The Future of Investment Management With Ryan Eisenman
- Quik! News Team
- Apr 5
- 25 min read
Ryan Eisenman is the Co-founder and CEO of Arch, a fintech company that automates the administration and management of private investments. A Houston native, he graduated from Vanderbilt University with a degree in Human and Organizational Development, along with minors in Corporate Strategy, Financial Economics, and Economics. Before founding Arch in 2018, Ryan gained experience in business development and analysis through roles at firms such as Deloitte and Techstars. Under his leadership, Arch has grown to serve over 270 clients, managing more than $100 billion in alternative investments.
Here’s a glimpse of what you’ll learn:
[2:08] Ryan Eisenman discusses how Arch helps investment advisors manage private market assets
[3:55] Comparison between Arch and personal finance tools like Mint.com
[4:37] How AI and automation streamline document processing for investment management
[6:31] The origin story of Arch and how Ryan identified the problem to solve
[9:23] Automating workflows for capital calls, distributions, and investment statements
[13:45] Strategies for turning customer feedback into intuitive product features and workflows
[21:53] The importance of asking precise AI-driven questions for better outcomes
In this episode…
Managing private market investments is often a tedious, time-consuming process. Advisors and investors must sift through countless emails, log into multiple portals, and manually extract key information from financial documents. Is there a way to streamline this workflow and free up valuable time for more strategic decision-making?
Ryan Eisenman, an expert in investment management technology, recognized these inefficiencies and co-founded a solution to automate them. He explains how AI and automation can eliminate manual document processing, allowing investment professionals to access structured data and pre-built dashboards instantly. He shares how leveraging AI to summarize lengthy financial reports can drastically improve efficiency and decision-making. Ryan also discusses the importance of balancing automation with a managed service approach to ensure accuracy when dealing with unpredictable document formats.
In this episode of The Customer Wins, Richard Walker interviews Ryan Eisenman, CEO of Arch, about using AI to simplify private investment management. Ryan explains how automation helps investment professionals manage their portfolios more effectively. He also covers the evolution of his company’s technology, the importance of customer feedback in product development, and strategies for building a scalable, customer-focused business.
Resources Mentioned in this episode
Quotable Moments:
"We help our clients get out of their inboxes and remove some of the most painful tasks."
"Every one of these documents has a workflow that needs to be automated and that should be automated."
"We've just been obsessed with customers and customer experiences since day one."
"We want to build software that solves problems and helps people make better decisions."
"The quality of your questions dictates the quality of your answers — the same is true for AI."
Action Steps:
Automate investment document management: Implementing automation streamlines document retrieval, data extraction, and reporting, allowing advisors to focus on strategy instead of administrative tasks.
Leverage AI for document summarization: AI-powered summarization helps highlight the most critical information, improving decision-making and saving time for investors and advisors.
Prioritize customer feedback in product development: Engaging with users throughout the development process leads to better adoption, improved retention, and organic business growth.
Develop scalable workflows for investment tracking: Standardizing these workflows with technology enhances efficiency, reduces errors, and improves the overall investment management experience.
Integrate systems for seamless financial management: Connecting these systems through APIs or integrations enhances data visibility and enables better portfolio analysis and reporting.
Sponsor for this episode...
This is brought to you by Quik!
At Quik!, we provide forms automation and management solutions for companies seeking to maximize their potential productivity.
Using our FormXtract API, you can submit your completed forms and get clean, context-rich data that is 99.9% accurate.
Our vision is to become the leading forms automation company by making paperwork the easiest part of every transaction.
Meanwhile, our mission is to help the top firms in the financial industry raise their bottom line by streamlining the customer experience with automated, convenient solutions.
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Episode Transcript:
Intro: 00:02
Welcome to The Customer Wins podcast, where business leaders discuss their secrets and techniques for helping their customers succeed and in turn, grow their business.
