really not about going viral.

49:52Turner Novak:Like going viral is not how you do founder led sales. It's resonating with the problem that your customer is facing. It's really just obsessive. Like all I do all day is talk to CFOs. They tell me their problems. They tell me some of the things that they're having issues with. And then we try to invent the future for them. Do you then take that feedback? You should take that feedback, put in the product. And you also I feel like a decent amount of your content is like, I just talked to a CFO at a billion dollar private equity firm. They said this and that's the that's the content. Yeah, I kind of think about it as like any conversation that I'm having could turn into content.

50:23So like the frame I have on this is with all the AI slop out there, you should only be writing and creating content of things that no one else could create. And a lot of that is like personal conversations. And so like I talked to the CFO about X, Y, Z. Here's what I learned. No one else had that conversation that day, right? So it's a lot about like, how do I, in a world of abundance of content, how do we have something scarce?

50:44Turner Novak:Do you keep like some sort of document or note where you'll like dump ideas in and you come back and visit it? Do you like plan it out Sunday night, right? Some content for the week? What's your process? Yeah, like in real time, I'll like jot down things as I'm having phone calls, conversations, et cetera. And like, that will be like the fodder for like the week's content. And so I think we maybe done this a little bit earlier. I actually don't even remember if it was before we started recording or not. But you talked about there's like a lot of the advice you kind of got or read about and heard about starting a company and building a company.

51:16Turner Novak:I think you said like 99 % of it just ended up being wrong. What's what's kind of the advice that you found is like most wrong? So I think, yeah, my my my take on this is I think like almost all advice, like 99 % of advice on scaling a company is incorrect right now. And so the traditional advice is like, oh my God, delegate everything, you know, hire this massive team, hire like VPs to do different actions and whatever. And I'm like, a lot of that is noise and basically creates this like hierarchical political system by which like people do well by figuring out ways to take credit. My goal is like, how do we do the anti that?

51:55And I took a lot of inspiration from Elon on this. of like be at the bare metal as much as possible. Like literally like don't talk to like three levels of whoever. It's like talk to the engineer writing the code on this like AI email agent and how this works, right? And like figure that out because the problem that creates, like if you don't do that, you create frustration for your best performers. The best performers like want a hard problem. They want the room to run and like go cook on that problem, right?

52:21Turner Novak:And so we've like really been anti this like hierarchical system by which like information is filtered in different ways and say like, let's just cut to the source and go direct. Isn't there an argument though that you kind of like quote unquote need like a grownup or like quote unquote need someone who's kind of done it before and knows the playbook. If you don't have like the VP that's, you know, done this before and can like share the knowledge with the team or knows what it looks like, do you miss out on that? So I think what's changing a lot now with like, what does it mean to build a company in the AI era, which is very different than I think the SaaS era of the 2010s, which is like the playbooks are being rewritten.

52:59What's possible is different. It used to be of a massive sales and marketing team. Now you have inference cost, right? And like that's your sales and marketing team. And so a lot of this is, I think, changing of like, instead of being an army of GTM, you have like the product does the talking, right? I think it's changed a lot. And so you look at companies like cursor that have scaled crazy with like a very small go to market and sales team. And so I think a lot of the playbooks are changing, which means like someone who's reusing a playbook from the last era is probably going to be not effective.

53:28However, that doesn't mean like we have multiple people that have been at companies that have exited before. They've been like senior engineers there. Like there is some level of how do we counterbalance like the hacker culture of the 20 year old who drops out of Harvard to, you know, what I call like the experience. Like I've seen all of these infrastructure problems at scale on the engineering side. And then obviously on the fund accounting team, like we are obsessively focused on bringing in expertise for like the Navy SEALs of fund accounting with like, that obviously requires a different level of experience in terms of how situations have been adopted over time.

54:03Turner Novak:Are there any things that you try to do based on, you know, someone said, this is how I've done this in the past, and it went horribly wrong that you feel like hopefully people can maybe learn from? And specifically with the way that building companies have kind of changed over the past couple of years with kind of these like AI native businesses? Yeah, I think, honestly, one of the things that we like preach every single day is this idea of like one way doors versus two way doors. Jeff Bezos invented this where it's like a one way door is like, if you make a decision in this way, you literally can't go back.

