🎧🍌 Inside Hanover Park: The AI-Native Fund Administrator | Chris Hladczuk
Building an AI-enabled service business, helping fund CFO's adopt AI, creating the financial infrastructure for $100 trillion in assets, and why you should always get on the plane.
Hanover Park just raised $27M to create AI products for investment firms that touch over $100 trillion in assets.
AI-enabled services businesses are the recent model to catch the attention of Silicon Valley, and I got a chance to sit down with Co-founder and CEO Chris Hladczuk to talk through everything he’s learned building one from the ground up.
I first met Chris two years ago. We didn’t know what it would be, but I knew he had what it took to build a generational business.
Since then, he recruited his co-founder Nick Puljic, they built a general ledger from scratch, and have grown to over $15 billion in customer assets on the platform.
We go inside their recent $27M Series A, talk about productizing the service layer, helping CFO’s use AI, automating onboarding + manual admin work, becoming a customers most important vendor, and why you should always get on the plane.
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Timestamps to jump in:
0:37 Financial infrastructure for investment firms
1:35 Hanover Park’s $27m Series A
5:30 AI-enabled services businesses
9:07 Productizing the service layer
11:30 Helping CFO’s and investors use AI
13:46 Building a general ledger from scratch
18:03 Compete against companies with IT departments
19:55 Hiring in an unsexy industry
21:30 Live in constant paranoia of your customers
25:19 Gongs, music in the office, blizzard commutes
28:54 Friday night hackathons
30:54 Automating onboarding and manual admin work
35:05 Real-time visibility on all data
38:07 Always get on the plane
40:36 Turning customers into raving fans
43:45 Using polite persistence in sales
47:36 How to master founder-led content
51:29 99% of advice is wrong in AI era
54:21 Importance of one-way vs two-way doors
56:11 Growing from VC into PE and Private Credit
1:00:36 When to turn down new customers
1:02:22 Becoming a customers most important vendor
1:04:00 Chris’ personal AI stack
1:07:41 Hanover Park’s MCP
Referenced:
Careers at Hanover Park
Find Chris on X / Twitter and LinkedIn
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Transcript
Find transcripts of all prior episodes here.
Turner Novak:
Chris, welcome to The Peel.
Chris Hladczuk:
We’re back.
Turner Novak:
The second ever second time guest. First one was Dan at Chainguard, which they went zero to 40 in revenue in two years. Those are big shoes to fill.
Chris Hladczuk:
I know. We went zero to $15 billion in under two years, 20 months to be exact. So, we’re going.
Turner Novak:
$15 billion in revenue?
Chris Hladczuk:
That would be a lot of revenue. I’m not cursor. That’s assets on platform.
Turner Novak:
Assets on platform. Okay. So, for someone who isn’t familiar with Hanover Park, they didn’t listen to the first one, which will link in the show notes for people if they want to listen to the year-old conversation. What is Hanover Park for people who don’t know?
Chris Hladczuk:
You can think about us as financial infrastructure for the investment firm. And so today there’s all these insane armies of human duct tape, we call it, that sticks together all the back and middle office to do all of the financial reporting for the limited partners at these firms, for the CFOs and all that kind of stuff. And what we’ve built is unified software plus AI plus services to do all the financial reporting, which would be called fund administration. And then we also have a bunch of portfolio management and monitoring tools. And our thesis is that B2B SaaS is dead, which I said literally on this podcast a year and a half ago that’s come true with Claude.
These thin layers on top of data that you don’t own are things that are being disrupted. And so, our goal is build the system of record for the fund, we did that. And then owning and controlling that data can deliver better product for the CFO.
Turner Novak:
So, I know you just announced some news within the past day or two, three, whenever people listen to this, what’s the thing you just announced?
Chris Hladczuk:
Breaking news heard here on The Peel. We raised a $27 million Series A led by Emergence Capital. Lux, Susa participated as well to build the financial infrastructure for the investment firm.
Turner Novak:
And how did this come about? What was the setup leading into it and the process of raising a Series A? Because it can be hard sometimes.
Chris Hladczuk:
We were growing really fast. We went from one to $7-ish billion of assets on platform late last year. People were super excited and we were like, what I wanted to validate is the size of the opportunity. It’s like you have $100 trillion of global assets, largely these investment firms are paying millions and millions of dollars a year to these outsourced providers. And we said, “Can I probably take this from a human heavy services business from something that’s scalable?” And so, that’s what we validated. And then we went to the market, it was very quick process, it only took a few weeks or so.
And there was this crazy moment where Jake Saper, who joined our board from Emergence, flew in from San Francisco to New York City on Friday night. He’s like, “I’m going to take you out to dinner.” It was like a three-hour-long dinner. And I was like, “When are we actually going to talk about the terms here? Are we just going to keep looking at each other, eating omakase back and forth?” And at the very end, he’s like, “All right, so let’s talk about the terms.” And so, we end up negotiating these terms and he literally nothing, it’s like Friday night at 9:00 PM. I go back to my apartment and at midnight I get a phone call. I’m like, “Why am I still up right now?”
And he’s like, “Term sheet’s in your inbox right now. What are you doing? You have 48 hours to make a decision.” I was like, “Oh, that was fun.” So, I was like, “This is great.” Now, we’d done a bunch of back channeling with Jake and he had been super close to the team at Susa as well and he has been the leader in what I call AI enabled services, which we can talk about. And so, pretty excited to team up with him and the Emergence Team.
Turner Novak:
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That’s probably an interesting thing to get into, this whole concept of AI-enabled services businesses, because you just talked about the industry standard, and maybe we could re-hit on like what does the fund admin market look like even if we’re going back maybe a couple years or if you don’t know Hanover Park exists and you’re talking to a fund admin, what do they look like?
Chris Hladczuk:
Yeah, it’s like army of humans with a set of disconnected tools that people are buying. And so, they might buy, you have a bunch of people in Kentucky, they are fund accountants, they are CPAs, they buy QuickBooks, they buy Excel, they buy bill.com. They don’t build any of their own tech because they call Engineering IT, they don’t have engineers at their companies. And so, a lot of it’s just disconnected SaaS tools with human duct tape on top. And so, the opportunity set is like we’re like, “Okay, if we build this ERP for the fund, which is like, everyone told us from day zero, this is crazy, don’t do this, don’t build this insanely hard thing to build.”
You’re building financial infrastructure for the most complex funds in the world, we did it. And it was like, “If you build this, that gives us the opportunity to have AI agents action on top of that data.” And so, instead of having people clicking buttons, you can have agents actioning. And then the paradigm that we’ve had is AI’s preparing things and then humans are reviewing things. And so, we have well-trained fund accountants on our team that are reviewing outputs to ensure accuracy, but that’s never been done before. Most people, I think in 2018 would be selling software to a fund admin instead of saying like, “I’m actually going to be the full stack fund admin.”