Richard Walker: 00:16
Hi, I'm Rich Walker, the host of The Customer Wins, where I talk to business leaders about how they help their customers win and how their focus on customer experience leads to growth. Some of our past guests have included Spencer Segal of ActiFi, Mike Betz of 11thEstate and Doctor Preston Cherry of Concurrent Wealth Management. Today, I'm speaking with Ryan Eisenman, co-founder and CEO of Arch. In today's episode is brought to you by Quik, the leader in enterprise forms processing. When your business relies upon processing forms, don't waste your team's valuable time manually reviewing the forms.
Instead, get quick using our Form Xtract API. Simply submit your completed forms and get back clean, context rich data that reduces manual reviews to only one out of a thousand submissions. Visit Quickforms.com to get started. All right. Today's guest, Ryan Eisenman, is the co-founder and CEO of Arch, a digital solution for managing private market assets like private equity, venture capital and real estate.
What started as a solution for collecting K-1s is now used to automate portfolio management and analysis by over 300 institutional clients, private offices and investment advisors, including one of the three biggest US banks. Ryan is a Houston native, graduated from Vanderbilt University with a degree in human and organizational development and lives in New York City, where Arch is based. Ryan, welcome to The Customer Wins.
Ryan Eisenman: 01:50
Rich, thanks for having me. Great to be here.
Richard Walker: 01:52
Yeah, I'm excited to talk to you. So if you haven't heard this podcast before, I talk with business leaders about what they're doing to help their customers win. How they built and deliver a great customer experience and the challenges to growing their own company. Ryan, I want to understand your business a little bit better. How does your company help people?
Ryan Eisenman: 02:08
Yeah, we help our clients get out of their inboxes and remove some of the most painful tasks that they have around managing their investments. And then instead have pre-built dashboards, really high quality data documents collected and organized for them so that they can understand how their investments are performing, make better decisions, and hopefully have better investment outcomes.
Richard Walker: 02:31
Okay. You started with the email inbox. I didn't actually anticipate that being a challenge. Are you saying that people are traditionally receiving a ton of email around their investments and not knowing how to like cipher through it?
Ryan Eisenman: 02:44
Yes, because a lot of the clients that we're helping are investment advisors or other types of allocators that have private market investments. So they own LP stakes in real estate funds or real estate investments. They've invested in private equity, they've invested in venture capital. And unlike stocks and bonds, those investments don't live typically in like a Schwab or a Morgan Stanley or an E-Trade. And each of those funds, when there's an update, sends the investor an email.
Oftentimes the email says you have an update, but it's in this portal, this like interlinks or data exchange or Cada portal. And so then they have to read their email, go to the portal, find the right document, pull the document down, read the document, file it, take some numbers, put it into a spreadsheet. It's a pretty manual and intensive process that takes a lot of time and takes time away from more strategic aspects of our clients lives.
Richard Walker: 03:36
Man, I mean, this sounds like something you could solve for me on my personal banking. All the different credit cards and bank statements and mortgage statements, etc. you have to log into a different site for each of them. And because we went paperless, you know, I'm not scanning documents. I'm actually logging into their sites and downloading. Is this very similar as am I getting this right?
Ryan Eisenman: 03:55
Yes. And so what you're describing there, there have been a couple of solutions for like a mint.com or personal Capital. It's a very similar idea of one-part aggregation and two-part centralization and creating like a really nice dashboard of your finances and of your investments. We just do it mostly today for institutional wealth management clients and for these type of private investments. But there may be applications longer term in aggregating bank accounts or doing kind of more of what you're describing as well.
Richard Walker: 04:24
Wow, that's really, really great. And I mean, that sounds like a big problem when you're saving companies this type of time and money. So how is your product actually work? Is it using AI to scrape data off these documents and interpret it? What are you guys doing on the back end?
Ryan Eisenman: 04:37
Yeah, we use a lot of AI and a lot of other type of technology to. And there's a few discreet challenges in here. There's getting documents out of these platforms. Sometimes there's APIs we can write to. But this industry is pretty premature in the level of automation that's available.
So we have to build our own automation. We build templates to documents. We leverage AI to especially summarize qualitative information, which some of the more recent large language models are really good at. Where we could feed a 90 page document into a model automatically and then get out. Here's the like 3 or 4 or 10 or 20 bullets that really matter for that document. So there's a lot of an ability to unlock value leveraging AI within this workflow.