54:33It's impossible. So an example would be the investors you have on your cap table, you can't get rid of them. Right? They're one way door. They're here for the life of the company. The two way door is, hey, we can make a decision. It's easy to go back at any time. And those are almost all decisions in a startup. And so what we've done is like, drop your ego to the ground. be intellectually honest about truth seeking of like, what's the right answer to the company and make a fast decision because you can always revert back really easily at any point in time. And so like empowering the team to say, make really fast two way doors without bogging it down in process to create a committee to figure out if that makes sense to make a decision.

55:08It's better to have iterated five times before the committee even gets out of bed.

55:13Turner Novak:How do you know if something's like a one or two way door? Like, is there a gut check on like, hey, we know this is reversible or won't, you know, blow up the product or customer trust or something like that? You know, examples would be like, you know, shipping an internal accounting update for our fund accounting team is very two way door. You know, if it doesn't work in five seconds, we can update it and nothing changes. Right. Whereas it's like, you know, one way door is like a massive change for LP portal. Right. Which is like what the massive endowments and banks in the world log into every day across our 10 ,000 different limited partners.

55:43Turner Novak:And so I think it's more like that's on the product decisioning side of like, okay, great. You know, that is still a two-way door because you can revert quickly. But it's something that will take a little bit more seriously. And so you started initially, you kind of mentioned Sousa Ventures was the first customer. One shout out. Shout out to Chad and Patush and Kenny. And Kenny. Kenny's a legend. He's the one with all the credit. Nice. I've never met Kenny before. Next time, next time I'm near the office, I should try to do it. Try to meet all of them or try to meet Kenny. And so how did you kind of expand customer base over time?

56:14Turner Novak:Because you first couple customers were all VC firms. You seem like you kind of have like been like laddering up almost, I guess. I don't know how to describe this, but like what's the process been like of expanding? Part of our goal is like, we want to build for complexity, which is like the most complex firms in the world have blockers and splitters and aggregators and triple parallel funds and UK subsidiaries and different currencies. There's all this noise, right? If you were just built for a$10 million venture fund, Obviously, you are not the right partner and customer for them or customer fit.

56:43So what we've done is we said, OK, we need to solve this cold start problem. We need to get our first 10 customers. We're going to do that in venture capital. But we've quickly expanded to other asset classes like private equity and soon private credit as well, where we knew the needs are much more sophisticated and we built for that future. And now it's been like kind of a great opportunity to expand in these different types of asset classes. And so we launched a product recently, breaking news, on AI native waterfall modeling. And so in natural language, I can run my deal by deal waterfall if I'm a CFO, which would take hours and hours and days and wrong and it's not correct.

57:19And it's like seven different system exports that we've made instantaneous and natural language to run these scenarios. And so that would be a product that a private equity firm would fall in love with.

57:27Turner Novak:So how do you know that something like that is accurate? Yeah. Great question. because I fuck it up even when I make it manually in Excel. Like I'll like forget to drag a formula and I'll notice it like later, like, you know, error checking everything. Yeah, one of the key product principles of the company is what I call like trust but verify. And so it's like, it's not like if you just give someone a number, assume every single CFO, they're the most skeptical people on the planet, they're gonna assume it's wrong. You need to be able to have them click into it, export, run their own calculations to like verify the accuracy of a number.

57:57And so, you know, the trust but verify approach on the waterfall modeling plus the explainability. Like the beautiful thing is like, AI can tell you where the work's coming from. It can say like, hey, we went through these three different tiers of our waterfall and here's exactly what happened, right? And so that plus the auditability and explainability has been a critical kind of pillar.

58:15Turner Novak:And it's all, when you export to Excel, it comes with like linked formulas and everything. Am I remembering this right? Yeah, I mean, this is actually really fun. I think there's been two different approaches in the market when it comes to this. One is, hey, it's a bunch of manual, like humans running around with like really big Excel files. That's one. The problem with that approach is it's very error prone and manual and slow, but it gives you some auditability because it has formulas. The other approach, which is like a very 2018 SaaS approach was like, hey, I'm going to give you just a UI.