Turner Novak:
Yeah, because a lot of people then would say,” What’s the size of the fund admin software market?” And it’s like-
Chris Hladczuk:
Tiny.
Turner Novak:
Yeah, it’s not existent. They pay for bill.com and QuickBooks maybe. Intuit is a big company, but like-
Chris Hladczuk:
It’s tiny.
Turner Novak:
And so what changed then over the past couple years to just make this possible? And then you talked about how you built your own general ledger. Why did you need to build a general ledger? So, what’s changed and then why did you do what you did?
Chris Hladczuk:
Yeah, I think the big why now about this market is it’s possible now with AI to act as a fund accountant. We call it an AI fund accountant. And so, it’s like, “Okay, we can take this thing that used to be really disconnected toolset with a bunch of humans in a room trying to click buttons and do work to agent can actually click the buttons and do the preparation work for our team to review.” And so, I think it was a lot about what does AI unlock. But what I tell the team all day long is if you don’t have the right bedrock, the right core foundational system of record, it doesn’t matter what AI is doing on top.
AI is not going to figure out bill.com, which randomly isn’t going to give access unless you’re doing some computer use agent. AI is not going to figure out Excel because there’s a lot of limitations. AI’s not going to figure out QuickBooks and other things. And so, we said the 80% is building the general ledger from scratch, and then on top of that, having agents’ action on. So, I think the big change here was it’s now possible to have agents doing work that would require an army of people, and now our fund accounting team can just review work.
Turner Novak:
And it sounds like really what a fund administrator is basically an accounting firm for an investment fund in the most simple terms.
Chris Hladczuk:
Simple terms, financial reporting, they also do investor services.
Turner Novak:
And you talked about how we’re entering this era of you can build an AI native services company. So traditionally, if I’m thinking from a technology business perspective, I’d look at a fund administrator and say, “They’re not building any technology, it’s just mostly people. It doesn’t scale in the most efficient way.” So, what’s happening in this broader AI native services? Are there certain things that needs to be true in order for that to unlock this massive opportunity?
Chris Hladczuk:
Yeah, I think we think a lot, and this is something we’ve spoken a lot at the board level in the past quarter or so, which is how do we productize the services layer, which is we are tracking key metrics on things like what percent of cash is auto categorized? What percent of times when a customer sends us an email with a request that AI agent can action on it with no edits by the human team?
Turner Novak:
This is like a customer service type of automation as well. And so, you’re automating the accounting, you’re automating the customer service, you’re automating other software that you’re starting to build on top of things.
Chris Hladczuk:
Yeah. A lot of it is productizing these core services delivery metrics, we call it, which are things like cash categorization, email agents that are action on customer requests and other stuff. And so that’s been the key part. Without that, and I think the reckoning will happen in 2026 for AI native services businesses that are growing revenue, but not actually productizing the services part.
Turner Novak:
Oh, Wow. Is that a common thing?
Chris Hladczuk:
Very common. I think a lot of people are doing that.
Turner Novak:
Are there certain categories you think it works best in? Fund admin? I’m assuming that’s one of them.
Chris Hladczuk:
Well, I’m talking my own book now. This is talking my own book. I think there’s a lot around what is the data layer that we have access to that can enable us to deliver a better service. And so, part of what we’ve done is said, how do we build wedge products around the core fund admin? Because if I go to someone and be like, “I’m going to give you slightly better fund accounting,” or “I’m going to give you 10 times better fund.” That’s still interesting, but not the most compelling. And so, we built a lot around AI native waterfall modeling, which is adjacent or portfolio management, which is adjacent or portfolio monitoring, which is adjacent.
So, it’s like, what does the full bundle look like that’s not just the core fund admin?
Turner Novak:
And so, the core customer or core user, buyer decision maker of this is a CFO of an investment firm, like the finance leader and an investment firm?
Chris Hladczuk:
The CFOs are my heroes.
Turner Novak:
Yeah, I know. I know you love CFOs. So, what can they use AI for? Because you just mentioned so many things like a waterfall model. Maybe you can explain why that is, maybe it’s not worth explaining, but you can just make that in Excel, right? So, what’s the importance of all this stuff?
Chris Hladczuk:
So, I think our goal is to become the default for how fund CFOs adopt AI. I think there’s a lot of noise in the market. There’s a bunch of providers, I call it the army of overpriced SaaS tools that are offering like, “Here’s what AI is.” And the CFO’s like, “This doesn’t actually help me.” And so, part of our goal was we’re launching an MCP server, which you can think about that as an API for AI. Which is like, I can have all of this data that Hanover Park has inside, which is your LP data, your portfolio data, your fund performance data, all the data that might be in disconnected systems is now in one place.
And now you can give that and feed that directly into Claude. You can feed it into ChatGPT or Gemini. And now you can instantly access and say, “Generate me a report with Yale endowments commitments across our five funds with a pretty graph, with my logo on it, with our top five performing portfolio companies by ownership percentage, MOIC and Gross IRR.” That is literally hundred hours of work to do across a bunch of random tools. Today, and now you can instantly do that through Hanover Park. And so, I think that’s some of the power is being able to feed this into the tool you’re already using as well.
Turner Novak:
And that’s something the IR team might make. So, it sounds like it’s not even just CFOs, it’s like other people at the firm can maybe start using the tool too?
Chris Hladczuk:
What we realize is CFOs and finance teams are drowning because they get hundreds of data requests that are like, “Hey, can you pull this random initial versus follow-on thing that of my venture fund portfolio companies that we have no idea what the stat is?” And the CFO is like, “Oh my God, what do I do?” They’re like, “Do I just run around and try to go into 17 spreadsheets that haven’t been updated in three months to figure out where this is?” This enables anyone to instantly access your data as well as the managing partner, the founder of the firm.
So, they don’t have to be begging their CFO to get back to them in three days. They can instantly access it, which gives a lot of credibility to the finance team.
Turner Novak:
There’s a lot of these, I don’t even know what you call it, banker AI tools or junior credit analyst type AI modeling tools. Does it start to flow into that? Not really? Where’s the delineation between all that stuff?
Chris Hladczuk:
Yeah, I think part of our, we call ourselves the anti GPT wrapper. There’s a lot of companies that are fine that are basically like, “I am going to take GPT, I’m going to verticalize it for something specific, I’m going to enable it to be better for a lawyer, a banker, or whatever it is.” Part of our goal was actually, we’re the opposite of that because we did the really hard thing first. Building a general ledger from scratch is one of the hardest technical challenges you have so hard that our early investors were like, “What is going on? This is crazy.”