Richard Walker: 05:21
Yeah for sure. Okay. Does it fail? Like are there documents that it's just not getting or not reading? And how do you know if it's failing and how does your client know if it's failing. And they have to do something manual.
Ryan Eisenman: 05:34
Yeah. Great question. So we have built a managed service on top of our system. So if for any reason a document fails, it's a new document you've never seen before. The format changes.
There's different kinds of nuances that appear that have never been there before. And then our team will go in and remap the documents and reprocess the documents to make sure that we can deliver 100% of the documents on a daily basis. And then there are document types that are not new that we're starting to bring to market, or that maybe we haven't brought to market yet. So some of the larger Lpas subscription documents, limited partner agreements we're starting to pull more information out of and give folks more of an ability to run this kind of automation on those documents, in addition to smaller and more repeatable documents.
Richard Walker: 06:22
So, Ryan, this is the kind of problem that you really only see by working in this industry. How did you find this problem and say, this is something I want to solve for?
Ryan Eisenman: 06:31
I worked for an investment advisor a little over ten years ago, so I saw some of those problems there and then kind of talked to a couple other customers that had related problems. Pitch this idea, or at least like the earliest version of this idea to a venture capitalists. And this was in 2017. And he had the problem was like, you should meet these two engineers. They're also interested in solving this or a related problem.
Maybe the three of you would want to work together. So I met Jason and Joel, who are the two other co-founders of the business, both engineers who studied computer science and met each other at MIT. And then the three of us in 2017 and in earnest in 2018. When we started, the company started to build out the earliest versions of Arch.
Richard Walker: 07:13
What was the earliest version like?
Ryan Eisenman: 07:16
Version one was or 0.01 was just a dashboard for collecting K-1 tax documents. The dashboard was accessible by the client, the advisor, their outside CPA. You could log into it, and it's basically an inventory list of every K-1 you're expecting and then which ones had arrived. So as a way to make sure that at the end of the year, at the end of the tax year, every tax document needed to be collected ultimately was collected, and that the investor and advisor didn't need to do the work or to do the work, and then make those tax documents available as fast as possible to the nkpa.
Richard Walker: 07:52
And so from there you figured out a platform, a model, and you said, oh, we could do with this document. Now let's try this document. And just kept adding different document types and companies.
Ryan Eisenman: 08:00
Exactly. Because we believe that every one of these documents has a workflow that needs to be automated and that should be automated. And so now we collect every document and have built out predefined workflows for things like capital calls. When someone gets a notice to pay for their investment, or distributions when they're getting paid back for an investment, or statements that show your values or statements to show what portfolio companies are within funds. That there's other ways to use software to build into the platform for each of those type of documents.
Richard Walker: 08:30
Okay, so it's not just here's a repository of everything incoming. You're helping them take action on what's necessary in those incoming messages. Right?
Ryan Eisenman: 08:38
Correct.
Richard Walker: 08:39
Yeah. That's awesome. You know, there's a lot of corollary between our two businesses, because quick is about getting the forms and the industry that people need to fill out. And so we started very early on with 300 forms. That was it.
And then we said, let's get to 1000 forms and then 3000 forms. And we just kept building our inventory of documents to add more value. You took it a step further in terms of providing the workflow. We actually partner with other companies to build out the workflows around forms, but I think there's so much there in terms of how this our two businesses have kind of grown. I though, am somewhat envious of the AI tools that you get to start with.
Were you starting with AI back in 2018? Was that on the roadmap already?
Ryan Eisenman: 09:23
Not as much. We were well-versed in the AI of the day. It's a great perk of having two really smart software engineering co-founders, and but the applications weren't really there yet, and there was a lot of buzzword around or buzzwords around machine learning and AI and different advanced technologies and people talking about OCR. But we found that we have really tried to avoid buzzwords and only talk about AI when it is truly that like more recent brand of large language model I. And so a lot of our core platform works really well in coordination with AI.
But it's built using other technology in order to get all the documents into the system.
