So, Lisa Reisman, founder, CEO of Metal Miner, thank you for coming in today. Thank you. It's a pleasure. You embarrassed me this morning when we were chitchatting about, do you remember when we talked six years ago or whenever it was and I was trying to place exactly when and where I spoke with you. So, my apologies. Well, I'm glad I made an impression. But I was probably one of 30 that you talked to that day. I think you were truly a startup at that point. Startup, startup. We were young. I think it was 20, I want to say 2019. Something like that. It might have been a while ago. You were nice to take the call. As long as I was nice. So let me ask you a question. What is Metal Miner? Great question. Thank you. So, metal miner, I would say it's interesting. We've even kind of transformed ourselves from where we started. We basically do metal price market intelligence really with a focus on the forecasting piece. So, what's the market going to do? We are an informal, I would call informal PRA, price reporting agency. Our prices are not typically used as the contracting mechanism, but we are following the IOSCO. There's all these guidelines in Europe so that your data is legitimate, how you collect your data, that you have proper licensure for your data, and that kind of thing. So you can't just throw any number out there and charge for it kind of thing? No, nor can you scrape off the internet and charge for it. There's a lot of people that do that. That create these databases based on pirating information? Or they'll take... I said, "Oh yes, I run the company Metal Miner." And this guy says, "No way." And which, I started laughing because I was like, "Okay, I'm like in the Middle East here. "How in the world do you know Metal Miner?" - Did he think you was pulling your leg? - Yeah, completely. And then he said, "Whoa, you're in this book "on price reporting agencies. "You're like in chapter five, "and you're written all over it, "you're in the front and the back." And I looked at him and I thought he had three heads. I'm like, what are you talking about? So I went home, went to Amazon, ordered this book called Price Reporting Agencies by O. Wayne Johnson, who's the Chief Strategy Officer at the CME Group. So I get this book and I don't know anything. This was not very long ago. I'm embarrassed to say it was like maybe three years - Yeah. - I didn't even know what a PRA was. I didn't know what an OSCO was. It's a European government agency that kind of oversees how companies report their prices, how they gather data, that whole thing. So I'm reading this book and I'm being informed by somebody who knew us, but I didn't even know what they were. So it actually helped us transform how we basically cleanse and are legitimate with the data that we collect. And there's a whole big thing on it now because of AI. People are scraping and taking information, and then they think they have a good answer. They've scraped it. You actually have to license data if it's not yours. You have to get derivative data license rights. You have to get distribution rights. You have playwrights, you have to, there's a way to do it. And then there's also how do you collect the data? So a lot of what we do is we look at trade data and so that's, we have a whole process around that. So anyway, that was, I didn't know that we were a price reporting agency until literally somebody told me that story or we had that story and he shared that book and I read that book and thought, oh my gosh, I can't believe this. - You kind of set you were in chapter five and not chapter one. No, because chapter five was the metals chapter. Okay, just making sure. But I was I felt super stupid when I met this guy because I literally when he said price reporting agency, I didn't even know what he meant. Well, then let's let's back up. So you've told us what you are. But let me put this into a practical term. So maybe tell me when I'm wrong, which Is Metal Miner is a program? Are we talking software program or a? - I think it was a data company. - Okay, a data company where people would contract or purchase your data to use to help them understand how to price things in the future or what markets would be doing in metal. - That's some of it for sure. - Okay, so give me so I can understand kind of very pedestrian or use case so I can really kind of understand okay so I would say the main thing that we help companies understand is price so dealing with price volatility okay so I'm an OEM I've got a 500 million or a billion dollars worth of spend and my steel prices and my aluminum prices are gyrating, going up and down, 6%, 7%, 10%, I mean, they go all over the place, right, managing that volatility. Now I'm on a contract and I'm using another PRA, not us. And my contract is tied to that. And so now I'm taking on that market movement. I'm going up and down, riding that roller coaster. Got it. But the CFO wants to know, like, hey, let's manage this better. Are we keeping within our budget? How are we compared to the budget? And that kind of thing. - So they're basically being tied to LIBOR, or something, with this contract. I mean, there was an index. - There's an index. - That what their pain was going up and down with that. - Correct. - Okay. - That's one of the things. The other thing that we really help companies with is I'm negotiating with my supplier for my annual contract. and I need some leverage to go into that negotiation. And certain markets, and you know these markets, so Stainless Deal is a great example of a very opaque market. It's not like you can go somewhere and easily find out what all the, how much the vinyl adder costs, or how much this gauge, or that gauge, or this width should cost, or how much extra it