And so, we’re like, “Once you do that though, you unlock all the ability for AI to action on data that you couldn’t before.” And so, part of this was building the GL sets the stage to build the magical MCP server on top versus the opposite, which is I’m going to get data that everyone else has access to, and then I’m going to make it slightly better on the AI front. So, that’s how we thought about the paradigm, which was different.
Turner Novak:
And it’s basically people you might describe, if you’re trying to hype up this in the most simple terms possible, you’d say it’s like an AI native fund administrator.
Chris Hladczuk:
Yeah. I think AI native fund admin, strike that. Fund admin, most unsexy term in the world. I think about it as financial infrastructure for the investment firm. So, Stripe did this for payments, Ramp did this for expenses, Hanover Park’s doing it for investments. That’s how we think about it.
Turner Novak:
And you didn’t even start with like, “Hey, we’re building an AI model for your fund.” You started with we’re building a general ledger that, general ledgers have existed since the invention of commerce, basically like ancient Italy or whatever.
Chris Hladczuk:
Yeah, I think the vertical integration story is around, okay, what is the core job to be done? Every single fund in the entire world needs to generate quarterly financials for their limited partners. Great, you’re going to have to pay someone to do that. May as well be us and think about that as the core layer. But on top of that, now it’s like, “Okay, I need to help a CFO make better decisions.” Great, all that data is now sitting in Hanover Park to help you make better decisions. On top of that, maybe in the long term, it’s like, “How can I unlock Alpha for the investment firm? How can we have this investment firm make better decisions on top of all the source of true data that Hanover Park has?” And so, that’s how I think about the layering from most unsexy to most sexy.
Turner Novak:
And so, what makes it so hard to make a general ledger because it’s just like some accounting, it’s like debits and credits. I don’t know, it doesn’t seem that hard.
Chris Hladczuk:
Yeah, I know. So, I think partnership accounting, and this is tuned out if this is the most boring thing you’ve ever heard ever. So, there’s a lot of complexity with fund accounting. And so, we’re like, “Okay, build debits and credits for a simple small businesses like table stakes honestly.” But saying, “Okay, I have all of these different limited partners in a fund. They have different allocation percentages, they have different side letters waiving economic terms, they have blockers and splitters and aggregators and they have 50 legal entities for one fund.”
All of that complexity of the interaction between all these legal entities and all of the partners in those entities gets crazy.
Turner Novak:
And then there’s multiple funds sometimes too, right?
Chris Hladczuk:
Dozens of funds, and then you have a management company that needs to talk to the funds. And so, I think the complexity lies in, think about these investment firms as the most complex financial institutions in the world and organizing that data is crazy. And so, we had to build a system that can handle the most complex investment firms in the world.
Turner Novak:
And is this why it was just like a, let’s just throw some bodies at this and people would just manually do it?
Chris Hladczuk:
Correct.
Turner Novak:
And that’s how it falls?
Chris Hladczuk:
And I think a lot of the underlying tools that were built. There’s some specific fund accounting tools that people had tried to build, but it’s like the problem is there was a disconnect between the people doing the work, the fund accountants, and the people building the product, random engineers at a different company. That disconnect created tons of problems because no one’s actually talking to their “customer all day.” And so, what we’ve done is said, “Hey, we have this 60-person room in Flatiron where we all go to every day called an office. Let’s all put the best fund,” I call it the Navy SEALs of fund accounting, “alongside lead engineers to work in harmony.”
Turner Novak:
And the last time you came on the podcast, we had an interesting conversation where the traditional fund admin sees an engineer, they call them the IT department. Your job is to get people access to the HR system or something or sign up for QuickBooks and generate someone an account on the different software using now.
Chris Hladczuk:
I love you talking about accounting. This is hilarious.
Turner Novak:
Well, and so just basically who you’re competing against, you’re like, you are an engineering product-led company that is competing against people who think about it as an IT department basically. It’s like a backup house versus front of host thing.
Chris Hladczuk:
Yeah. I think I think about if you’re one of the greatest engineers in the world and we’ve built this hacker culture, it’s only dropped out of Harvard, he was a sophomore in college. We have a team USA drone racer, we have people that have multiple ex founders, former and future founders, I call it. So, we built this really talent dense engine product team. Those people would never in their wildest, wildest considerations or nightmares join a legacy fund admin who doesn’t care about them. And so, our goal is how do we build this financial infrastructure for the most complex firms of the world?
If Ramp can make expense management sexy, we can make investments sexy. And so, I think about this as the most elite engineers on the planet will never join a legacy fund admin because no one cares about them there. What we’ve done is say, “How do we build this world-class team of engineers?” People that drop out of Harvard, Team USA drone racers, shout out JT, former founders, future founders. People that are top 1% that might join an AI lab say, “Hey, I have this deep obsession with building for FinTech and building for the most complex investment firms in the world.”
This 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 a legacy fund admin.
Turner Novak:
Yeah. Okay. So, you’ve built this environment where the top 0.1% of engineers want to go. How do you convince people to join? And then maybe another interesting thing to hit on is how has that changed over time? If somebody listened to this first conversation, they can hear your original philosophy, what’s changed over the past year?
Chris Hladczuk:
Yeah, I think I say growth solves a lot of problems. We went zero to $15 billion in 21 months since our first line of code. That level of growth proves to the most skeptical engineer on the planet like, “Hey, this is working. And if I have a deep interest in FinTech, this could be compelling and interesting.” And the second piece is you are what you prioritize. There’s a lot of companies who have 100 people on the team and 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, what is hired for?” If this is an eng-first hacker culture, that matters deeply when I think about 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 pushing on engineering when it comes to building.
Turner Novak:
So then, how do you guys figure out what to build when you’re talking about the engineering being first class? And it sounds like it’s literally just you. Are you talking to customers? Are engineers joining calls? Are engineers using, demoing the products? I think I’ve seen something around when I was hanging out in the office one day, everyone uploads stuff or something. I may be remembering the story wrong, but.
Chris Hladczuk:
So, we have demo night every Friday night where literally people are showing what they’re building, both to the fund accounting team as well as on the engineering side, which is really fun. But how we think about what to build is we have a Slack channel with every customer. I literally, I said I live in constant paranoia that my customer is finding a better solution, just like this Jeff Bezos quote of like, “Oh my God, live in fear that not that your customer’s unhappy that they’ll find something better.” And so, we constantly want to be pushing the envelope to invent on our customer’s behalf.
And so, we take that super seriously when it comes to feedback. And being in a Slack chat with every customer, our engineering team is blown away by 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. And so, the level of importance creates a sense of urgency, especially on the team. And then on what we’re building and what we’re working on, it’s like we really said, “Start with the unsexy, automate core financial reporting, automate core fund admin.”
And then now we’ve built a series of portfolio management and portfolio monitoring and all the adjacencies that should live in one place that haven’t, but stay tuned for more stuff.
