ClearFactr

"What's happening?" This. If you build or use financial models, or software that makes use of those, you'll want to check this out. linkedin.com/posts/deanzarr…

An #ROI of 4,670%. For those in the back: Four thousand, six hundred, and seventy percent. That’s what #Claude told me an enterprise ClearFactr customer might expect from using the platform at scale. It shocked even me. But there’s more... We’ve all heard it: “Sell the benefits, not the features.” ClearFactr certainly has plenty of features, and they’re there because they produce great benefits. Precisely quantifying them has always been a bit fuzzy, beyond the “Dude! We did with ClearFactr in three months what otherwise would have taken a year.” A while back I wrapped up the entire story into what I now call our Big Picture deck: just two slides, basically your firm’s spreadsheet-riddled-life before and after ClearFactr. Those slides became a series of blog posts. I fed the slides into Claude and said (paraphrasing): “Make me a financial model that computes an ROI from these two slides, where all the problems depicted on the first slide turn into the benefits depicted on the second slide.” Five minutes later or so, I had my Excel file. Of course, I immediately uploaded it into ClearFactr. In a very meta way, I wanted to have ClearFactr explain the benefits of ClearFactr to me. Claude produced a nicely organized model across three tabs, one for inputs, one for various computational details and one for a summary. Super impressively, it quantified all the nuances of the Big Picture. The Table of Contents tool quickly told me the overall computational lay of the land. Between that and the “root cell” indicator, ClearFactr told me that the number of spreadsheets in the example company, 500, wasn’t actually wired into anything. Yes, a design bug in the model! I went back to Claude and pointed this out. Here’s some of what it said back: “Good catch — you're right, the "Number of legacy spreadsheet models" input is just sitting there unused." (see comments below) Another thing popped out at me: pricing, a necessary component for any ROI calculation. I hadn’t given Claude any guidance on that. I went back to Claude and asked it to justify it, and it did so on numerous measures. Suffice to say, maybe ClearFactr, Inc. is leaving money on the table… or, you can cut the pricing assumption in the model and the ROI just goes up further. I won’t spend more words on the particulars of the model here. I’ll likely do that in subsequent posts. Suffice it say, there are a lot of inputs corresponding to all the potential pitfalls of hashtag#spreadsheets at scale, and not everything may apply to your situation. This is precisely where scenario analysis is required, and that’s just one of ClearFactr’s strong suits. But the model’s math is both deterministic and sound. As my friend @brianlaungaoaeh told me two days ago, if it’s only 25% applicable, you’re still potentially looking at a four-digit ROI. Reply in the comments and I’ll send you the Excel file. Better yet, ask to see it via ClearFactr where you can compare the two experiences side by side. #spreadsheets #ai #Claude @AnthropicAI From LinkedIn: linkedin.com/feed/update/ur…

Palantir CEO Alex Karp told you the most important thing about the Pentagon vs. Anthropic standoff. And nobody is connecting the dots. Watch and save this clip, then read this thread. Karp said something most tech CEOs would never say out loud: "A small island in Silicon Valley that would love to decide what you eat, how you eat, and monetize all your data should not also decide who lives in your country and under what conditions." He's talking about his own industry. And his argument is simple. There are elections, there are rules. There is a transfer of power from one president to another. Silicon Valley does not get to override that. "The view of Silicon Valley that we get to decide should not be the way these things are decided." This cost him everything. His house was protested for month, Palantir's offices were protested. Employees pushed back internally and some walked out. He didn't change course. Then the interviewer asked if he supports the Trump administration's approach. His answer might surprise you. "I've been a card-carrying progressive my whole life. My family is progressive. I have a degree in what amounts to progressive thought." He said he's never stopped being critical of this administration. He's not planning to vote for it. But then he said the thing that changes the entire Anthropic debate. "The core issue is: who decides?" Not whether the policy is right and not whether you agree with the mission. Who decides. He made it personal. "It's commonly known that our software is used in operational context at war." "Do you really think the warfighter is going to trust a software company that pulls the plug because something becomes controversial?" Let that sit for a second. "Currently, when you're a warfighter, your life depends on your software." "They will never trust you if you pull the plug just because you're unpopular." This is a man whose software powers classified military operations across the West. He's describing what happens when trust breaks. Now apply that to what's happening right now. Anthropic built Claude, the only AI running on the Pentagon's classified networks. It was used in the operation that captured Venezuela's Nicolás Maduro in January. The Pentagon loves it and it works. But Anthropic has two red lines: No mass surveillance of Americans and no autonomous weapons without a human pulling the trigger. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth gave Anthropic a deadline: 5:01 PM Friday. Drop the red lines or face the Defense Production Act. Anthropic's CEO said no. "We cannot in good conscience accede to their request." But here's where it gets complicated. Anthropic isn't refusing to work with the military, Claude already does. It's refusing two specific things. Two. But here's the problem, congress hasn't passed a single law governing military AI. There are no elections on this and no rules. The Pentagon is using contract language and Cold War era emergency powers to decide the future of AI in warfare. That's not democracy either. Two private parties are fighting over rules that elected officials should have written years ago. The deadline is today. Friday. 5:01 PM Eastern. If the government forces these guardrails off, no AI safety commitment ever means anything again. If Anthropic wins, tech CEOs become the gatekeepers of American defense. Either way, the system is broken.

