A Letter About Scout

It has become fashionable to promise the world in an instant. To claim that a single question, typed into a strange and barren box, can be answered with wisdom in the blink of an eye. This is a pleasant fiction.

For the serious individual, whose decisions are measured in millions of dollars, a fiction is not enough. He requires facts. He deals in documents—in spreadsheets dense with figures, in PDFs stained with coffee and the marginalia of previous, disappointed investors.

He does not have the time, nor the inclination, to learn a new language to speak to a machine. His business is conducted where it has always been conducted.

He understands that true analysis is not a parlor trick. It is a process. It requires tools.

We have taken a different view.

The system we call Scout does not hallucinate. It does not pretend. It operates the tools you yourself would use, had you the time and the staff. It reads the documents you send it. It scrutinizes the columns of your spreadsheets. It cross-references, it calculates, it parses.

This is not instantaneous. It requires minutes, not seconds. We believe this to be a feature, not a failing. For a verdict arrived at in ten minutes that is correct is of infinitely more value than a guess delivered in ten seconds that is not.

There is no new system to learn. There is no janky chat interface to master.

You simply forward the deal, as you received it, to a private address. The analysis returns to your inbox, where all your other business is done. If a new question occurs to you at midnight, you ask it there, in a simple reply. It is that straightforward.

We are adding new tools for it to use every day.

The number of available spots in this phase is limited.