Turner Novak:
So, can you give me some examples if I’m not super familiar of what some of those tools might be and what I’m using them for?
Chris Hladczuk:
Yeah. So, say you invest in Hanover Park at the Series A, you get a set of legal documents or cap table or something like that. Typically, these legacy providers, all they do is save those docs randomly-
Turner Novak:
It’s in a folder. It’s a random folder.
Chris Hladczuk:
It’s a randombox.com or Google Drive or something super random and be like, “Oh yeah, 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 book some super boring accounting stuff that the CFO doesn’t care about.
Turner Novak:
Sometimes there will be a shared drive though. You can access it from your browser and you can download it.
Chris Hladczuk:
You can download the file. And so, what we said is we were like, amazing, we have this leveraged position because we’re doing your 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, AI extracts and process 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 in this company? What’s the ownership percentage from the cap table?
What’s the latest valuation, post money valuation? Who are my co-investors in the deal?” All these other important details that should live in one place that don’t. And so, we bundled this “AI portfolio management tool” in for free alongside the core fund admin services.
Turner Novak:
And I think you mentioned it took you about nine months to kind of make this. Am I remembering that number right?
Chris Hladczuk:
Boy, yeah. So, this is a very complex technical, 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 all this crazy complexity in the pursuit of how does the customer lift zero fingers just forward it over to us and let us take care of the rest.
Turner Novak:
And so, what was the hardest part about doing all this? Is it natural language processing extraction? Is it organizing it in a sortable, efficient way?
Chris Hladczuk:
The extraction is really complex because it’s really simple if you’re doing a Series A in the United States like we did, but if you’re doing a deal in Europe, if you’re having a random mistake made by the lawyers on the cap table. Okay, if we have 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 highly complex documents that you know 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. And so, that was part of the challenge.
Turner Novak:
So, you walk into the office at Hanover Park in the morning, what’s it like?
Chris Hladczuk:
So, at 9:00 AM 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 founded 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 want to hear outside of work ever again, but we do that. And so, it’s a fun environment where we’re blasting music. We go right into engineering stand-up, we then go right into the accounting team stand-up and we get right into our day.
But my goal is how do we create this overwhelming sense of energy and how much we’re building and how fast things are moving?
Turner Novak:
Is there a gong in the office, I hear-
Chris Hladczuk:
How did you hear about this, Tyler? You heard about the gong? 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 everyone involved.
Turner Novak:
I actually haven’t seen the new one yet.
Chris Hladczuk:
You haven’t seen the new one.
Turner Novak:
How close is it?
Chris Hladczuk:
Yeah, it’s right near here.
Turner Novak:
Can I stop by right after this?
Chris Hladczuk:
Come stop by after.
Turner Novak:
All right, I want to see it right after this, on my way to the airport.
Chris Hladczuk:
So, in our first office, which was this tiny little office in FiDi, we had this gong. Anytime we would get a sale, anytime something great would happen, we did this. Now 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 Newman, we crash style, we have not upgraded yet, but the gong is very ... The only people allowed to ring the gong are one, customers.
And so, we literally had a customer in the office the other day and 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 you have to ring the gong.” So, he comes over, he rings the gong and the entire team goes wild. Literally people are cheering their belt, 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 we ship some massive product update or close the sale.
Turner Novak:
And so, those are the only people that are allowed to ring it, right? No outsiders?
Chris Hladczuk:
No outsiders.
Turner Novak:
So, technically I cannot ring the gong?
Chris Hladczuk:
No investors.
Turner Novak:
I’d have to be a customer.
Chris Hladczuk:
You’d have to be a customer.
Turner Novak:
Which I need to hit that institutional sky. I don’t have a CFO, it’s just me.
Chris Hladczuk:
We’re just CFOs.
Turner Novak:
Soon. Soon. 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. What’s the story with that?
Chris Hladczuk:
So, I got to give a shout-out to Philip. We literally, it was like a Sunday at 2:00 PM, there’s a crazy blizzard happening in New York City. And of course, I don’t expect people to be in the office. 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 and he’s like, “I just biked here.” I’m like, “How are you alive right now?” And he just goes right into coding and he’s like, “I’m good. I’m just biking.” So, I’m like, “Okay, this is what we screen for though. We have forces of nature that are figuring stuff out.”
Turner Novak:
Was the subway down because there was so much snow or what was going on?
Chris Hladczuk:
I just think he’s anti-subway. That’s what it is. He’s not just a subway guy. He’s like a bike guy.
Turner Novak:
Interesting. The streets would probably be open, very clear. You could probably just keep cruising, you probably wouldn’t have to stop.
Chris Hladczuk:
Yeah, maybe. Yeah, it’s crazy. It’s like if it even got plowed that day.
Turner Novak:
So, then what do you guys do on Friday nights? I know you have a Friday night thing that you do.
Chris Hladczuk:
So, we have this thing where we love to celebrate our product velocity is everything. We’re literally doing multiple releases a day. I would say compared to many legacy players who call Engineering IT and don’t actually ship net new product, our goal is 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 every few weeks on Friday at 6:00 PM where they’ll literally like everyone will huddle around what we call the podcasting couch. It’s not actually for podcasting-
Turner Novak:
Podcasting coach. We should have done this there on the podcasting couch.
Chris Hladczuk:
Yeah, we should have, podcasting couch. We have this massive couch, which people have gotten excited about that literally everyone goes onto that couch and we demo 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 tell everyone what we’re working on.
Turner Novak:
So, this is not like a hackathon random side project type of thing. It is you’re showing what you built?
Chris Hladczuk:
Yeah, exactly.
Turner Novak:
Okay. And you said you’re shipping multiple things per day. So, is it Friday, you spend an hour and just everything that was shipped, people just go through and show what they shipped?
Chris Hladczuk:
Yeah. And there’s a lot of times when people get feedback, so we’ll ship something and it’ll be an iteration and the fund 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 customers to the office for these Friday demos to see the latest and greatest. Because what we’ve had is I had a customer call me and be like, “Hey, you’re our most important vendor. I love Hanover Park.” I don’t think anyone’s ever said that about a fund admin before.
“I love Hanover Park. Can we host a customer conference at the office and can everyone just jam and huddle about 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 live feedback at these demo nights.
Turner Novak:
So, when somebody comes across Hanover Park, what is the reason that they choose Hanover Park versus, there’s a couple other options that are out there. What is usually the discovery process of finding it and then the decision-making process usually?
Chris Hladczuk:
So, all the problems come from, if you’re just a $50 million venture fund and it’s super simple and it’s one person in a room, things are super simplistic, 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.” And so, therein lies the problem with all the legacy players where things are broken and held together by legacy, human duct tape and Excel. And so, that’s problem one. It’s like, “Oh my god, I can’t scale.”
