The Blackbird Stacklist

The most important data to us is how a company will perform in the future. The only real way to get this data is by organizing all of the public information about a business into a granular financial model. You can then see how sales translate to profit, how growth uses cash, and so on. The work is labor-intensive. We built our Blackbird.io toolkit to do more of this type of analysis automatically: Blackbird builds bottom-up financial models in Excel automatically. We also use Bloomberg for standard market color and research.

The most important data to us is how a company will perform in the future. The only real way to get this data is by organizing all of the public information about a business into a granular financial model. You can then see how sales translate to profit, how growth uses cash, and so on. The work is labor-intensive. We built our Blackbird.io toolkit to do more of this type of analysis automatically: Blackbird builds bottom-up financial models in Excel automatically. We also use Bloomberg for standard market color and research.

We built the Blackbird.io toolkit for our own use. As investors, we wanted to quickly build high quality financial models and avoid repeating investment mistakes. That use case didn’t require a lot of outside relationship management. We are now starting to open up our platform to external users, so I would expect our CRM system to evolve accordingly.

We built the Blackbird.io toolkit for our own use. As investors, we wanted to quickly build high quality financial models and avoid repeating investment mistakes. That use case didn’t require a lot of outside relationship management. We are now starting to open up our platform to external users, so I would expect our CRM system to evolve accordingly.

Any person on our team can generally chose the tools they like the best. But, FogBugz does have an integrated messaging platform that we like very much and use for any important messaging. It integrates with Slack, our codebase, and our internal wiki.

Any person on our team can generally chose the tools they like the best. But, FogBugz does have an integrated messaging platform that we like very much and use for any important messaging. It integrates with Slack, our codebase, and our internal wiki.

In our world, “content” means financial analysis. Blackbird.io is our way of organizing our financial knowledge in a way that’s permanent and easy to use. When we have an investment insight or a better way of thinking about a business, we add it to the system. Blackbird.io then uses that knowledge when building models, so we can consistently spot issues behind the numbers and avoid mistakes. Because our knowledge lives on Blackbird.io, anyone with access to the system can use it to generate their own views.

FogBugz is our end-to-end management platform. It automatically registers cases, tracks our responses, and syncs to our code base.

FogBugz has file sharing through their platform and through Kiln.

We use QuickBooks for the basics and then have a professional accounting firm deal with more complex issues.

We primarily use human recruiters. We believe in the power of small teams, so we look for people with technical depth and a real passion for engineering. These qualities can be hard to spot on paper. Recruiters help us identify candidates who really care about their work.

Our three pillars are Google Apps, AWS and Fog Creek.

We built Blackbird.io for our own use, and the system remains our key tool. We use it to store our investment knowledge and apply it quickly to new opportunities. For example, we can take our methodology for looking at a company like Domino’s, add it to the system, and then develop a view on a company like Papa John’s in a matter of hours. If we then look at another franchise organization 3 months later, we can do the same, without having forgotten anything. If it turns out we made a mistake on our original Domino’s investment - missed a cost or forgot about some risk - we can add it to the system and never make the same mistake again. And anyone else who has access to the system can leverage that same knowledge without having to make the mistake themselves.

Our three pillars are Google Apps, AWS and Fog Creek.

We rely on FogBugz heavily. It has a lot of features built in a really nice way. It’s searchable, trackable and secure.

We use Fog Creek’s enterprise suite to manage our codebase and workflow. We use both Git and Mercurial for DVCS, so we needed a hosting solution that supports both seamlessly. Fog Creek's Kiln delivered that functionality and also provided enterprise-grade security (physically segregated private servers, automated backup, etc.). We then use FogBugz for issue tracking and knowledge management.

We use the JetBrains IDEs for development.

We use Fog Creek’s enterprise suite to manage our codebase and workflow. We use both Git and Mercurial for DVCS, so we needed a hosting solution that supports both seamlessly. Fog Creek's Kiln delivered that functionality and also provided enterprise-grade security (physically segregated private servers, automated backup, etc.). We then use FogBugz for issue tracking and knowledge management.

We use the JetBrains IDEs for development.