We were happy to have this piece run at @rc_markets today. A use-case tailor made for @ClearFactr, and one based on a real world success story. Reply ‘share’ in the comments (plus any other feedback) and we’ll get you access to the model and platform. linkedin.com/pulse/us-feder…

What if you could drive your custom workflows... - with calls to an externally-programmable model - that in turn is getting its data from from external data sources - all visible, traceable and auditable via a true spreadsheet interface? Oh, and one fully backed by enterprise-grade governance that will delight your compliance and risk management departments? That's a mouthful, but with ClearFactr, it's easy. See how it's done in our latest video, and think about what you could build with it, guaranteed hallucination free. Ping me to see it live at #AWSreInvent next week. Kudos to anyone who calls out the unintentionally-epic funk in this video 😉 😂 linkedin.com/feed/update/ur…

Calling all #developers and solution builders! Here's where the real magic of ClearFactr happens across your enterprise: Easily integrating your ClearFactr financial modeling ecosystem with all of your other systems and data workflows. This video hits some highlights of our powerful yet easy to use server-side REST-API (yes, we have a client-side one, too). You'll see how we: 1. Read computed data out of a ClearFactr model into your own application. 2. Write data from your app into the model, generating new versions of the model for consumers downstream. 3. Use ClearFactr like an in-memory, headless calculator to extend the compute capabilities of your app, but via a way that end users can safely explore, experiment with, AND with permission, change! Think about that latter point: Governed, auditable software releases without the dev-managed SDLC. It's a time-to-market home run. Schedule your situation-specific discussion and demo with us at our website. We can get you into the product in minutes. youtu.be/tMBbEwCteko

Does your firm have too many spreadsheets to count? This will interest you. We keep hearing there's nothing else like this on the market. Find out more below. linkedin.com/posts/deanzarr…

"Your work is going to fill a large part of your life, and the only way to be truly satisfied is to do what you believe is great work. And the only way to do great work is to love what you do." - Steve Jobs 👍👩‍💻❤️ #stevejobs #motivationalquote #lovewhatyoudo #motivation

"Goldman Acquires Software Firm in Tech Push" institutionalinvestor.com/article/b1br4h… @GoldmanSachs @DeanZarras @iimag

This non-profit will give you $1,000 if you take a few personal finance classes cnb.cx/2MJuy5O

Productivity: blog.samaltman.com/productivity

hbr.org/2018/03/thrivi… @HarvardBiz Excellent article. #Productivity

.@AlanPage: "If we want to be serious about quality, it is time to get tired of finding bugs and start preventing their happening in the first place." beyondagilethebook.com @jtayler @AlexCone #BeyondAgile #Agile #programming

Book Review by @JohnTamny: Carl Schramms Burn the Business Plan realclearmarkets.com/articles/2018/… @rc_markets

We’re compelled to agree. @WSJ @MissShumsky Happy Thanksgiving to all. wsj.com/articles/stop-…