Problem two is I’ve heard of all these good things about AI, ChatGPT is out, Claude’s out, but what has it even done for CFOs? Nothing, and people are frustrated by that. And so, it’s a combination of things are breaking what we scale and oh my god, how can I adopt AI? And so, we’re at the intersection where it’s like, “Hey, instead of buying a random army of overpriced SaaS tools on one side to compliment 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 LM to Claude or ChatGPT or Gemini and be able to action on your data. And so, it’s this like, “Oh my god, my data’s 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 buy 20 other SaaS tools.” And we solve both those problems.
Turner Novak:
Isn’t it really hard to switch a fund admin though? It’s got to be one of the most difficult problems in the history of humanity.
Chris Hladczuk:
So, I joke, I literally, I’ll be on 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.” And I take that insanely seriously of the level of trust that our customers put in us, that’s what keeps me up at night of 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 to switch? That’s literally what everyone says.
Turner Novak:
That seems like that would be the disqualifier like, it seems cool, but I don’t want to do this.
Chris Hladczuk:
I don’t want to deal with this.
Turner Novak:
I’m not going to put up with this.
Chris Hladczuk:
And so, I literally tell our team, 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 what’s possible with AI is 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. And so, I see a future where we get to one click migration.
Turner 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?
Chris Hladczuk:
I think it’s just if you’re a world-class engineer that’s looking at this, this is a example of a really fun technical challenge to work on, which is super challenging technical problem, wrangling the most complex financial data in the world. It’s really just end bandwidth plus some pushes on the frontier of how do we think about these long-running agents that need to operate over days and weeks, not minutes.
Turner Novak:
So, that is probably the big just overarching problem that people are trying to solve right now is cracking how to speed this up.
Chris Hladczuk:
Yeah, I think it’s a massive problem that traditionally people have hired an army of humans to solve it. And it’s like, well, if that doesn’t deliver a 10X better experience, what would? And I think there’s an opportunity to do that.
Turner Novak:
And I know there was a time where you, I think when you first started the company or getting customers, and this even harder ask back when you started it. 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 or?
Chris Hladczuk:
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.” It did, I’ll never forget though, one of our earliest customers, and by the way, I have a crazy place in my heart for our earliest customers that trusted us with their most important financial data. And I was one of our earlier customers and I’m on a call with him on a Tuesday and I’m like, “Hey, where do you live? Where are you in?” And he’s like, “Why are you asking me where I live?”
And he’s like, “I’m in this random town in Florida.” And I’m like, “Okay, I’m booking a flight right now. I’m coming down to Flo-, this was the first call. He’s like, “Who is this guy?”
Turner Novak:
So, he wasn’t a customer yet?
Chris Hladczuk:
No, a prospective customer. And I literally booked a flight and I go and literally me and him spend five hours at his house until 2:00 in the morning basically talking about how the future of finance is possible. They became one of our earlier key critical customers and has been a massive advocate for us. So, it’s credit to them and what happened. But in the early days, do whatever it takes to win.
Turner Novak:
What did you talk about in that five hours?
Chris Hladczuk:
Oh my god.
Turner Novak:
What was the biggest takeaways?
Chris Hladczuk:
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 CFOs don’t have visibility in real time of anything that’s going on. That’s crazy. Think about you’re making a $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. I’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.” So, it was just a frustration layer. And with what’s possible with AI now, I think now is the time where we should solve that problem.
Turner 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.
Chris Hladczuk:
Oh, this is the plug.
Turner Novak:
I’m giving plug.
Chris Hladczuk:
On pod plug. I have not tried it.
Turner Novak:
You’ve 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, their thesis is if you have AI agents that are doing things automatically, you just need real-time data, everything needs to be synced. Because if something’s off by, let’s say you have to wait for a sync or the data’s off and the agent starts to make a decision, you’re making decisions and it’s just doing things with incorrect information.
Chris Hladczuk:
100%.
Turner Novak:
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. The first episode, we spent a lot of time talking about 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 re-hit on that stuff and 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?
Chris Hladczuk:
Yeah, so I ended up joining Series A FinTech that was doing business banking. Helped us scale from call it 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, a ton of respect and credit for them. But it taught me a lot. Literally SVB collapsed, we scaled exponentially, closed hundreds of customers myself personally. And I wrote this almost manifesto, which I call always get on the plane that I think has become popular now. I think people are just stealing my tweet and retweeting it, but it’s like-
Turner Novak:
Did you came up with this?
Chris Hladczuk:
I came up with this. So, I wrote this thing of always get on the plane. And the key principles of 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, this is a decade-long relationship.
Turner Novak:
Yeah. And they really trust you if you’re not going to do that.
Chris Hladczuk:
And It’s like, I can’t build trust over a Zoom call. And so, I did this, I popularized it, and now it is one of the key philosophies, especially for us. And so, there was a 10-person finance team and a massive private equity firm that we’re talking to that I literally told them, I was like, “I’ll just go to your office wherever in random place in California, and 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, let’s just be honest with each other about what the trust and the blunt feedback is.
And so, I’ve obsessively been focused on this, always getting on the plane thing, and I’m glad to see people are taking it.
Turner Novak:
Yeah. So, how do you manage that though? You’re trying to run a company, 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.
Chris Hladczuk:
So, look, time management, prioritization, there has to be a level of like, “Okay, how do we think about what is the highest ROI thing?” I think a lot about, I’ve taken a lot of inspo from Elon on this of 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 obsess over that problem until it’s solved? And so, limiting factor is migration. We need to go parachute in, work with our head of ops, Emily, who joined, and obsess over what does AI native migration look like. So, at different times, whatever the limiting factors in the company, my job is jump into battle and figure it out.
Turner Novak:
One of the things that you’ve done really well, people call it founder-led sales, where I think you said you’re the only person that’s on the sales team.
Chris Hladczuk:
Still, I don’t know how. I’m just a founder of the plan, I’m not even a sales guy.
Turner Novak:
Yeah. And maybe it’s not sales, it’s just like trust building. You’re trying to understand customers, trying to solve their problems. So, what’s been the biggest learnings you’ve had over the past 21, I was going to say 21 years, 21 months since you wrote the first line of code and started onboarding customers.
Chris Hladczuk:
Yeah, I think for ... And we’re definitely in founder-led sales mode too long. We’re at $15 billion of assets on platform that’s probably a little too long. And it’s been something I’ve held onto just given how critical and customer trust is and how that interacts with product and eng 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 how do I make sure that these people can become raving fans? Which I think is very different philosophy.
And all the worst parts about sales in general of like, I’m just trying to get them some sales guy with commission. Obviously, I’m a founder with no commission. And so, what I think about is if our number one goal in 2026 is every customer’s a raving fan, that is very, very hard in our industry. That’s like the craziest thing ever. 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 hundred 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. How do we make sure that you’re a raving fan in 12 months?”