is. So, we provide that kind of intelligence so companies can walk into a meeting or walk into a discussion with a mill and at least be able to anchor the price or question what the supplier is telling them. So that's, I would say that's a core use case. And I think the other piece is then, yes, the forecast, what's the market going to do? Because that's going to dictate how I'm going to buy. We also have something for the spot market, though. - Yeah, let's tell me about that. - Yeah, we do give a monthly outlook where we give an indication of where we think the underlying metal price is going to trade between basically a floor and a ceiling. And then if the price goes above the ceiling or below the floor, that's the cue that the buyer has to change their buying strategy. So if we see, for example, aluminum breaks out of what we call a resistance range, and you're only buying as needed, we might say, hey, we might be coming into a longer term uptrend. You might want to take cover because we think the market's going up. So go ahead and buy forward, and then we give a recommendation. How much forward should you buy? Maybe just a month or two, maybe three months. Every once in a while, we give a longer one, right? Six, nine months out. Like, the market is going crazy. Buy long. So these companies are really making decisions. - Exactly. - Which is why you need so much licensing or certification because you have a lot of people. - You have to make sure you're distributing the data in a legal manner, that's the first thing. But also people come to, first of all, they start with us just sort of like, okay, let's see about what these weirdos are talking about. We'll see. And I think over time they learned to trust it 'cause it's backed with a great track record. So if you follow the guidance, and I gave an example from last year, when Copper ran up really high in May of 2024, we fielded some panic calls. And we helped companies and people said, "What should I do?" We're like, "We think it's short -lived, take a breath, "don't make all your orders right now "when the market is riding." And it was, it was like a short -term, less than 30 -day kind of pop and then the market came back down. So helping companies understand the noise from the signal I think is really important and I don't think we've had that historically and that's not where price reporting agencies have ever played well. So that's I think the niche where we find ourselves in and I think that's the one that people are looking after now because the volatility has been so much in so many markets. This couldn't be a larger topic in my mind. From the outside looking in, it may not be clear why all the pricing complexity in the first place. Great question. Why is this not more simple than it is? Is there a way to answer that? Do - I have an answer? - Yeah, I do actually. So it's interesting and I don't know how long you've been in the steel industry. So I've been in the metals industry since 1994, more or less. I did a consulting stint for six years, but I was always on the metal projects, but that's a different story. So if you think about, I think about aluminum prices, more or less, traded around, I'm gonna make up a number, 2 ,100, 2 ,350 a ton, more or less, steel, hot -roll coil used to trade between, I'm gonna make up the number, 350 to 550 or 350 to 500 a ton until 2004. So what happened in 2004? China entered in a big way, you know, World Trade Organization and became a major player, both on the supply side and on the demand side. And so what we saw is their demand was so huge, it usurped everybody else's demand, and it became what happened to the price. And that's literally when the volatility started. I'd chuck it up to China, not in a blame way, but just life was much simpler with less volatility when the world became more globalized, we all traded, inherited, et cetera, trends going on in other countries into our commodities. Yeah, and the other part that I think makes it really complex is the difference in price that a U .S. distributor will pay for that metal versus maybe like a Russian distributor or oh yeah it's massive the differences that in the I'm talking like way pre tariff I'm talking yes basically forever since we were bringing it in and I was at a mill in China he was laughing literally about how much we pay for their metal well I'm not surprised I'm not surprised it was it was like what he's like yeah he goes you I think it's all like we make you these special recipes. He's like, it's all the same stuff, you know? And I was just like, good to know. - Interesting. So Russia, I think was the first. So when I started in the industry, I'm gonna really, I'm gonna sound like I'm 800 years old. - We know you're not. - Okay, so Russia started shipping semi -finished aluminum material to the U .S. in the early 90s, like around 94. And there was always a delta between not just the price, but there was a quality delta too, until much later. And then Russian material, and a lot of semi -finished aluminum material from Russia was equivalent or better than, in some cases they could make things that we couldn't even make. So, you saw like that quality thing. And I think, if you were trading back When I was in the late 90s, there was like the Asian Tigers and those companies were, those countries were also exporting and we were still in an era where like the quality wasn't quite there across the board, especially like Thailand, Taiwan at the time. Now it's all changed and, but yes, so you'd see these huge price differentials and yes, the American market had always been pretty protected, particularly for steel. It's more international for aluminum and stainless. We go over there and look at those mills right there's