You're listening to Bloomberg Business Week with Carol Masser and Bloomberg Quick Takes Tim Stinovich. Well. Maritas is a company and app founded by two Wall Street veterans. The aimed to a democratize Wall Street recruiting and more. The platform simulates the experience of working at a fast paced hedge fund on your mobile device. At least that's what the company's website says. So we want to find out more. We welcome Neil Dotta, chief executive officer at Maritas, joining
us via zoom in New York City. Neil, um, good to have you here. Tell us a bit about your company and what you guys do. Hi, Carole, Mike, thank you for having me so. My my background is I've
been an institutional allocator to hedge funds for last fifteen years. Um, really having exposure to some of the most well known, best performing hedge fund managers in the space, and uh, over the course of that time, you know, it became abundantly obvious that the folks that are in the position of making investment decisions and managing money for folks that are you know, whether they're they're firemen or police officers
or institutional investors like myself. It's not necessarily the people that have the most talent, but a lot of times it's the folks that had the best resumes and found
themselves in the position to uh manage that capital. And really what we wanted to do with Maritas was to kind of create a platform that democratizes this access that forever has been limited to folks who have specific resumes, came to specific schools, um So that's the platform in a nutshell, and really what we do is we extend this access to folks regardless of their ability to financier
trading or their actual education. So it's a free app that you download that allows you to simulate working at a at a hedge fund and trading equities and crypto, and your experience generates an alpha score and we take that alpha score and we allow you to apply for jobs on Wall Street with that score. So it's really bringing that experience to to everyone through their mobile devices.
It amost like the journalism tests we have to take to get into the part you do it for hedge funds, like it gives you a chance to kind of play a little bit right and get a score. So people can evaluate you. Yeah, exactly. And one thing that was kind of you really obvious to me was that you know, for I've been managing large pools of capital and my my co founder Gabel as well, and we realize that even at the scale and scope that we invest, even ourselves,
we don't actually own our own track record. And it's a rare thing to be able to own your own alpha, to own your your investment experience. And this is what we think we should do to everyone and give everyone
the opportunity to. You know, whether you're you're a junior analyst at a bank and you want to leverage your experience, most of the time, your employer owns your actual ideas, and we give folks like that and the ability to say, hey, this is why I'm talented, and this is why you should hire me based upon my talent, not what based on my resume says. It's pretty fascinating stuff, Neil, So let me let me make sure I'm picturing this right.
So I log in and I basically can start doing some paper trading, and you'll be able to track my p and l UH and sort of rank me among other traders. Um, what happens if say, my strategy is some algorithm, you know, fast twitch type of thing. Uh am I able to sort of input input a automated
strategy into this thing as well. That's a great question, and the answers, no, actually, and we we take the view that you know, being allocators into these strategies, so I know, the folks that you can think of that are kind of at the forefront of high frequency and systematic trading. We take the view that it's very difficult for a typical person to compete against a big ten billion dollar hedge fund. So really we're meant for fundamental investing.
We're meant for people that do you know, research and individual companies and take views on things like market share and earnings and growth potential. We're not focused on kind of day trading or systematic trading because the thinking is that that's not a game that at the person can
succeed that. You know. It's interesting we just talked um Neil, Mike and myself about how hedgephones are pushing the sec um are are the sec excuse me, is pushing hedge funds to share more of their strategies essentially make them more transparent. In general, just creating more transparency within the hedge fund industry. That would be a good thing in terms of individual performances those who work there, and just kind of understanding a little bit more of what goes
on behind the scenes. Sure, it's it's a great point. You know, transparency is almost always a good thing. The only way I would caveat that is if you go back a year and a half to you know, the meme stock rally and game stuff. Um, you know something that was kind of the byproduct with that was folks that were involved in those trades they just made a decision that they're not going to do those trades publicly anymore. So there's ways to express shorts on companies that you
expect to fall, but you do it synthetically. So it's what's called staying off the tape, so it's not hitting thirteen filings thirteen thirteen G filings. And this was actually the source of the information that the folks on read and used to you know, at tax or and hedge funds. So really, I think what what it did was it forced these managers to kind of circumvent the public reporting
that you know, theoretically is and everyone's best interest. YEA So now I'm wondering how Maritas makes money off of this. It is a free app. I'm guessing the the users, the traders get to use it for free and then maybe the hedge funds pay for access to to see who's doing what. Yeah, exactly, So we're effectively a recruiting platform.
So the way I like to think of us is we're kind of like the n C double A for Wall Street, where you you join our platform, you showcase your skills, and if your skills happen to match UH an employer who finds that valuable, then they'll reach out to you directly, and then we'll get paid on the
recruiting fee that the employer will pay us. Hey, new, how does this maybe help create more diversity when it comes to financial firms hedge funds specifically, because that is certainly something we've talked about a lot over the last couple of years, and well, there's progress being made, there's a lot a long way to go. So how might what you guys are doing help with that? Can you make it kind of color blind, um, sex blind? Like
can you or gender blind? Can you do that so that we may be up the up the diversity anti sure, great question. And if you think of the way recruiting is done at hedge funds and big banks, it really hasn't changed in the last hundred years. Um. It's effectively a network of who you know and how well you're connected, and those are the metrics that typically place people, particularly in most highest income roles like portfolio manager and analysts.
So we take the view that it should be a democratized system that should be based solely on your talent. So through us, we don't care what you look like, We don't care what your resume says, we don't even care where you to school. We only care about your ideas, and those ideas can can potentially get you paid or get you recruited. So it actually does level the playing field.
And what I think about is, you know, whether you're you know, as we've heard many times, you know, certain folks are steered towards sales and marketing roles, and certain folks are steered towards for fullio management roles. If you're if you're you know, a marketing associate and you happen to have great trading ideas, you can prove you have ideas and then leverage that into your next role. All right, next time you come on there, we're going to find
out about the custom score that you got generated. I'm assuming you did a test and we'd love to hear um. Keep us, uh, stay in touch, let us know how this is going. Kneel Data the chief executive officer Maritas, joining us via Zoom in New York City