The View from the Office. 

I met up with Tim Baker for drinks at The Campbell Apartment at Grand Central Station. We sat outside because the weather was so nice. I had a Negroni and he had a beer. 

Tim is the co-founder and CEO of viaNexus, a data platform he formed with Pedro Aguayo and another co-founder, out of the ashes of the firesale of assets from IEX Cloud.

The group was familiar with the assets they acquired because Tim headed the business at IEX Cloud for about two years ending 2021. 

The idea was that viaNexus could tap into a market to provide high-quality data to developers, institutions, individual investors, and academics via fast APIs.

Tim is at the center of a scramble for easy-to-access, high-quality data that companies need to benefit from the insights offered by Generative AI. 

In July, viaNexus launched an MCP Service to enable autonomous agents to securely discover and consume financial data with built-in authentication and entitlements. 

As anyone familiar with Wall Street knows, entitlements are a big deal and a feature that is somewhat unique to the heavily-regulated financial industry. 

It was sort of amazing we didn’t already know each other given our similar paths. 

Our drinks meeting was long-overdue. It took about two years to arrange. We met on LinkedIn when he commented on one of my posts and I responded. We ended up DMing and dropping the ball several times until the stars finally aligned. 

It was another reminder to me of the opportunity to connect that comes from posting online. 

You can connect with Tim via LinkedIn or DM me for a warm intro.