58:49Great. It's at least something, but it's just hard coded export randomly with no connectivity. We don't think either of those are the right solution. So we actually built an Excel replacement in the browser, similar to ramp sheets or try shortcut. There's these tools that do this. Like generally, we built this specific for our industry for fund CFOs, which enables us to instantly generate all the financial reporting without having to go into this crazy offline process. And so we think we've kind of married like best of both worlds when we think about the reporting aspect with the auditability of like formulas across the different Excel replacement that we built.

59:20Can you still export it to Excel? Always. Yeah.

59:23Turner Novak:Everything's exportable. I was going to say, like, I just don't think if you told a CFO everything we've just described about Hanover Park, but you can't use Excel anymore. It's over. Yeah. Like that's that's even even harder than the migration of a whole provider is like getting them off Excel. Like the industry runs on Excel. And you I think you have a nickname with your friends. They call you Chip. Oh, boy. What's going on with Chip? This is coming up. This is coming up. So my friends will shout out Raj and my friends. But like, when I started the company, everyone was like, you're crazy. What are you doing?

59:59You just like, you know, left this job and previously left Goldman Sachs. And like, this is insane. What are you working on? What are you doing? And I basically had this thing where like, I had this massive chip on my shoulder. I love this quote from Josh Wolf at Lux Capital, which is chips on shoulders, put chips in pockets. And now that, you know, Peter and Lux have invested, it's kind of entertaining for it to be full circle, which is like, everyone started calling me Chip because they were like, wow, he has this like massive chip on his shoulder because everyone doubted that this would be successful.

1:00:27We still have a lot of work to prove it, though.

1:00:29Turner Novak:Yeah, I think one thing that's been kind of interesting is despite you have like this chip on your shoulder, you really want to be successful. There's been times that you've turned down customers like somebody you don't think that you can take them on and like give them the right kind of service. How do you know when to do that? Yeah, I think like ideal customer profile, which is like a common term, has become like insanely important for us. Like I am deathly afraid of disappointment, right? Which is disappointing a customer that is really excited about Hanover Park, that we can't deliver what we need to deliver for them.

1:01:03And a lot of the problems in that is like you take on too many customers that are not the right profile that have different needs from who you're focusing on. And so you don't end up building for them. You end up with a bunch of people that are asking for things that don't match, right? And that's a massive problem. So I'm turning away customers left and right to ensure the people we do partner with have the A-plus raving fan experience that we want to deliver. And so that's kind of been the focus of like, it sounds crazy, but like we'll turn away customers all the time to ensure that the customer base we have can become raving fans in 2026.

1:01:34Turner Novak:But don't you want to grow super fast? Like that's kind of like the point of hyper-growth startup, right? Is it grow as fast as possible? Isn't that what they say? I think grow as fast as possible with like, you know, the right constraints of who you're building for. And so obviously there's a massive market right of like opportunity. And we've just focused, I would say on like mid-market enterprise, which are like larger firms with finance teams, more sophisticated CFOs than some of the kind of the smaller firms. That doesn't mean in the future we won't go there. I just think like, it is not a near term.

1:02:04It might be a long term as we are able to like democratize the like services delivery that we have and make it and make it scalable.

1:02:12Turner Novak:Talking about longer term, what is kind of like the longer term, like 10 years from now? I don't if we're gonna do this every single year. We should do it every year for the next decade. Yeah, but like, I mean, talking about 10 years from now, whatever the long-term is, like I'm reading the S1 for Hanover Park. You're like spilling it, spilling it all out there. Like, what am I gonna be reading about? Yeah, well, I think it was pretty awesome is that when Jake and Emergence led our series A, they wrote this memo and they said like, this, if executed incredibly well, we have a lot of work to do, is a Viva-like opportunity.

1:02:45Viva is the largest vertical software business in the world right now. It's around 50 billion market cap, which is like, but what's funny about Viva is they started as a CRM for life sciences. That is the most niche boring thing of all time. Now they're the board level vendor for Moderna and Pfizer and like all of these different things, right?

