Anastasia Kinsky: We are in Lisbon at the Alpaca Partners Summit, and I am joined by Howard Lindzon, general partner at Social Leverage and CEO of StockTwits. Howard, thank you so much for joining us.
Howard Lindzon: I am excited to be here.
Anastasia Kinsky: You have been part of the Alpaca family for a while, and you have invested in them. You met Yoshi, the co-founder, quite a while back. Talk to us about how you guys came together.
Howard Lindzon: It was 2014. I started a company called StockTwits back in 2008, and StockTwits was a social network. A lot of startups from 2008 on would call me because they would grow their users on top of StockTwits. I got introduced to Yoshi in 2014 by a really great investor, Ed Sim. I remember exactly: he emailed me, a very smart guy, a great investor, but he doesn’t do fintech. He emailed me and said, you should meet Yoshi and Hitoshi. I met them, and they pitched me. It was ahead of its curve. It was a machine learning stock-picking screener, and I just said, nah, it’s too far ahead of the curve. In 2016, I was trying to help them meet other investors. They pivoted their idea to be more of an API for brokerages. I really liked the idea, and he ended up raising money from Y Combinator at a much higher valuation than we were willing to do. So I said, Yoshi, no cussing, but I basically cussed and said, Yoshi, go ahead, take the money from Y Combinator, but it’s too rich for our blood. A year goes by, and I get a call from one of my LPs, [unclear: “Brant Rowland”], who’s a really smart guy, and he says, you should talk to Yoshi at Alpaca. My son uses their API. His son was like 17 or 18, and he’s using their API to do trading. I said, okay, and I called Yoshi back up. Now it’s 2017, and they had still not figured out their business and they were running out of money. As luck would have it, the third time we got involved, we restructured the cap table. We invested, we brought in some other good investors, and nine years later, like everything, overnight success.
Anastasia Kinsky: Yeah, exactly. A fabulous story. And [unclear: “it’s the rescue for sure”]. Talk about being ahead of the curve. Alpaca is now a foundation, part of any fintech building, looking to innovate. [unclear: “There’s a genetic side of it sort of come out of the blue”; likely the agentic side] and shifted everything again. For many people in this space, I’m sure it’s a long time coming, but actually, it’s all overnight.
Howard Lindzon: Some things are overnight. There are a lot of sports analogies sometimes. You may not be the best hitter, but if you’re a pro and you’re in the batter’s box four times a game, or eight times a series, it only takes one. So by being in this business ahead of the curve a little bit, what really happened is Alpaca has become self-clearing, which obviously is the most important thing. But that was a dirty word 12 years ago. Robinhood was the first really fast-growing mobile brokerage, and my firm, Social Leverage, was the first investor in Robinhood. I had this thesis that I shared with Yoshi in 2016, that they should just [unclear: “market Robin alpaca is letting a thousand Robinhood’s bloom”; likely “market Alpaca as letting a thousand Robinhoods bloom”]. Robinhood was originally built on a company called Apex, which is somewhat of a competitor to Alpaca, much older pipes, yada yada yada, and difficult to use, et cetera. Along comes Alpaca with modern pipes. So my pitch was just, that’s your marketing: a thousand companies around the world would like to be the next Robinhood, and you will power them. That was my simple idea. They executed on everything. Along comes OpenClaw, maybe a year ago or six months ago, and Alpaca started getting discovered in [unclear: “AAU”; likely AIs], like the GPT searches, as having the best API. By being in the business as long and building a great product, the agents, which aren’t people per se, are just researching and hooking up to the best APIs. So I think they got a bit of a break there as technology kind of caught up with the product. Agentic trading now is a huge thing. We’ll see how big it becomes. But my whole thesis [unclear: “for stocked with Robinhood”; likely for StockTwits, with Robinhood], and now Alpaca, and Alpaca really believes this, is opening financial access to everybody around the world, starting with U.S. stocks. With agentic trading, you set up a wallet, you can trade $100, and have a machine try out different strategies.
Anastasia Kinsky: I think it’s just another way for people to learn and to provide those options across the board. And what you’ve said there about Alpaca, trust is something we talk about a lot, whether that’s trusting humans, trust in an AI, or whatever. But Alpaca seems to have captured the trust of so many clients by just staying true to exactly what they’re doing, but adapted to the modern world.
Howard Lindzon: And the thing is, it’s not an overnight success. Like I said, with Yoshi, it starts with the phone calls in 2014 and now it’s 2026 [unclear: “when I was 2026”]. These things have a tendency to get glorified in the media, but really there’s no such thing as an overnight success, whether you’re in Hollywood or in sports or in startups. So I think that’s now working to their advantage. You have 12 years of storytelling, 12 years of lessons, 12 years of recruiting, 12 years of getting the best people in the right places. Then you have these network effects as well that are happening. It just takes time. Sometimes you get lucky and you can tweak the curve to start early. Robinhood had that. But really, it generally takes ten years. Keep your head down, work hard.
Anastasia Kinsky: Talk to us a bit about StockTwits and what your plans are in the next few years.
Howard Lindzon: It’s a long journey, 17 years. I came back as CEO three years ago because of AI. I’m not a coder. I’m not a technologist. I’m more of a creator, a social, social-mobile fan. In a world of AI, instead of hiring ten machine learning engineers to siphon out our data, we can now do this [unclear: “with our own”]. We built an MCP, that’s technical jargon, for allowing people to use StockTwits in a completely unique way, which is very exciting. Alpaca has an MCP. And the other thing is that StockTwits has so many users chatting about the markets, so we have this unique sentiment. With Alpaca, we’re thinking through partnerships of how to distribute our news and sentiment through all their partners. There’s a lot of opportunity around helping their customers get news, information, sentiment, and social, so that when a new customer hooks themselves up to Alpaca, not only do they get the trading and access to the market, they could theoretically get news, sentiment, and all kinds of other things. Social.
Anastasia Kinsky: Fascinating. Lovely to see how it’s actually all knitting together.
Howard Lindzon: It took forever, and all of a sudden things start making sense and falling into place, like me doing a jigsaw puzzle after two months.
Anastasia Kinsky: Right. Well, thank you so much. That was fabulous. I really hope you enjoy the rest of the summit. It looks like it’s going to be lots of very interesting conversations.
Howard Lindzon: Yes, thanks. Thank you.