Turner 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 to manage your fund?”
Chris Hladczuk:
So, I got to give a lot of credit. I’m going to give a shout-out to Chad at Susa, founder of Susa and Pratyush. Kenny, who’s their CFO. I love you, Kenny. They were our first customer. And so, I literally was like, “Hey, we’re doing this, you’re our first investor.” They 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 around for the most important thing for your firm, which is all of your LP relationships.
And they were literally like, took some convincing. It took some trust building, but they ended up doing it. And that was obviously a critical first customer. But the people after that, it was like, “Hey, I will literally do whatever it takes to ensure that this is successful. I don’t care if I need to sleep at your office. I don’t care if I need to book the entries myself.” It’s just all about, “Hey, we’re taking this journey together, here’s why this can be a super compelling future, but look me in the eyes and say, I will deliver for you.” And that’s how we got the first five or 10.
Turner Novak:
And you had this concept of, I think it’s called polite persistence. Is that the phrasing?
Chris Hladczuk:
Yeah, yeah.
Turner Novak:
So, was there a lot of that? You had to continue to be getting in front of people, continuing to ... What was that process like?
Chris Hladczuk:
Text, call, carrier pigeon, email, LinkedIn, DM, Twitter. It was really anything. And I see in the earliest days, and even now it’s like whatever it takes to win, do. And I think people don’t take that seriously enough of 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. And so, I took that very literally, like 10, texting, calling, voicemails, whatever. And 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 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 trust building plus just obsessive, play persistence.
Turner 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? Hey, I’m just following up.” I usually start to tune that out. So, how do you not do that?
Chris Hladczuk:
A lot of jokes. Yeah, yeah. If someone’s calling you being, 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.” There’s a little bit of humor and fun to it. It comes off as very authentic if you’re actually believe in what you’re building and selling versus some random sales guy who’s sending a friendly follow-up 58 times, which no one cares about.” And so, that’s been a lot of the focus, which is like, how do I build trust while also being persistent?
Turner Novak:
And so now you’re making this transition and making people raving fans. How do you be a raving fan? As a CFO, what are you happy about? What are you telling your friends and the CFO group chat of Hanover Park is so great?
Chris Hladczuk:
So, there’s the three elements to a 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 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. That is incredibly challenging. 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.” 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.” All right, 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. It’s how do we unlock and build something magical on top of that data that no one else could offer?
And so, that’s been the three elements and hitting those are things that I care deeply about tracking and monitoring and focusing on.
Turner Novak:
Was there a time when you knew things were working, like you were just getting the scale tipping towards more positive feedback in momentum versus not?
Chris Hladczuk:
Yeah, I think after $5 billion of assets, now we’re almost $15 billion, after five, things started moving downhill. Ecosystems started to pick up of people being like, “Have you heard of this Hanover Park thing?” Despite us doing not a ton of marketing aside from me tweeting and posting on LinkedIn? And so, we started to get this positive momentum and ecosystem of like, “Oh my god, this could be the future.” The 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.”
Turner Novak:
And 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 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 whole journey for you been like?
Chris Hladczuk:
Yeah, so the quick primer and background on it is was a college kid at Yale, literally was like, “Okay, I was reading it.” And before Sam Altman was cool, in 2020, he wrote this blog post-
Turner Novak:
This is pre-ChatGPT.
Chris Hladczuk:
Pre-ChatGPT, pre-he was cool. He wrote this blog post, How To Be Successful. And I obsessively read that and was like, “This is insanely cool.” And I was like, “Okay, this start-up thing might be interesting, but 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 earliest stages wasn’t a good end. So, I wanted to figure out distribution and sales and said, “How do I write compelling content on the internet that people would actually click on, watch, listen to?”
And so, I did this whole interview series where I interviewed Emmett Shear at Twitch and Michael Seibel at YC and Kevin Ryan who found a MongoDB and I turned all of that into Twitter content that went super viral. And so built the following to a few 100,000 people over the past few years. But when I started Hanover Park, I was like, “I actually don’t care about virality,” which is a little bit contrarian. It doesn’t matter if Elon retweets me, which he did one time, which got me 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.
Turner Novak:
You’re tweeting about the accrual-based accounting method closing faster. The average person reasons they block you.
Chris Hladczuk:
Please block me. Yeah, they’re like, “Block Chris.” And it’s really the problems that a CFO faces of you’re up at 2:00 in the morning, your LP calls you and says, “This number’s wrong. Do you ever want that problem?” No, you don’t. So, it’s a lot about that in terms of how I think about the positioning and how I think about what we’re doing. And so, one of our largest customers came in bound off a LinkedIn post that had 10 likes.
Turner Novak:
So, it’s really not about going viral. Going viral is not how you do founder-led sales. It’s resonating with the problem that your customer is facing.
Chris Hladczuk:
It’s really just obsessive. 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.
Turner Novak:
Do you then take that feedback? So, you take that feedback, put in the product, then do 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 content.
Chris Hladczuk:
Yeah, I think about it as any conversation that I’m having could turn into content. So, 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 personal conversations. And so, I talked to the CFO about X, Y, Z, here’s what I learned. No one else had that conversation that day. So, it’s a lot about how do I, in a world of abundance of content, how do we have something scarce?
Turner Novak:
Do you keep some sort of document or note where you’ll dump ideas in and you come back and visit it? Do you plan it out Sunday night, write some content for the week? What’s your process?
Chris Hladczuk:
Yeah. In real time, I’ll jot down things as I’m having phone calls, conversations, et cetera, and that will be the fodder for the week’s content.
Turner Novak:
And so, I think we maybe hit on 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 a lot of the advice you got or read about and heard about starting a company and building a company, I think you said 99% of it just ended up being wrong. What’s the advice that you found is most wrong?
Chris Hladczuk:
So, I think my take on this is I think almost all advice, 99% of advice on scaling a company is incorrect right now. And so, the traditional advice is like, “Oh my God, delegate everything, hire this massive team, hire VPs to do different actions and whatever.” And I’m like, “A lot of that is noise and basically creates this hierarchical political system by which people do well by figuring out ways to take credit.” My goal is how do we do the anti that? And I took a lot of inspiration from Elon on this. Be at the bare metal as much as possible.
Literally don’t talk to three levels of whoever. It’s like talk to the engineer writing the code on this AI email agent and how this works and figure that out because the problem that creates ... If you don’t do that, you create frustration for your best performers. The best performers want a hard problem, they want the room to run and go cook on that problem. And so, we’ve really been anti this hierarchical system by which information is filtered in different ways and say, “Let’s just cut to the source and go direct.”
Turner Novak:
Isn’t there an argument though that you, “need a grownup,” or “need someone who’s done it before and knows the playbook?” If you don’t have the VP that’s done this before and can share the knowledge with the team or knows what it looks like, do you miss out on that or?