Richard Walker: 10:04
So I applaud you on that because I run a series in this podcast, which is an AI series, to talk to different people about how they're using AI and looking at you, I didn't even think about it because it's not the front and center. The problem you're solving is what's important. The how you solve it is a different thing. And that's one of the things I have that I'm seeing in the marketplace is so many companies are like, oh, we have AI, we're AI, we're AI. Look, we introduced our own forms, sorry, AI driven form solution last year, but it's really about the problem we're solving.
And it seems like you have had a strong focus on that. So I'm curious about how you figured out to build the best customer experience for what you're doing. How did you figure out Did you talk to a lot of customers and change? Did you go through ups and downs? How did you go through this process and figure out what makes the best experience for your customer?
Ryan Eisenman: 10:56
Yeah, we've just been obsessed with customers and customer experiences since day one. We were really lucky that when we started the company, we had two customers that were our design clients, so we built a lot of the early versions of art around, and so we were constantly talking to them, constantly showing them new dashboards and new features and saying like, hey, how does this help your workflow? What's painful? Oh, and by the way, can you introduce us to your accountants? We want to talk to them.
We want to go deep with them and understand their workflow. And even though the accountants aren't the ones paying us, in most cases, we want their experience to be so great so that it reflects on the customer that actually is paying us. So it's just a huge part of our DNA and part of our culture is being obsessed with customers. We know that the next customer that we onboard is most likely to come through our current customer. Over half of our customers have referred and have referenced or served as a reference for us and referred us to new clients.
And so we would prefer to grow our business that way over any other way of just delivering a really great client experience, and then having those clients be able to share us with other people and know that they're like trusting their connections with us and know that we'll take good care of them.
Richard Walker: 12:06
In the early days, did you face the pitfall of a customer falling in love with you and taking up all your time, and you being dedicated to that one or 2 or 3 customers? Or was this always the plan to serve as many as possible through the right means?
Ryan Eisenman: 12:20
Always a plan to serve more than just a few customers. We're really lucky that we got to spend a lot of time with our early customers, but they also were very understanding and also didn't want us to necessarily customize everything for them because they wanted this to be a business that can survive and be sustainable. So that's been a big focus for us of learning with our customers, not being captive to any one customer and building this really as this, like Switzerland for private markets, meaning like we need to be able to serve the entire customer and all the different personas within this industry. So build this in a way that it works with all the private equity firms and the investors and their advisors and their accountants and their attorneys. And so not getting kind of pulled in any one direction too strongly.
Richard Walker: 13:05
All right, Ryan, I'm going to ask you what I think is somewhat of a hard question to answer because when I talk to people and ask them, how do you build the best customer experience? The resounding answer is you have to really sit down with your customer and listen to them and understand them. But the hard part to answer this question, this is what I want to challenge you to try to answer is how do you take that feedback and turn it into actual product? Like, what are some of your mindsets or frameworks or, I don't know, etiquette, just design philosophies that make you say, oh, I heard what you said and I'm going to turn it into an experience that actually is beautiful and easy or intuitive. I want to hear you articulate some of that, if you can.
Ryan Eisenman: 13:45
Yeah. Well, we have folks in the company that really care about this exact same thing. So a woman named Eva who runs our operations cares deeply about the customer experience, starting with onboarding, getting clients on really quickly and then delivering a great experience to them. Then we have some really strong product managers, some of which started in our operations team. So one of our product managers named Paul.
He was hands on with clients. Helping them get on board and use the platform, so understands customers extremely deeply and then pivoted over to product where when customers are asking for certain things, what we do is we kind of start a mini research project around a feature or an area. So it's like, okay, we've heard a lot about a certain integration. Our customers want us to integrate with this software. We've heard a lot about a certain workflow.
Our customers want us to build this workflow. Well, let's go talk to every person that's requested that feature. And so we rigorously log all the requests we get from our clients. And then let's go talk to other customers that haven't requested this feature that we think are in the customer type, that would get value out of that feature. And so it's learning, like, what do you do today?