like three people working there in this They're just cranking out. It's so it's so high -tech, right and it's so you kind of can't hang your hat on that like Maybe we once were able to do it, right? But let me interrupt and say Okay, so you're at metal miner founder CEO metal miner Let's talk a little bit about how you got there Because you didn't start there. It's a series of accidents. Yeah. Well, it's that's a common tale, by the way Yeah, you know, I mean, I don't think anybody wakes up and says I think I want to be in the metals industry when they're a child No, like no one said no one ever, right? No, I think that's a hundred percent I've always said like that's the one thing everyone in the metals industry has in common They didn't plan to be in it. No, not Not at all, and you know, as we were chit -chatting before. So my path was, it's interesting though, if you go really far back, I was like a broadcast journalism major and I wanted to get into politics and I went to DC and I had a legislative job as an assistant and a trade association. - Really? - Yes. And-- - Did you have someone in mind, you're like, I want to do what they do. - I want to be like a corporate lobbyist. I want it to like sort of influence policy. And so the first kind of issue, I worked for a retiree organization. I have to say the name 'cause it's a funny name. It's called NARF. - NARF. - That was my first job. National Association of Retired Federal Employees. - That was the cost. - That was my cost. Well, actually I got a couple of job offers to work on the Hill, And at that time, the starting salary was $16 ,000 a year. So you're not eating very much for $16 ,000 a year. So I took this job off the hill for $21 ,000 a year. So a lot more. Percentage basis, you crushed it. I crushed it. So it was interesting. And in that little brief time, I had a chance-- I actually had lunch with John McCain. I thought I was super cool. Back then, everything was like the liquid lunch, I won't get into that. - Yeah. - But your work on one issue, and that's all you would focus on. So my issue was universal healthcare. And at the time, Hillary Clinton was the wife of, you know, Bill Clinton, and he was the president, and that was the issue that she was working on. And after about a year, I thought, I could never do this, like to spend my life working on one thing, like universal healthcare, we still arguably don't have that. - Yes. - And here we are in 2025. So I was like, nah, I'm not gonna do that. I'm gonna go on the corporate side. So I went to grad school at NYU and moved up there and I thought I was gonna be this corporate lobbyist. - What'd you go to grad school for? - Public administration. I wanted the public policy background to be this corporate lobbyist. This was my goal. So I walk into my first class, first day, I'll never forget the professor, I won't name him, but it was public intro to public policy 101 and the and the assignment was we want you to write about an alternative to this policy and the policy was allowing smoke in public places like bars and that kind of thing and I raised my hand Very innocently and I said oh can one of the and we to write about a policy alternative to that I said well here's can I write about doing nothing as an alternative and The professor looked at me and he said no because this is all about government intervention And that's when I became a little disillusioned with like that the government was gonna solve everything So that was probably like a moment. - That was a moment. So I finished this. - What else did they do? - Right, right. So I finished this degree program and I'm like, I wanna do something in international business. So I started looking in the help wanted ads and stuff. We're going back pretty far here. Before Indeed and before the internet was really actually working. And I found a job at an aluminum trading company. But that was my strategic blunder that put me into this industry for the rest of my life. So that was the-- So you just saw here classified. A classified ad, they were looking for somebody to help work as an aluminum, junior aluminum trader doing import /export. And I'd already been doing a little side hustling while I was in grad school doing kind of like experimenting with like import /export and I thought it was glamorous and exciting and all of that. - You're like, "I'll go do this while I find my real job." - Exactly, exactly. So, it's in New York City, it was like a cool place to be. And I worked for this guy who I will not name, but I'll describe, he was an ex -fibro trader. And the fibro guys in the 80s and 90s were the guys that really led this whole commodity. They were the ones that were trading the oil and and they got into metals, and they were the, you know, Solomon Brothers was a competitor, but this is like kind of the-- - This is the features trading? - Yes, and physical, so they would ship goods as well. So it turns out the guy I worked for, who was ex -Fibro, was trained under another person, ex -Fibro, who worked under Mark Rich. And if you remember Mark Rich, he was the aluminum trader that was defaulting on taxes or tax evasion and then he fled Switzerland and he was the guy that Bill Clinton pardoned when he left office. Okay, so Mark Rich is sort of this and he was the founder of Glencore, which is today arguably one of the largest mining and trading companies in the world. And he was the founder of that. So I felt like I was getting trained by impressive people in that. And I thought this was like this glamorous world. Well-- - Was disillusion number two coming? - Yeah, disillusion number two. So Mark Rich, like, okay, he's a criminal and fled the country and my boss studied under him. And so this is a true story. This