Chris Hladczuk:
So, I think what’s changing a lot now with 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, what’s possible is different. It used to be you have a massive sales and marketing team, now you have inference cost and that’s your sales and marketing team. And so, a lot of this is, I think, changing of instead of being an army of GTM, you have the product does the talking, I think has changed a lot. And so, you look at companies like Cursor that have scaled crazy with a very small go to-market sales team.
And so, I think a lot of the playbooks are changing, which means someone who’s reusing a playbook from the last era is probably going to be not effective. However, that doesn’t mean we have multiple people that have been at companies that have exited before, they’ve been senior engineers there. There is some level of how do we counterbalance the hacker culture of the 20-year-old who drops out of Harvard to what I call the experienced. I’ve seen all of these infrastructure problems at scale on the engineering side.
And then obviously on the fund accounting team, we are obsessively focused on bringing in expertise for the Navy SEALs of fund accounting with ... That obviously requires a different level of experience in terms of how situations have been adopted over time.
Turner Novak:
Are there any things that you try to do based on 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 changed over the past couple of years with these AI native businesses?
Chris Hladczuk:
Yeah. I think honestly, one of the things that we preach every single day is this idea of 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. It’s impossible. So, an example would be the investors you have on your cap table, you can’t get rid of them, 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 and it’s easy to go back at any time.” And those are almost all decisions in a start-up.
And so, what we’ve done is drop your ego to the ground, be intellectually honest about truth seeking of 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, 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.” It’s better to have iterated five times before the committee even gets out of bed.
Turner Novak:
How do you know if something’s like a one or two-way door? Is there a gut check on like, “Hey, we know this is reversible or won’t blow up the product or customer trust or something like that?”
Chris Hladczuk:
Examples would be shipping an internal accounting update for our fund accounting team is very two-way door. If it doesn’t work in five seconds, we can update it and nothing changes. Versus one-way door is a massive change to our LP portal, which is what the massive endowments and banks in the world log into every day across our 10,000 different limited partners. And so, I think it’s more like that’s on the product decisioning side of like, okay, great. That is still a two-way door because you can revert quickly, but it’s something that will take a little bit more seriously.
Turner Novak:
And so, you started initially, you mentioned Susa Ventures was the first customer-
Chris Hladczuk:
Customer one shout out.
Turner Novak:
Shout out to Chad and Pratyush and Kenny.
Chris Hladczuk:
And Kenny. Kenny’s the legend. He’s the one with all the credit.
Turner Novak:
Nice. I’ve never met Kenny before. Next time I’m near the office, I should try to-
Chris Hladczuk:
Do it.
Turner Novak:
... try to meet all of them or try to meet Kenny. And so, how did you expand customer base over time? Because first couple customers were all VC firms. You seemed like you have been laddering up almost. I don’t know how to describe this, but what’s the process been like of expanding?
Chris Hladczuk:
Yeah. Part of our goal is we want to build for complexity, which is 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. 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. And so, what we’ve done is we said, “Okay, 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 into 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’s been 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. And it’s like seven different system exports that we’ve made instantaneous in natural language to run these scenarios. And so, that would be a product that a private equity firm would fall in love with.
Turner Novak:
So how do you know that something like that is accurate?
Chris Hladczuk:
Yeah, great question.
Turner Novak:
Because I fuck it up even when I make it manually in Excel. I’ll forget to drag a formula and I’ll notice it later, error checking everything.
Chris Hladczuk:
Yeah. One of the key product principles of the company is what I call trust but verify. And so, it’s like if you just give someone a number, assume every single CFO, they’re the most skeptical people on the planet, they’re going to assume it’s wrong. You need to be able to have them click into it, export, run their own calculations to verify the accuracy of a number. And so, the trust but verify approach on the waterfall modeling plus the explainability. The beautiful thing is 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.” And so, that plus the auditability and explainability has been a critical pillar.
Turner Novak:
And when you export to Excel, it comes with linked formulas and everything. Am I remembering this right?
Chris Hladczuk:
Yeah, 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 humans running around with really big Excel files.” That’s one. The problem with that approach is its very error-prone and manual and slow, but it gives you some auditability because it is formulas. The other approach, which is a very 2018 SaaS approach was like, “Hey, I’m going to give you just a UI.” Great, 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 TryShortcut. There’s these tools that do this 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 married best of both worlds when we think about the reporting aspect with the auditability of formulas across the different Excel replacement that we built.
Turner Novak:
Can you still export it to Excel?
Chris Hladczuk:
Always.
Turner Novak:
Yeah.
Chris Hladczuk:
Everything’s exportable.
Turner Novak:
I was going to say, 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.
Chris Hladczuk:
It’s over.
Turner Novak:
Yeah, that’s even harder than the migration of a whole provider is getting them off Excel. The industry runs on Excel. And I think you have a nickname with your friends. They call you Chip?
Chris Hladczuk:
Oh, boy-
Turner Novak:
What’s going on with you?
Chris Hladczuk:
... this is coming up. So, my friends will shout out Raj and my friends. But when I started the company, everyone was like, “You’re crazy. What are you doing? You just left this job and previously left Goldman Sachs and this is insane. What are you working on? What are you doing?” And I basically had this thing where I had this massive chip on my shoulder. I love this quote from Josh Wolfe at Lux Capital, which is, “Chips on shoulders put chips in pockets.” And now that Peter and Lux have invested, it’s entertaining for it to be full circle.
Which is everyone started calling me Chip because they were like, “Wow, he has this massive chip on his shoulder because everyone doubted that this would be successful.” We still have a lot of work to prove it though.
Turner Novak:
Yeah. I think one thing that’s been interesting is despite you have this chip on your shoulder, you really want to be successful, there’s been times that you’ve turned down customers, somebody you don’t think that you can take them on and give them the right kind of service. How do you know when to do that?
Chris Hladczuk:
Yeah. I think ideal customer profile, which is a common term, has become insanely important for us. I am deathly afraid of disappointment, which is disappointing a customer that is really excited about Hanover Park, that we can’t deliver what we need to deliver for them. And a lot of the problems in that is 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 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+ raving fan experience that we want to deliver. And so, that’s been the focus of, it sounds crazy, but we’ll turn away customers all the time to ensure that the customer base we have can become raving fans in 2026.
Turner Novak:
But don’t you want to grow super fast?That’s like the point of hyper-growth start-up is grow as fast as possible. Isn’t that what they say?
Chris Hladczuk:
I think grow as fast as possible with the right constraints of who you’re building for. And so, obviously there’s a massive market of opportunity. And we’ve just focused, I would say, on mid-market enterprise, which are larger firms with finance teams, more sophisticated CFOs than some of the smaller firms. That doesn’t mean in the future we won’t go there, I just think it is not a near term. It might be a long term as we are able to democratize the services delivery that we have and make it scalable.
