Official news: After a unique year, DC's food delivery service TwentyTables has closed its doors. Now, co-founder Alex Cohen is building a platform to serve retail investors.
Four years later, Cohen quietly closed TwentyTables in March 2021 with no plans to reopen. He told Technical.ly that the reason was the pandemic market losses. In May 2020, the company successfully switched to providing meals for hospitals and front-line employees, and won the Best Corporate Butler Award for Small and Medium-sized Enterprises awarded by the American Chamber of Commerce. However, Cohen ultimately stated that he believes the company will not be able to operate in the long term. Before the switch, the app was originally designed to provide fixed-price meals at local restaurants and has worked with universities in the Washington area in the past.
"We quickly realized that this would have a long-term impact," Cohen said. "Universities disappeared, local restaurants disappeared, this is the bridge we serve."
But for Cohen, the end of TwentyTables is not the last chapter of entrepreneurship. With the closure of this startup, Cohen said that before landing on Reddit's retail investment revolution, he spent some time thinking about his next move-think about the AMC and Gamestop adventures in early 2021. After becoming a leader on a famous stock forum on the platform (he refused to specifically share which one), he hosted some AMAs and held talks with the leader on market trends and structures. He decided to pursue a mature startup company on this topic: terminal .
The Terminal is Urvin Finance's flagship product, and Cohen is the co-founder and chief operating officer. The financial company aims to become a social platform for retail investment, providing individual investors with advice, data and educational opportunities. Loosely, retail investment refers to individuals making investments for themselves, rather than making decisions on behalf of companies, organizations, funds, or other entities.
In an ongoing round of crowdfunding, along with co-founders Dave Lauer (CEO) and Zachary David (CTO), Cohen and The Terminal raised nearly $1.4 million from 1,500 investors through Wefunder.
"Really [The Terminal] is a three-legged stool. It is built on all of our experience in very in-depth and very detailed interactions with retail investors over the past 10 months," Cohen said. "The stool is professional-quality data and tools, and the retail industry does not currently have access to these data and tools."
In addition to providing general investment advice, other users can comment and put forward their ideas. Cohen said that an important aspect of The Terminal is its educational part, which runs through the entire platform. The company intends to combine things such as information bubbles with definitions with keywords, such as "remortgage" and "short selling."
There will also be a video component, including live discussions and AMA, as well as recorded information meetings and a portal for asking experts to create a more interactive learning experience.
"[Information sharing] is a very collaborative process, and it has only just begun, because all forums, all spaces where this kind of collaboration takes place are not inherent to the type of activity actually carried out," Cohen said. “Therefore, through our platform, we are trying to create a more native environment for such use cases. We find that this environment is very common and is indeed at the forefront of promoting new participation by retail investors.”
Cohen said that looking forward to the future, the company expects to launch an alpha version in the first quarter of next year, a beta version at the beginning of the second quarter, and at the end of the second or early third quarter. The Terminal has also started hiring Blazer coders. He said it has hired a core development team, but will continue to increase staff as the company grows.
Cohen said that as leaders build companies, one of the most important aspects of The Terminal is that it tries to promote investment equality and provide resources to facilitate access. Considering the crowdfunding aspect of investors acquiring equity, he said this is an ideal platform and is crucial because he only sees retail investment growth.
"We intend to bring this drumbeat into this new environment on behalf of retail investors, because they are not served and have not accurately represented them in many different ways," Cohen said. "Because we know them, we are them, we have always been with them, we feel that retail investors as a whole will not disappear... Large institutions have been able to absorb the insignificant huge profits for too long. With the support of the fund, with the support of individuals. So, this is what we are trying to do, and this is what we are trying to achieve."
Post time: Nov-18-2021