is what happened. So I worked for the company, it was called Kometco. And If we get any listeners that ever traded, they'll know this company, 'cause it's kind of a famous story. And it burned an aluminum mill here in the US. So anyway, so the guy that ran my business was backed by an heiress to the drug, the Merck Drug Fortune. - Wow. - So he had really impressive financial backing and he was gonna create this global trading company, importing and exporting Russian -sourced aluminum all over the world and bring it to the US for the first time, bring it to Southeast Asia. And so-- - Going big. - Going big, that was the plan. And I was just kind of soaking it up, learning, learning inco terms, using the Thomas Register green books, probably if you remember those. And I would cold call these companies in South Africa, and Aruba, and crazy, like to get new business, right? Just total cold calling, dialing for dollars. Well, the business wasn't run particularly legitimately. It took me a little bit to figure some things out, but basically you're brokering a deal, right? You're importing, so you're opening up a letter of credit to your supplier, which was in this case, the Russians and then you have your customer open a letter of credit to you. We call him back -to -backs, which makes sense. And it turns out my boss left the country and was quote -unquote on a trip in Europe, you know, working with other suppliers. And he calls me up one day and I'm, I don't know, 26 at the time or 24. I was young, stupid like, and there was two other people in the office. One was a controller, very kind of nervous, nitty OCD kind of person. And then somebody who was in the music industry was just answering the phones. And I was kind of running logistics and he called and he said, I need you to change the dates on the shipping documents because the banks do in this week. And I'm like, okay, and his name's Danny, I'll say that much. So I hung up the phone and sat there and thought, hmm. - Feels wrong. - Yeah, not feeling good about this, you know. So I come back and I tell the controller and I said, Danny wants us to change the dates on the shipping documents. And for some reason this guy was like, okay, I'll get the documents. I'm like, whoa, I think we need some advice. - Wow. - I called a friend, I was a kid. I had no mentor, I was a kid. My mentor was out of the country, and I said, "What do you think?" It's a super smart friend of mine, MIT undergrad. He's like, "Oh, that smells like fraud." (laughing) - Get away from that. - Get away from that. So it turned out that I actually had to call, so I knew who the owner was, and I was so intimidated, and I'd meet them for Christmas dinner. It was in this, you know, posh building on Fifth Avenue. And I mean, these guys were loaded. So this was this heiress to the drug, the Merck Drug Fortunes husband. So it was a husband that invested. And again, I won't name names. And with a very high -priced, fancy attorney that was also involved, and I had to whistle blow and I just, I just didn't know what to do. So I ended up calling calling their accountant who works with us. And I said, "I think we have a problem." So he came, and anyway, the whole company became unraveled. And we - - And the accountant knew. - He didn't. - Presumably. - He didn't, well, he didn't know that anything was being doctored, nor did any of us. So I basically informed him like, okay, Danny's asked me to do this. And I don't think this is for sure. - Oh no. - Okay. He said, yeah, let's a few oh no's and some oh others. And he had to call these owners and say, oh, we got some problems here. Then Danny didn't come back to the United States. And then it really got crazy. And we heard through the industry, the Russian mob had a hit out for him. He changed his name. This was so crazy. And he had stung at the time, I don't know, century aluminum, he owed them money for material that he had shipped and sold. And so they were stung with not getting receivables from that. If they end up listening to this podcast, they're gonna be like, "I remember that." - This is like big time stuff though. - Right, but I was a kid, I was so like, what were you like when you were 24 or 25? You're just making your way in the world, you know a few things, you don't know this, high stakes stuff, this banking stuff. So that was the, so I kind of unhelped sort of, you know, unravel the business. - That was your foray. - It was my foray into, wow. So this guy was, he was a crook, which actually leads me to my next story, but this was after I met him, so yeah. - So this is, you answered classifies this for you ended up. - This is where I ended up. So I had this, so I learned a lot from him, right? So I learned how to trade metals from an import -export perspective. I knew all about the INCO terms, the banking documentation, that I learned everything about international trade. So that was how I got my international trade. And I found it exciting, except a little repetitive. - Mm -hmm. - You know, it kind of has like a regular cadence to it. So you go, you try to get an order, you get an order, da, da, da. And then I kept saying, how's the internet gonna disrupt this world that were, this is a manual process where traders take advantage of Customers didn't know suppliers in other countries and suppliers in other countries didn't know customers in our country, right? So you're capitalizing on just the lack of knowledge. Yes, and I remember thinking this is all gonna go away because the internet's gonna change all this This isn't 94. Yeah took a long time to get there and traders as you know, probably backward Integrated into well, we'll take title, we'll do the shipping, we'll warehouse the material, we'll kit