Fixing Wall Street's AI Problem with Phill Rosen, CEO of Astraeus

**Dan Nathan** (0:00)
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**SPEAKER_2** (0:56)
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**Dan Nathan** (1:01)
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**SPEAKER_2** (1:23)
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**Dan Nathan** (1:58)
All right, welcome back to OK Computer. I'm Dan Nathan. I am here with Bill Rosen. He is the CTO, CEO, co-founder of Astreus. This is a AI infrastructure company focused on the wealth management business. Bill, welcome to the podcast.

**Phill Rosen** (2:12)
Thanks very much for having me.

**Dan Nathan** (2:13)
All right, man. Well, you and I have chatted about a bunch of the things that we're going to talk about here. You and I got, I guess, put together by a good friend of mine, and he's obviously an investor and a backer of yours, Gareth Jones from FinTech Collective. You and I were at a dinner back in May. Really, really interesting group. I think you guys were still in stealth, so we're going to talk a little bit about what you do, who you're targeting, what you think of the broader industry in which you are looking to disrupt. I also, because we're going to put your CTO hat on a little bit away from what you do with Astraeus, and I'd love to get your take on what you see going on. What is being built? What do you think is useful? You know, what is built on top of? Do you think we are allocating, when I say we, the trillions of dollars that are being earmarked towards infrastructure build from all the hyperscalers and a whole host of other companies. So, love to get your broader take on that. But let's start out with, you know, you've been a builder in FinTech. You sold a company, Even Financial, to MoneyLion. That's how I got to know all you guys. Great group, D. John Stevenson, who was the head of BizDev at MoneyLion. So we obviously did your deal for Even, and that's how you got over there. So let's just kind of start with your background and how you got to building Even, MoneyLion, and now Astreus.

**Phill Rosen** (3:26)
Yeah, sure. So I'm a software engineer who's originally a college dropout. I dropped out of college in the late 90s to work in the first tech boom and never went back to school. And I've just been working in New York City tech startups ever since then with a brief hiatus during the O1 collapse where I worked at a nonprofit. That sucked.
Then I came back to tech and-

**Dan Nathan** (3:47)
You wanted profits, basically. Yeah.

**Phill Rosen** (3:49)
And then, I guess, starting around 2012, I started embarking on doing my own business as opposed to working for others. The first one I did was with some great friends and colleagues, a company called Orchard Platform, ancient history, but we used machine learning and AI to programmatically buy unsecured consumer debt on behalf of hedge funds and BDCs. And that was pretty cool. We had great yield for a while.
The market moved on us and the model didn't stop working. The company kept going, but I went on to start Even Financial back then, and I guess in 2014, 2015