EP. 229 - Building Real-Time Financial APIs: Inside Benzinga with Tommy Cotter

**Tommy Cotter** (0:00)
I'm a Robinhood user, and they just recently released their MCP, where you can actually place trades using an AI agent. I placed my first trade a few weeks ago, when they released it, and thought that was fascinating. The fact that I'm able to be in Claude, and I can hook up the Robinhood MCP and execute a trade directly from Claude. If you would have told me that in 2020, I, one, wouldn't have even known what a chatbot is, and two, would have just thought that's insane, that you can do that.

**Narb** (0:38)
Welcome to the Dev NTell Podcast, where founders, hackers, and anyone in between showcase their products built on the bleeding edge of tech.
Hello, hello. Welcome to the show Tommy. Stacked to have you on today, man.

**Tommy Cotter** (0:51)
Yeah, thanks for having me on, Narb. Excited to be here.

**Narb** (0:54)
Yeah, yeah, for sure. And yeah, I was telling you kind of before we started, Benzinga is kind of entrenched in all basically the trading, the major trading platforms out there, even if folks don't realize. But yeah, I'm really excited for our audience to kind of learn more about the platform and the different ways they can plug into that data. But before that, would you just like to give a introduction about yourself?

**Tommy Cotter** (1:20)
Yeah, yeah, totally. So I am a, I basically handle all things, APIs at Benzinga.
And, you know, like you said, Benzinga, we're a financial media company. So we write stock market news for retail investors. And, and aside from the news, we've got a suite of 30 API products that we've built. And we have built some bespoke solutions. We built some, some kind of generic data solutions that are redistributed widely. But yeah, that's, that's kind of what I do. I build APIs and help push them out into the world.

**Narb** (2:13)
Amazing. And yeah, I mean, APIs, they've always been kind of the bread and butter of developers. But I think even now more so with the demand that's going to be rising from, from AI agents and whatnot. But I'm just curious, how did you, how did you find yourself in, in the technology space? Like what was kind of the origin story behind Tommy here?

**Tommy Cotter** (2:36)
Yeah, my, I've got a pretty niche and, non-traditional route for, for how I got here. But yeah, I, I studied mechanical engineering in college. Didn't really know what I wanted to do. And, and I went to school in Metro Detroit at Oakland University. And it's not the Oakland, California, it's Oakland, Metro Detroit. But yeah, so I didn't know what I wanted to do. Went there for basketball, studied mechanical engineering, and then I, you know, like most students, went right down the street and got a job in auto. And so I worked for Fiat Chrysler for a couple of years before COVID and during COVID.
And then I, you know, met the VP of Licensing at Benzinga, and he was looking for some help on the product side. And brought me on, and I'm super gracious to heaven, Benzinga, for that.
And the rest is history.

**Narb** (3:47)
Amazing. And would you, would you say kind of that the basketball, the sporting background kind of, kind of help set some of the foundations for your career later on?

**Tommy Cotter** (4:03)
Totally.

**Narb** (4:04)
Yeah.

**Tommy Cotter** (4:04)
I mean, sports is, in my opinion, the best way for young people to learn. You learn to stay organized, diligent, work in a team setting.
You kind of have that, that urgency, that sense of urgency that you, you operate with in your job and in your life in general. So yeah, I'm really glad that I decided to play basketball in my youth and into my early adulthood.

**Narb** (4:37)
Yeah, sport, you can't go wrong with sport. There's so many great attributes you can kind of pull from that into like whatever you do in your day to day.
But that's amazing, man. And yeah, a lot of folks sometimes that come on the show don't really have the most traditional background and end up being amazing people in the tech space. So it seems like you're no different. And I guess for folks who might not be familiar with what a director of products might do on the day to day basis, could you kind of take them through what your typical day to day might look like?

**Tommy Cotter** (5:18)
Yeah, so a lot of our product development and our roadmap is kind of dictated by what our clients want.
So basically, what I do is I interface with a lot of these big brokerages, big retail platforms, try and figure out what type of demand they're seeing, what type of interests their users want, and then either steer them towards a solution that we might have already built out, or kind of brainstorm on how we can fill the gap via a new product. And if we make the decision to go out and build that product, I kind of map out and scope out what's gonna be required in order to get it done.