some of the distributor functions that distributors historically or service centers had always done, so. - And be a bank a little bit. - And be a bank and take on the risk. It was all about risk, risk, risk, which by the way is a theme I think in the markets today. And I think we're still fundamentally focused on helping and companies manage risk in a different way, the price risk of all of this. So that was my foray, so that was my-- Jesus. Yeah, it was a little-- yeah, no, you're good. That's-- how did you feel about all that? I felt like, well, this was not what I expected to be doing in business or like-- and what am I going to do with my background working for somebody who the company was liquidated. I mean, I would-- entity. I don't really know what happened to him. I know we moved back to Europe, changed his name, changed his company name. And so, yeah, so it was really like, full reboot. So I'm like, how am I going to get a job? It doesn't look good. Yeah, with that kind of, right, with that kind of background. So I ended up doing some trading on my own with a partner for a little bit, kind of dabbled. And then I said, I've got to leverage this into something else. So I actually went into my second company that went bankrupt, except this one was a really big company. It was Arthur Anderson. - Oh, yeah. - So they hired me because they had just kind of, were growing their wholesale distribution practice and they wanted people that had skills and knowledge of global trade. It was perfect. So that was a place where I could kind of walk into, No one had to explain to me what a container was or how things were shipped financing. So that's kind of mice That's where I learned a lot just about how to do consulting how to The Arthur Anderson way etc. I've been what happened there. I have more funny stories there So if you recall what happened there, that was the whole Enron scandal. Mm -hmm So I had never worked And Ron, I just want to state that for the record. - You're like Forrest Cump. You're like all these major events. - Right, the story gets crazy crazy. So then it even gets crazier. So I was working mostly with, I would say mid -market manufacturers that were sourcing metal and wanted to figure out if they could be sourcing globally. They used to call it low -cost country sourcing. I became more of an expert in that. and also working in the early, early marketplace models. So I was brought in for the, you know, oh my gosh, there were so many of them. Constellium and chemicals or there was spectrum metals was the aluminum one that Alcoa. - Was it e -metals? Was that U .S.? - There was an E -Steel. - E -Steel, okay. - Yes, there were just tons of these models. And I kind of wrote Arthur Andersen's first white paper on these marketplaces. I interviewed everybody. I interviewed people at free markets. And so-- - Did you offer up an opinion on that at that time? - I did. - What was your conclusion? - Oh my gosh, I have to share this. I wrote an article with my now husband. We wrote it in 1999 saying that most of these marketplaces were gonna be junk and worth nothing. And I should read that, and perhaps I have, but why did you guys think that at that time? Because most of them were focused on the wrong part. They weren't solving the actual problem, and I think about what you do at Brijos, and your approach to the problem is totally different. So most marketplace models think all we need to do is take the catalogs of a bunch of suppliers and get a bunch of buyers in here and people are gonna be able to just buy, again, going after transactional business, which I know you guys are focused on. But that's not actually how a lot of people buy, they're buying contract, right? So it was hard for, and the Mills, you think of an Alcoa who's participating in one of these marketplace models, they wanna sell on contract largely, they're not doing transactional, not as much certainly, as Lizzie. - No, they wanna know what's going on in the future. - They wanna book their capacity and whatever. So a lot of these marketplaces just missed the mark and they thought that certain things don't lend themselves well to catalog, others do. What you guys are doing is very specific, it's parts, but if you're buying like sheet and coil, not all of it is catalog -ish. It's based on the width and the gauge and the outer and the finish and the coating and the wrapping, the packaging. And is it eye to the sky? And what's the inner tube outer tube? You know, there's all sorts of variables that impact the price, impact what people quote. So, and also, I think people treated direct materials at the time differently. They treated it the same as they would as you're buying MRO if you're buying like toilet paper and gloves and oil and they're not the same. A strategic purchase is different. You know, if you're putting aluminum on an automotive vehicle, there's a quality standard that has to be met that is that just doesn't lend itself to at the time the simple marketplace models that existed. Yeah, I agree. And I think that the beta C playbook doesn't work in B2B. No. And actually, I'll take it a step further, which I coined, which is online metals is not even B2B, in my opinion. It's eye to eye, industrial to industrial. It's like this whole other category of thinking. And I think that thinking about it really in terms of B2B is maybe going to maybe closing your thinking a little bit because I think it's it's not that I think you can't necessarily say oh it's a B2B model we'll apply it to metals right I just I just think that that would be a catastrophic and having iterated our platform over time I can tell you firsthand that just taking a B2B concept and trying to apply it to a supply chain, at least in