How would this feature or how would this product help your workflow? What would need to be true for you to use it for you to pay for it? What would you want to pay for it? And just kind of really understanding before we start building what it would take for that product to live on its own and be successful. And then that gives us a much better informed view on what's possible.
And we've been able to also leverage some more of, like the call recording software in order to allow our engineers who are building the product, hear directly from clients, and hear what the client articulated as the use case for the software. And then whenever possible, we try to get our clients in front of our team in person. We've had some like live seminars around certain products and brought clients on site. And so the closer that the folks building the product can be to the clients that have the problem, the better product we think we can build, and the more empathetic we can be on our client's needs.
Richard Walker: 15:49
Oh man. That's great. Okay. You record some calls to your engineers, can hear them, you can lead a horse to water, but you can't make it drink. How do you get your engineers to listen to the right segments of these calls so they understand it?
Do they have an innate interest in doing that, or is it like a weekly meeting? What are you guys doing?
Ryan Eisenman: 16:06
Yeah, a little bit more ad hoc than like a weekly meeting around this. But we'll clip the calls. So it's like minute 23 to minute 24 is when they're talking about the exact desire or pain point that they're trying to solve. So that's a big part of this. And the teams intrinsically motivated around building the right thing.
Like we don't want to just build software for the sake of building software. We want to build software that solves problems, and that helps people make better decisions and leads to better lives, and helps them be so happy with arts that they refer us to the next person. So it's all for this like higher level purpose of we want to be a company that's around for decades. And in order to be around for decades, we need to continue to innovate and serve our clients extremely well, because that's a big part of building our brand and reputation for how we care about the clients in our market.
Richard Walker: 16:51
Yeah, well, good for you, man. So I in our company, we manage an idea board, and anybody who hears an idea from a customer, whether that's sales or customer service or engineers or whoever talking, we can log an idea in the idea board. And then periodically about once a week, once every two weeks, we sit down and talk about what the ideas are that came in, so we can assess should we do them or not. How do you assign business value to the ideas that you get or the requests you get? How do you decide that you should approach it or do it?
And I heard you say, talk to more customers, but what if it's just a convenience? What if it's just a nice to have? It's not going to improve your revenue or improve your market share. Like, how do you guys really assess to take one thing over another? Because you can't do it. All right.
Ryan Eisenman: 17:35
Yeah. And it's hard because some of these things are really quantitative and some of them are a little bit more qualitative. It's like, well, if we build this thing, then this client that will spend a couple hundred thousand dollars with us will sign a contract. It's like, okay, great. Yeah, that's really easy to assign value to.
And those are great. And we love and there's opportunities to build things that help a client, a prospect, become a client and then help our current clients be happier clients. But there's a lot we want to think about in terms of just like overall quality of life. How useful is the platform? How usable is it?
We're having a conversation yesterday as part of some of our annual planning around building things, not just to hit a product spec, but we want to build things that are truly novel and truly great products for the market that go that extra mile and don't just like check off. Here's what we need to produce for a client to say, yep, you built that thing that I need, but what do we need to produce for us to help a client have kind of that like magical moment of like, wow, this helps me see my investments in a way that I've never seen before, and this helps me actually make better decisions and understand things I couldn't have understood without you. And that's where we're really trying to push, is truly innovate on that side of the market.
Richard Walker: 18:50
Well, right. Because that's adding a lot of value to your product that, you know, everybody's going to get. Well, tell me if this has happened because this happened to us recently. Somebody asking for something. And you look at it and you're like, there's not much reason for us to do it.
Sure. It would help you. It would make sense in your specific situation. We would love to help you. We just can't do it all. How do you say no to customers when you just can't take it all on?
Ryan Eisenman: 19:14
Yeah. Unfortunately, in order to say yes, you have to say no all the time. And so it's just kind of like making sure that the reasoning is pragmatic and customers understand our perspective too. And so but we also do a lot to allow customers, for example, like use the data that Arch collects for them in other applications. So we have an open API that other solutions can write to.
So someone might say, well, it'd be really amazing if I could build the perfect dashboard of my investments. It's customized to just me. And it's like, okay, cool. Like, we're not in the business of customized dashboards for individual clients, but we can help you connect to someone who is in that business. And we kind of believe in this best-in-class ecosystem.
