Kelly Littlepage and Stephen Johnson, founders of OneChronos, discuss their journey of raising over $80M to build a tech company that uses trade algorithms.
Kelly Littlepage and Stephen Johnson, founders of OneChronos, discuss their journey of raising over $80M to build a tech company that uses trade algorithms. They share insights on finding long-term investors and navigating complex financial regulations.
Perseverance is definitely the first thing that comes to mind. There were a lot of times when we could have just given up on the process and didn't and it ended up paying off. The good stuff that happens to you is never as good as you think it's going to be and the same is true for the bad stuff. [Music] All righty. Hello everyone and welcome to the deal maker show. So today we have two co-founders joining us, you know, and it's quite a remarkable story, you know, what they're doing. They've been building it now for a decade. Uh, and again, some really interesting stuff. They've known each other forever. And we're going to be talking about all of the good stuff, you know, like tackling problems, you know, when is the right time to do so. what was the Y cominator admission process for them the early days the early signs of life you know and then also how they've thought about uh hypers
scaling growth and then as well raising money so without further ado let's welcome our guest today Stephen Johnson and Kelly little page welcome to the show thanks for having us hey so originally born in the south of Denver in Colorado you know you actually guys you know are from the same town and you've known each other forever. So, how was life growing up for the two of you? Maybe we can get started with Stephen and then let's hear Kelly. Yeah. Yeah. Um, pretty unique story. So, uh, we we met each other in middle school and, um, you know, life was pretty sleepy. We grew up in a quiet suburb and, uh, I think we were both pretty bored and spent a lot of time tinkering with computers cuz there wasn't a whole lot else to do. So um that kind of planted the seed of you know working with programming languages and learning software development on our own in the early days. There were not a lot
of resources to do that. There was no such thing as like a computer science class in our high school. So it was very uh fish for yourself kind of a kind of a situation out there. Um got got in a fair amount of trouble ourselves with with computers in those days. nothing too bad, but like a lot of uh like a lot of people in the '9s and 2000s, um you know, it was the wild west out on the the world of computers in those days. So, uh yeah, I mean it was it was a very lucky happen stance, I think, for both of us that that uh we've known each other from childhood. What about for Kelly? Uh what what got your attention, you know, on computers? What what was it about that was so exciting about computers? Yeah, I've just I've always loved systems in general and figuring out how things that work or how how things work. And computers were a really tangible system you could figure out. I remember
when I was a kid, I was fascinated with the way that the pump worked at the neighborhood pool and at aquariums and things like that. And um at one point it just kind of dawned on me that hey, the computer must be doing something. And this was like early internet era when as Steve said there just really weren't resources or anything low-level. So, you kind of learn by doing and taking apart hardware and trying to figure out what happens. And uh as Steve said, the most exciting thing in our neighborhood at the time, and Denver is a very cool place now. It was not when we were there. Um the most exciting thing we had was a McDonald's and uh some old Packer Bell computers to rip apart. So, that's how I got started. Anyway, and and and Stephen, how old were you guys when you met each other in in middle school? We were probably about 12 or 13. Um, and uh, yeah, really got to know each other in
the the high school days. Do you remember Kelly the first day when you when you saw Stephen or No, first day. The first day that you saw Stephen in your life, you I mean, it's a long time ago when you were 13 years old. I wonder like what was your reaction? You know, what was there like a special connection back then or no? I think we were both pretty different people back then. Uh, I was going through a little bit of an Eric Hardman phase which I'm uh proud to have mostly not completely grown out of. And uh Steve's always been pretty buttoned up. So yeah, I was I was not the most social kid in those days. So it was probably a very awkward teenager interaction in those days. Now now for you Steve, uh basically what happened is you essentially went to Lehigh University and you combined their computer science with economics, but you decided to go the uh consulting route at Accenture and
that was pretty much all you knew until you know you guys decided to join forces. How was that experience like of uh of working at Accenture and and and experiencing different divisions too? Yeah, so I I went into consulting because I couldn't decide what industry I wanted to work in and what I wanted to do when I grew up uh after college after uh graduating. So um the the good thing about consulting was I got to experience a lot of different industries and see a lot of the same problems replicated across different industries and companies huge companies and uh I was working mostly in cyber security and software engineering at at the time. Um but my heart has always been in building things. So, I was a huge Legos kid. Probably why I got into computers as well, cuz you can build software, you can build the computers themselves. Um, and consulting is very much you go do a project and then
hand it off and never see it again. And I I didn't love that. Um, so I ended up moving into an R&D group there where I got the opportunity to build some new technologies and and uh services from scratch. And this starts to get into a bit of the one chrono story where um the the big project I was tasked with there is to build a platform that takes a bunch of data from corporate networks, from the federal government, from web applications, etc., and try to find signals that hackers are breaking in to the company. So, it was very much a big data and signals processing and analytics um platform. And uh it kind of turned out that Kelly was doing similar things but for markets trying to find signals to trade better. So, um I mean I'll I'll hand it over to Kelly to talk a bit about that. But, uh that's kind of one of the one of the formation stories for One Kronos. And let's talk about that
too. Uh, Kelly, I mean, in your in your case, you know, you did Georgia Tech and then after that you went to a hedge fund, you know, which is kind of like what gave you the exposure of what Steve was alluding to. How wh why hedge funds, you know, what what caught your attention from hedge funds? Yeah. Yeah. So, actually that part of the story starts with my undergraduate, which was Caltech. I I did Georgia Tech um while I was working, but I got very interested in economics my freshman year just by a complete coincidence. I came into school as a physics major. Later on, graduated uh doing applied math since I gravitated towards that. But there was this very cool and interesting intersection of those in the world of auctions, which was not something I'd ever thought about or knew about going in. Um again, in the town of Centennial, Colorado, academic auction theory was not being discussed
a lot at the time. Really, it was this notion of you can design in the same way that you can design computer systems. You can design auctions that are aligned with economic interest for agents as we call them. So buyers and sellers, but just participants in a market in general. And like the idea that you can design these systems that produce good outcomes was really interesting. And when I graduated school, like there wasn't um there wasn't really a lot of opportunity to do pure math outside of academia at that point or the applied stuff even I was interested in. Finance was a great outlet for it. And I was also familiar at that point with the de Shaw story of this idea that hey you can go and make money doing something unrelated to basic science and you can do basic science later in your life whether it's funding whether it's doing research. But I I really gravitated toward this idea of
trying to have some impact commercially and then take that back to academia later. So then so then the computational ability I know that that was a a problem that you guys you know were kind of like sharing and and incubating and then eventually you know you saw that it was the right time. So why weren't you able to execute on that and what were the sequence of events that needed to happen for you guys to be like okay let's let's go. Well, so uh the type of auction that we run is something called a cominatorial auction and it's not something that we invented and we weren't the first people to do it and actually a lot of confidence that we had in building one chronis as a company is the fact that they have been so successful elsewhere whether that's display advertising or wireless spectrum licensing. The problem with these auctions or specifically the format that's really relevant to…