metals, which is the only thing I can speak to, it just didn't work. It's something different. Well, and there's plenty of carcasses crowned. Tell us that that's so, right? Which is amazing. I mean, I get it how that occurs, Because, and it's still tied back to the dot com era to a degree, which is, no, this is how marketplaces should work. And there's Amazon out here, which is always the one people point to. You just go do that and do it well. And, but when you do the world supply chains, I just, I'm finding that's not true. And it's, and it's so different when you, you know, for example, you might have tooling that you've, and dies and things that you've developed for your. - No, they want to know if they get in a jam, and I'm talking contract business, really, that they've got a partner for their business. - Right. - Whatever the circumstance is, they're tying themselves up to this other company, which is, you could argue that to a degree, there may not be a marketplace opportunity in that world. - Exactly. And it is going to be in transactional because, as you and I have discussed, that is the least oil, highest velocity, and you need it right now in buyers typically are like, "I don't really care where I get this at this moment, there's kind of the price I need to be near that price, and I need it here at this time, and I kind of don't much care where it comes from, I just need it. - Yeah, and those marketplace models, and I think still today, a lot of people get those marketplace models wrong. - Yeah. - They still apply that same thing. - When there's also the idea of that, if you don't have somebody from that domain who's developing that software, you're heavily influenced by their consumer habits, and you can't bring those into this equation. - Right. There's too many other parameters that have to go. And, you know, we haven't even talked about things like, you know, delivery requirements and all of the ways things need to be packaged at certain locales and look, you know, there's all sorts of requirements or fill my can band. Like those aren't things that also lend themselves readily to the circa 2000 marketplace models. - Yeah, and I've thought that I agree with that. And one other difference being that B to C is so formulaic now, where if I buy some tennis shoes or something, the moment I check out, that transaction just ended, effectively. It's going to go through a credit card rail, and everything's going to go. In materials, that's when the transaction begins. That's right. That's right. Because I've just put something into play and now we're going to see what we have right exactly I think an obvious thing once said yes but I think you have to bend in it to like really get to get it's totally different it's totally different and that's the difference between it's a we can split the word transactional in direct material purchasing transactional can be very strategic strategic, right? So certain quality standards, I'm sure you get this on your platform where people need certain quality standards for the material that's coming in or certain specifications, so it matters. And that's not always the case when you're buying some object on, you know, a consumer product on, you're not maybe checking that, you're not sourcing to say, "Was this shoe made from a non -labor blah blah - Yeah. - Manufacturer, you know, some people can do that, and again, the behaviors are different, B to C, B to B. - Yeah, I mean, it's, there are ties that bind it, that they're all these, you know, as you know, the restrictions that live around these transactions, which need to be considered. But so back to your journey. - Yes, I was doing that at, at Earth, okay, so what happened, I have to tell the last Anderson story 'cause it was the best. So one morning, back when people still got papers delivered, like newspapers, somebody calls me and says, "Oh my God, you're on the front page "of the business section of the Chicago Tribune." I said, "What?" And I pull out the paper and it is a picture of me walking out of Arthur Anderson headquarters carrying binders. I look like I was weighed down with a bunch of binders and boxes. The implication, and the headline said, "Arthur Anderson rocked by scandal." And the implication was that I was walking out of the building to the shredder. That was the joke about Enron. The documents were shredded. So literally, I came to the office the next day and People called me Shredder. I literally got at this nickname as if I was Mind you, I've never stepped foot in Houston in my whole time that I worked at Arthur Anderson You know never stepped foot there never touched on Ron never was involved with any of that But anyway, so that was my so my second company that I'd worked for two for two here I was two for two and I started to get a little bit of a kind and here everyone said oh go work for Arthur Anderson It's like the best brand in the world, it's a super safe company, their stellar reputation, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, but by the time actually right, it was around when I got married in 2001, you know, the company I could see was unraveling. And I remember somebody explaining to me, my boss at the time was explaining, I said, why can't they just like spin out that part of the business that did Enron? - Right. - And remember him saying, No, it's kind of like a cancer that's already metastasized and it's kind of like all over and it can't be cut out anymore. So that was my second. So that was a good-- - Back to the drawing. - Okay, so our group went to Bering Point and I spent my time at Bering Point mostly working for Motorola in a giant, It was like one overarching project of 60 sub -projects. And I don't mean to trash Bering Point or