If you might want Arch for this piece, and then there might be other pieces that you go to down the line as well.
Richard Walker: 20:03
Yeah. You know, we did something similarly a few years ago, we released a set of APIs for reporting metrics so that you can call our system and get the reports yourselves and display them in the way that makes sense to you if you want your own dashboard, etc.. So you tend to work with a lot of institutions. Is it is it hard to get in front of them and earn their business, or has your name preceded you? Like with your referrals from clients?
Ryan Eisenman: 20:30
Yeah, in the first couple of years, it was especially really hard to have people realize like, okay, who are you? Why should we trust you? Your team is how big? We don't have those problems as much anymore. It's still like there's certain firms that don't know of us, or certain pockets of the world that we need to get to know us.
We still have a lot of work left to do, but we have some really good proof points that we can talk to. We have like one of the five biggest and four of the 20 biggest banks are on Arch in various ways, and we have some very large investment firms that we can point to. And so now we have some really good referenceable clients in certain categories. And so when someone's like okay, great, how can you serve me and my problems. We can now speak really fluently to their problems and help connect them to someone else that looks just like them, who has used us for a similar type of thing?
Richard Walker: 21:20
Yeah. Wow. What's the smallest size company that works with you in terms of a customer type?
Ryan Eisenman: 21:27
So we have some clients that have started with us and have like a dozen or so investments, and then we have clients that have tens of thousands of investments that will use us. So kind of a pretty big range of clients and client sizes.
Richard Walker: 21:42
Okay. All right. Ryan. Considering how you've adopted and started using AI, what is something about AI that you think most people don't understand, that they should maybe start to understand?
Ryan Eisenman: 21:53
Yeah. Well, there's kind of like when you put things into a model, how you actually ask a question really dictates the answer that you receive. And so you can do this yourself as a consumer going into a ChatGPT or perplexity and say, hey, like, can you summarize this document or will tell me what's happening in this industry or this thing? But you'll get a different outcome if you say, describe in the style of a Wall Street Journal reporter what's happening in Syria today. That will give you a different outcome than if you just say, what's happening in Syria today.
So these models are actually pretty complex. And their ability to interpret human language and pull an answer according to the whole prompt and not just the like, what are you asking? But like, what are you asking and how and through what lens? So a lot of the like value is on the lens through which you ask the questions. And it's it's kind of like classic pre AI world.
The quality of your questions dictates the quality of your answers. You as a podcast host ask very good questions so you get good answers. And the same is true for AI.
Richard Walker: 23:05
Yeah 100%. Oh my gosh I think we've all if you've used it long enough, you've been through that learning curve of asking better and better questions. And really, I think a lot of the better questions come with more context. Not just a question, but a whole preamble around how you should focus the AI and what the background of your problem is that you're trying to solve for, or the question you're trying to get answers to. It's not a search engine.
You can't just say, hey, tell me this. You can, obviously, but you get way better results when you don't have you, as an organization been using AI in your daily jobs? I mean, have you been training your people? Have they been incorporating it into their daily lives to make their individual roles easier, or is that something that's ongoing?
Ryan Eisenman: 23:49
Yeah, definitely. We don't have formal training on it, but by nature of being a technology company and having a lot of people that are very interested in the future, there's a lot of leveraging of AI and daily lives inside and outside of work.
Richard Walker: 24:02
Yeah, we we're doing everything we can all the time to try to put more and more uses into it. So one of the things we started doing is every Monday in our stand up call, somebody gives an example of how they used AI last week that made their lives better. So it just inspires more people to try to do it.
Ryan Eisenman: 24:19
That's fun.
Richard Walker: 24:20
Yeah, it's really eye-opening, frankly. We put a Slack channel together as well, called AI prompts so people can share their prompts or their success stories. one of our director of it. He put several hours into this, but he worked with ChatGPT and he took a ten-hour process down to 10s.
Ryan Eisenman: 24:39
Wow.
Richard Walker: 24:40
That's just unreal.