1:03:04Turner Novak:Board level. Board level, meaning they're the most important vendor for like Moderna and Pfizer. Like Moderna and Pfizer pay them like tens of millions of dollars a year, right? And so our goal is to do that in finance, right? And so it's like, okay, we want to become the most important vendor for Blackstone and KKR and Vista private equity and pick your name of like really important investment firms and not just do one siloed specific thing that they're used to. We want to like own the core like back office, own the middle office and own all the software tool spend for the investment firm. And along the way, have the opportunity to like bundle all these additional products and service offerings around it.

1:03:42And so, and then in the super long term, if now all this data that used to be in 50 different random tools is now in one centralized system of record, why can't we help people make better decisions and unlock alpha and do that for the investment firm? So that's the super long term.

1:03:57Turner Novak:So I have one more thing I want to ask you. You're kind of like personal AI stack, like what you use personally as like Chris. So I think a year ago, you told me you were using clawed artifacts and you were also using something called Hemingway for writing. what's still using those? What's number one tool right now? Granola, you know, it's just like AI call, you know, call right. So like what we do is a lot of our internal calls is like, we'll basically record any meeting. And then we have this like transcript repository that you can query and do a bunch of analysis on. And so like that really helps with like contact sharing across teams, especially as we've scaled the team really quickly.

1:04:32And so that's been one. The other is like, I am obsessed with Claude Cowork. Claude Cowork has changed everything. Claude Cowork is my chat GPT moment. Like actually.

1:04:43Turner Novak:So not even ChatGPT, like Claude Cowork was yours. Claude Cowork is like 10 times better for ChatGPT than me. It's crazy. Like what it's basically done is I used to be an investment banker. I used to have to put PowerPoints together. I used to put financial models together. I am now like, I did this massively important presentation for a trillion dollars of assets. And legitimately, Claude Cowork took call transcripts, notes, all this stuff. And I was like, here's the format of a different deck. build me this 10 slide thing from scratch with all these graphs, it one shot at it. I made like an hour of modifications of something that would have taken me 10 hours and I was done.

1:05:21And so it's been transformational when I think about like all the data analysis stuff, as well as like building presentations.

1:05:27Turner Novak:You said you built this kind of like central to do list thing. I remember you were texting, but like, what is it exactly? Oh, yeah. Do you use it or just like a fun thing you try to do? So I've literally like, as like the non-technical CEO that wants to be closer to the bare metal, I was like, AI coding tools are so much better. So I literally whipped up Claude Code this past weekend. I was like, I'm going to vibe code a like CEO command center basically to make decisions. And it was like pulling in all of Slack, all of email, all of Google Calendar, all of my granola notes, all of these different sources to like build a dashboard to help me be like, what are the decisions that I need to action on right now?

1:06:05and then like a self-updating to-do list that's synced with my email and other things. And so it's been pretty fun. It's still like super experimental. Like I did it for two hours on a Saturday, but it's been pretty fun to play around with.

1:06:16Turner Novak:Is it like you get like a feed that's updating every minute, like synced with Slack and you're like typing in and hitting enter to like make it do things? Like how does it actually work? Yeah, it's pretty crazy. So it's updating like, I think it's like every hour or something pulled together from like any activity over Slack, over email, over calendar, over anything. Linear is another one. We pull in our product issues and stuff like that. And so all the activity feeds in. And then if I want to update the dashboard, it's like I'm just connecting to a bunch of MCP servers and I'm literally prompting cloud code to do things.

1:06:49And so it'll just auto update. Say it's like, hey, you need to respond to this email. It's super critical about this deal. Once I respond to the email, it just auto updates.

1:06:57Turner Novak:In the dashboard. Yeah. Because that's the thing that I've always had, the issue I've had with these to-do lists is like you make your to-do list and then you can do the thing and you like go and change the to-do list. It's like what's going on. Yeah. So like I've always had super simple to-do lists that are basically like high level bang up this hour thing. And then you like maybe it's worth updating, but like there's some people make these like super elaborate, like very minute to-do lists. It's like you're spending half your time on your to-do list. I mean, I think it's like this, like, you know, productivity optimization sometimes is procrastination.