the project, but it was awful. And I was working killer hours. And so I ended up leaving Bering Point to go to Deloitte Consulting, which I thought, actually Deloitte and Touche, which I thought was, they were spitting out their consulting firm. So I was thinking, oh, I can stay more local. I can have local clients. They're spitting out the consulting arm. So the weekend I gave my resignation to Bearing Point, Deloitte consulting, which was going to be Braxton, decided they would not spin out and instead we're going to reintegrate. So I was back to, I literally traded one job for another job. I had basically the same job and I was traveling all over. So this time though at Deloitte, my client was Caterpillar. So I spent 14 months at Caterpillar and like learned a lot, and again, metal sourcing, metal sourcing. So flash forward, we were starting our family. I'm like, I cannot be on the road like this. And I think a line job, so you basically in consulting up two choices, you have a line job, which is where you can grow and become partner, or you get a staff job. And if you get a staff job, I don't wanna trash people that have staff jobs, but let's just say they're less high - Right. - This high earning potential, et cetera, et cetera. Tend to be a little more static of what you're doing. - Right, okay. - Not on the partner track, et cetera. - Different objectives. - Different objectives. So I felt like, oh, I don't really want to do a staff job. I feel like I'm more entrepreneurial. I want to do something else. - Yeah. - And my husband at the time, so we had met also through all this B2B Marketplace stuff. He worked for Free Markets. We met at a B2B net market makers conference. So we're all marketplace to everything. Like we really are marketplace. - A bunch of nerds. - Bunch of nerds in the marketplace. And he was doing kind of M &A and that kind of thing. And after we had our first kids, it was in 2003. This was back when we used to use the Zagats to find out what restaurants are before all the good, like OpenTable and Yelp and all that. - It - There's like zagots and photos. - Yeah, there you go, there you go. - You got the whole recovery. - There you go, so we have our first kid and you know, we're not doing it with any help. We're gonna figure this out. And so you know, you're doing the round the clocks and the shifts and the baby thing. And so one day I walk into the den, which is where he was working at Free Markets. And he is sitting there picking out restaurants and wines and I looked at him and I said, "You need to go to the office. "You need to go downtown and pretend like you're working "because I have no sleep and I'm going front." So he goes downtown and starts working with a company that free markets had acquired. And then I think he was getting kind of itchy and so I said to him, "Well, one of us needs to quit "and start something." So we really were kind of like, "It could be you, "it could be me, what What do you want to do?" We decided I actually had probably the better job at the time. He went and started his company, which became Spun Matters. Another fun story. Our first client in that business was the now Senator Dave McCormick of Pennsylvania. Dave was at free markets, and he ended up hiring Spun Matters, my husband at the time, to do some work. That's how we - What did Spend Matters do. - Initially we were doing, it's interesting, kind of analyzing technology and technology stacks from different providers, and then providing competitive intelligence. That's still what the company does today, but it was more primitive back then, more in the form of white papers and things like that. - Okay, so you were kind of researching vetting? - Research, yeah. So that's kind of what Spend Matters did, and then we kind of hemmed and hot, and I ended up only about six months later starting a company called Appdeem Global, which was essentially a consulting firm helping companies with direct material sourcing, which is what I was doing at Caterpillar, global sourcing, etc. But this is where the part where I couldn't get out of the metals industry. All the projects people would call us for always were metal projects, stampings, fabricated semi -finished sheet and coil, et cetera. So we were doing some consulting business and then at the time in 2004, Jason started a blog called, it was called Spend Matters. So he ran a company, it was his old partners, but the blog was called Spend Matters. And I thought, oh, that would be an easy one. Kind of what you guys are doing here with your podcast, right? That would be a good marketing vehicle for My consulting business so we began we started and we thought well what we call it I don't know. Well, so we had a hired a branding consultant. We're like, we're gonna call it metal miner Okay, that was a blog site. That's literally what we did. That's where you started. That's where we started and we wanted to Consult and use that as a means to consult and but what we ended up doing was getting people angry and That's another story. But Basically, you know, we started off the traffic, you know, we used to laugh. You can appreciate this. We, the first few weeks were like, wow, we got like five readers, you know, and we're all excited. I'm like, well, that was, that was me, you, my mom, your dad, you know, and so like that was how we, right? Yeah. Hadn't totally arrived. Hadn't totally arrived. Then you know, we had like 20 readers in a day or whatever. So then, you know, I remember when we, you know, kind of hit, I don't know, it was a few hundred readers in a month or whatever it was, it was like the threshold, but it was sort of like some hockey stick growth. - Right. - We started getting like five, 10 ,000, I'm like, wow, we're