Turner Novak:
Talking about longer term, what is the longer term 10 years from now? I don’t know if we’re going to do this every single year-
Chris Hladczuk:
Yeah, every year for the next decade?
Turner Novak:
Yeah. But talking about 10 years from now, whatever the long term is, I’m reading the S1 for Hanover Park, you’re spilling it all out there. What am I going to be reading about?
Chris Hladczuk:
Yeah. Well, I think what’s pretty awesome is that when Jake and Emergence led our Series A, they wrote this memo and they said, “This, if executed incredibly well,” we have a lot of work to do, “is a Veeva-like opportunity.” Veeva is the largest vertical software business in the world right now. It’s around $50 billion market cap. But what’s funny about Veeva 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 all of these different things, right?
Turner Novak:
Board level of vendor?
Chris Hladczuk:
Board level, meaning they’re the most important vendor for Moderna and Pfizer. Moderna and Pfizer pay them tens of millions of dollars a year. And so, our goal is to do that in finance. 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 really important investment firms and not just do one siloed specific thing that they’re used to. We want to own the core 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 bundle all these additional products and service offerings around it. And then in the super long term, if now all of 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? And so, that’s the super long term.
Turner Novak:
So, I have one more thing I want to ask you. Your personal AI stack, what you use personally as Chris. So, I think a year ago you told me you were using Claude Artifacts and you were also using something called Hemingway for writing.
Chris Hladczuk:
Yup.
Turner Novak:
Still using those?
Chris Hladczuk:
Number one tool right now, Granola. It’s just like AI call. So, what we do is a lot of our internal calls is we’ll basically record any meeting and then we have this transcript repository that you can query into a bunch of analysis on. And so, that really helps with context sharing across teams, especially as we’ve scaled the team really quickly. And so, that’s been one. The other is I am obsessed with Claude Cowork. Claude Cowork has changed everything. Claude Cowork is my ChatGPT moment, actually.
Turner Novak:
So, not even ChatGPT. Claude Cowork was yours?
Chris Hladczuk:
Cloud Cowork is 10 times better than for ChatGPT than me. It’s crazy. 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, 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 of these graphs.” It one shotted it.
I made an hour of modifications of something that would’ve taken me 10 hours and I was done. And so, it’s been transformational. When I think about all the data analysis stuff as well as building presentations.
Turner Novak:
You said you built this central to do list thing. I remember you were texting about like, “What is it exactly?” Did you use it or it’s just a fun thing you tried to do?
Chris Hladczuk:
So, I’ve literally, as 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 CEO command center basically to make decisions.” And it was pulling in all Slack, all of email, all of Google Calendar, all of my Granola notes, all of these different sources to build a dashboard to help me be like, “What are the decisions that I need to action on right now?” And then a self-updating to do list that’s sync with my email and other things. And so, it’s been pretty fun. It’s still super experimental. I did it for two hours on a Saturday, but it’s been pretty fun to play around with.
Turner Novak:
Is it like you get a feed that’s updating every minute synced with Slack and you’re typing in and hitting enter to make it do things? How does it actually work?
Chris Hladczuk:
Yeah, it’s pretty crazy. So, it’s updating, I think it’s every hour or something pulled together from 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 of that 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 then I’m literally prompting Claude Code to do things. And so, it’ll just auto like, “Hey, you need to respond to this email. It’s super critical about this deal.” Once I respond to the email, just auto updates.
Turner Novak:
In the dashboard.
Chris Hladczuk:
Yeah.
Turner Novak:
Yeah. Because it’s the thing that I’ve always had, the issue I’ve had with these to do lists is you make your to-do list and then you go and do the thing and you go and change the to do list. It’s like-
Chris Hladczuk:
What’s going on? Yeah.
Turner Novak:
So, I’ve always had super simple to do lists that are basically high level banging off this hour thing and then maybe it’s worth updating. But some people make these super elaborate, very minute to do list. It’s like you’re spending half your time on your to-do list.
Chris Hladczuk:
On the to do list. I think it’s this productivity optimization sometimes is procrastination, I think is the piece of it of if you’re doing too much, 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.”
Turner 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?
Chris Hladczuk:
So, breaking news, Hanover Park MCP is live now. What this enables us to do is MCP, think about it as API for AI. And 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, we 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 Attio 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.
Turner Novak:
You mentioned Attio. Did you switch over to Attio?
Chris Hladczuk:
I didn’t. I’m a HubSpot Stan. It’d be old school. Use HubSpot for CM right now, but I’m thinking about new things like Monaco and others.
Turner Novak:
Oh, nice.
Chris Hladczuk:
Shout out Sam Blonde.
Turner Novak:
Yeah, he actually respond to my DM and was like, “Hey, why not 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 going to do it in a couple 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 Chetan at Benchmark. We’re talking all about software. We have a episode with Scott Stevenson at Spellbook. It’s the fastest growing AI company in Canada. We think that that’s a true statement based on-
Chris Hladczuk:
Is that true?
Turner Novak:
We think based on-
Chris Hladczuk:
Legal, right?
Turner Novak:
... what he’s heard from, yeah. It’s like cursor for contracts. So, if you’re a lawyer, a lot of the work you’re doing is with contracts. It’s essentially a Microsoft Word plugin where you can edit contracts like you would code essentially. And if you’re a lawyer, a lot of your job is just writing legal documents and editing legal documents. It just helps you do it faster. And I have a couple other, it’s almost like Claude Cowork for doing legal things. 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’ve ever met them throughout the course of fundraising, but Nikhil was a seed investor in Canva, Farmer’s Dog, probably missing a couple multi-billion-dollar companies. And then Mike was the COO of Stitch Fix, zero to $1 billion in revenue, ran walmart.com, was 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 people should continue listening to.
Chris Hladczuk:
Love it.
Turner Novak:
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?
Chris Hladczuk:
We’re not using Numeral yet. What are you talking about?
Turner Novak:
You should use Numeral.
Chris Hladczuk:
Oh, whoa, whoa, that’s good.
Turner Novak:
And then other sponsor is Flex, which I use for the fund. If you check out the link and description, sign up for the wait list, you’ll get the Flex Elite personal card. It’s like business and personal banking all in one.
Chris Hladczuk:
Let’s go.
Turner Novak:
And they give you credit. So, there’s a lot of guys out there that’ll say, “Oh, we’ll give you a credit card” just based on your bank account and what kind of cash will give you a percentage of it. Flex actually gives you a credit card, underwrites it like Amex. So, worth checking all those out.
Chris Hladczuk:
Let’s go.
Turner Novak:
Thanks for listening. See you guys next time.
Chris Hladczuk:
This was fun. See you soon.
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