1:07:31I think it's like the piece of it of like, if you're doing too much, like the simplest execution should be like, I'm doing this thing today. And here's the most important problem to solve and everything else is noise.

1:07:40Turner Novak:And you just announced, I think you mentioned earlier, the Hanover MCP. So what is that? And what can you do with it if you're a customer? So breaking news, Hanover Park MCP is live now. What this enables us to do is MCP think about as API for AI. And so So instead of having many different disconnected data sources, the really cool thing about Hanover Park is because we are doing your core accounting execution, we have all of your system of record data. That's what gets audited. That's what gets sent to your limited partners. That's what you get your financials. On top of that data, we built some magical things like now we have all your LP data organized.

1:08:17We have all your portfolio data extracted. We have all your KPIs collected, all this stuff. Now with our MCP, it can be like, I don't even need my GP to log into Hanover Park. I can just tag it right into Claude alongside our CRM from Adio. And I can just query the full context of my data and generate PDFs on the fly. And so it's been a pretty magical opportunity for customers and excited to see where it goes.

1:08:41Turner Novak:You mentioned Adio. Did you switch over to Adio? I didn't. I'm a HubSpot stan. Oh, okay. Like it'd be old school. Use HubSpot for CM right now. But I'm thinking about new things like Monaco and others. Oh, nice. Shout out Sam Blonde. Yeah, he actually, I actually need to respond to my DM. I was like, hey, want to come on the podcast, talk about Monaco, everything you've learned about sales and growth. And he's like, yeah, let's do it. I think we're gonna do it in a couple of weeks. So if you're listening to this, look out for that episode. I think we have a couple. Let's see. I think it's either right before this or right after we have one with my friend Chathan at Benchmark talking all about software.

1:09:16We have an episode with Scott Stevenson at Spellbook.

1:09:20Turner Novak:It's like the fastest growing AI company in Canada. We think that that's a true statement. Is that true? We think based on what he's heard from. Yeah. It's sort of like cursor for contracts. So if you're a lawyer, a lot of the work you're doing is like with contracts. It's essentially like a Microsoft Word plugin where you can sort of like edit contracts like you would code, essentially. And like if you're a lawyer, a lot of your job is just like writing legal documents and editing legal documents. It just helps you do it faster. And I have a couple others. It's almost like Claude co-work for doing legal things.

1:09:55Turner Novak:So you can say, hey, write me this document based on these things and just go and do it. It's pretty interesting. I'm trying to think of who else we have. We have Mike and Nikhil at Footwork. I don't know if you ever met them throughout the course of fundraising, but Nikhil was a seed investor in Canva, Farmer's Dog, probably missing a couple, a couple like multi-billion dollar companies. And then Mike was the COO of Stitch Fix, his zero to a billion in revenue, ran Walmart.com, was like the in charge of all that, thousands of employees. Walmart.com is pretty big now. So anyways, a lot of good conversation coming up on the podcast.

1:10:36Turner Novak:People should continue listening to. Love it. Subscribe to the show. Subscribe to the newsletter. I might not even have to do an outro now. We can just do the outro right now. Also, thanks to Numeral and Flex for sponsoring the show. Check out numeral.com for sales tax. Do you guys have sales tax you have to collect? Are you using Numeral? We're not using Numeral yet. What are you talking about? You should use Numeral. Oh, whoa, whoa, that's good. And then other sponsors, Flex, which I use for the fund. If you check out the link in the description, sign up for the waitlist, you'll get the Flex Elite personal card.

1:11:11Turner Novak:It's like business and personal banking all in one. Let's go. And they give you credit. So there's a lot of guys out there that'll say, oh, we'll give you like a credit card, quote unquote, just based on your bank account and what kind of cash. We'll give you a percentage of it. Flex actually gives you like a credit card, underrates it like Amex. So worth checking all those out. Let's go. Thanks for listening. See you guys next time. See you soon.