like, there's people that we don't even know that are listening to this or reading this or whatever. - Yeah. - And we were much more whimsical and our voice was almost like, it was way less corporate. It was much more, we were funny. - Yeah, let us fly. - We were, We recommend like if you're gonna take a manhole cover like wait until steals at least X dollars per ton or it's just not worth the wait So it was like I'm the market time the market. So it was just this parody almost I mean we got tons of traffic tons isn't it crazy over it was silly. It was absolutely silly We will read we wrote a story on what do you call them grills your teeth with the gold, you know, I hate to say that is our number one most trafficked piece of content of all time. Is it really? And of course, you realize that you also in your when you're doing these outreach efforts, you also want to pull in people that can actually help your business, right? Be help you grow your business. And so, you know, we hired a Google exec who basically said, you probably don't want to be writing about that because that's probably not your target market. How did you discover that you wanted to write an article about grills? Like, how'd you get there? I'm trying to think if I wrote it or somebody else, I have no, I think we wanted to, to do something fun and whimsical at least one day a week. We wanted to write about something that was like, um, basically pushing the idea of of like supporting metals as an industry in general and all the different use cases of metals. - Okay, what's made of metal? - So it was like a fun Friday, right? It's a fun Friday piece. We've done some other great ones like that I think are practical. For example, if any of you have some male listeners, I just want to say rose gold is not a thing. It is a total rip off. So you should never buy rose gold. And the reason for that is that it's mixing a base metal with a precious metal. So copper is a base metal. It's really cheap compared to the price of gold. But that's what gives gold its pink color, a la rose gold. So we actually did a little, you know, a little fun story looking at Tiffany and how much they're charging for, you know, rose gold, not to trash Tiffany, but rose gold is-- - Sorry, Tiff. - Yeah, sorry, but rose gold is a no -go. So, you know, we would write fun pieces like that. So that's how I think the grills piece kind of came about 'cause we were like, there's a lot of gold in that and, you know, now people are doing all sorts of weird things. They're like doing gemstone stuff, like on their skin. And, you know. - Yeah, it's, well, people get bored. They start doing all sorts of different things. So you guys brought her to Google Marketing Consultant? - Yes, - Yeah, so she was a friend of mine. She was high ranking at Google and she kind of came in here and basically whiplashed us into sort of understanding like I kind of whipped us in the shape, basically saying you guys are jumping from all these different things and you really need to think about your core audience. Who are you going after? What are you trying to convey to that audience? I don't think the grill's audience is your buying audience, you know, as an example. So how'd you guys feel about that when you heard somebody, I mean, there's kind of rain in the end, right? And saying, are you guys serious about what we're doing or not? Right. And if you are, so how did you guys feel? Were you still sort of, I mean, you brought the person in to help you, but you're like, yeah, she totally gets this. It was a mixed feeling because Actually, I was more worried about how much traffic we would lose, 'cause all those fun pieces were driving in big traffic. And all she made was like a super obvious statement, but our business wasn't paying attention to it, which was, you gotta make your site work for your business. Like, you're not there just to be whimsical and silly, or entertaining. Like, we didn't have a revenue stream from that unless you could monetize it, which we had sponsors at the time. So we've had sponsors of the website. That was the revenue stream. And then we would do consulting on the side, not on the side, but that was our business. We would do like a gain share consulting thing. And we did that for a bunch of years and then just merge that business into spun matters and kind of operated both companies. It's a long story. Well, so your husband goes in because you had the better sort of steady job situation, he went with Spend Matters. How long did it take for you to jump and get with? - Not long, 'cause he's an animal. So he started Spend Matters, I think, in January, February of 2004. And then I ended up quitting, I left Deloitte in 2004, like by the summer of 2004. And then I was doing my consulting on the side and he was running this business. And we did that for a number of years until 2010. And then we merged both companies together because we were doing a lot of the same things. It was kind of like shared services, right? Like we don't really now have two sets of books and two sets of this for these little businesses. So we put them together, but kept Metalminers its own like little operating group and some kind of separate investments. And it got a little complicated, which is why we kind of decided, let's really grow and blow out the spend matters part of the business that had more momentum, more revenue, more clients. And then we built that and sold that to private equity in December of '21, and then spun out metal miner to let it grow and thrive on its own and create its own, and that's really when we built the platform in 2019, so that's when MetalMiner really transformed from, let's say, blog and some consulting to more of a SaaS platform data company.