Ryan Eisenman: 24:41
That's awesome. Did you have a favorite learning from the AI Slack channel?
Richard Walker: 24:47
You know, I'm the most advanced in my company, I would say in terms of prompting. So I tend to push out there all these different ideas. I just love it when people are using it to understand things better. And I see the moment. I'll share with you one of my best ideas though.
I decided to build a sales consultant in ChatGPT. And so I fed it information about our company, sales calls, etc.. I told it ask me questions. I gave it all the answers questions. I have this really, really powerful ChatGPT module now that helps me with sales strategy, developing like objectives and key results, or coming up with answers to messages in my voice.
It's one of the most powerful things I've done. It has saved me countless hours as well as frustration because I'm always trying to think, how do I how do I figure this out? And how do I I don't know, I'm not trained in sales. I don't say I'm bad at it, but I'm always learning from it.
Ryan Eisenman: 25:43
Yeah. Very cool. A lot more to learn on that side.
Richard Walker: 25:47
Yeah. For sure. What's your favorite AI tool personally that you use the most?
Ryan Eisenman: 25:52
I really love perplexity. Perplexity. I think it just produces really good summary information quickly. And I feel like it's kind of a similar step function in having Google of the level of detail and level of just like context you can find is pretty remarkable.
Richard Walker: 26:10
Yeah. Ryan, what is one of the biggest challenges you face as being a co-founder and CEO of your company these days?
Ryan Eisenman: 26:19
There's just so much to do. On a daily basis. And so it's just figuring out like the prioritization of that. And there's lots of projects that are important but not urgent. And sometimes the urgent projects will beat out the important projects, and it's making sure that that doesn't long term stay the case.
Because we need to be doing important things to build the company long-term.
Richard Walker: 26:43
Yeah. I mean, you really do have a long-term view of what you're doing. And so that is challenging when you're putting out fires versus building on your initiatives. Man, we go through that too. Last year, some security things popped up from some of our partners.
And I mean, just like, hey, we're deprecating this and you've got to change. It wasn't like an emergency that we were going to fail or we had a breach. It was nothing like that. It was just more like, oh wait, we now have three months to address this thing that we didn't have on our roadmap to address. Man, that's hard.
Ryan Eisenman: 27:13
The joys of building an early-stage company.
Richard Walker: 27:15
Yeah. For sure. Man. Well, I think this is awesome. Look, we're running up to the end, and I do have another question for you before we get there. What is the best way for people to find and connect with you?
Ryan Eisenman: 27:26
So pretty active on LinkedIn. A little bit less on Twitter, but you can find me at Ryan Eisenman. And then our company is Arch. And so send us a note. Always happy to chat on our website.
We have a forum. You can book time directly with our team. If you want to talk about ways that this can help you in your business. And we're excited to just continue to learn with our clients and future clients on like what the industry needs and where we should go from here.
Richard Walker: 27:57
Yeah, I love your attitude of really listening and understanding that that is so important. Good job. All right. So here's my last question. One of my favorite questions.
Who has had the biggest impact on your leadership style and how you approach your role?
Ryan Eisenman: 28:11
Yeah a couple good answers to this. But one, to really thank our first investor, a guy named Lee, who introduced the three co-founders together and then was a huge part of helping us think through how to build a scalable technology company and how to acquire our first customers, what we needed to do to build great software and so definitively would not be here without him.
Richard Walker: 28:35
Yeah, man. That's great. All right, I want to give a big thank you to Ryan. Sorry. Ryan Eisenman, CEO of Arch, for being on this episode of The Customer Wins.
Go check out Ryan's website at arch.co. And don't forget to check out quick at quikforms.com where we make processing forms easy. I hope you enjoyed this discussion. We'll click the like button, share this with someone and subscribe to our channels for future episodes of The Customer Wins. Ryan, thank you so much for joining me today.
Ryan Eisenman: 29:04
Thanks, Rich. Great being here.
Outro: 29:07
Thanks for listening to The Customer Wins podcast. We'll see you again next time and be sure to click subscribe to get future episodes.
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