Alex Kramm: No, very clear. Thanks for the color. And then again, sorry to be numbers focused here, but the question around expenses, maybe you can be a little bit more specific as well. I mean I hear you head count flat and that’s great. When I look at I mean it’s great from expense control. Hopefully, you’re still investing enough. But in terms of the expense growth in total, I mean, it’s been basically flat the way I look at it. It’s basically revenue minus adjusted EBITDA, which I think was $118 million in 2023 and was basically flat for the last three years. So look, there’s an inflationary environment, there’s other costs that you have. So do you think in dollar terms, you want to try to keep the expenses flat as well? Or is there actually a scenario where things improve that overall expenses start ramping up a little bit. So just in terms of the expectations we should be having initially here? Thanks.
Mark Lee: Yeah, Alex. Look, I think what’s — what I’ll make very clear — well, let me back up. When we talk about adjusted EBITDA year-to-year, we were very specific to identify that when you look and compare our adjusted EBITDA year-to-year, just please consider that we did capitalize software in 2022, and we have had legal expenses associated with 2023. And so we called those out specifically so you can kind of get a better idea of how to look engage us on an apples-to-apples basis. But the way we think about it, we’re very clear that we’re committed to our investors, to our shareholders, to our Board that we are going to be reducing burn year-over-year, right? And we look at it as trying to manage our costs while growing the top line, right, and taking back revenue growth while continuing to invest but reducing burn.
So that’s how we’re thinking about the world right now. I mean, we’ve pointed out historically that this has always been a company that we’ve operated to be roughly breakeven, right? Kind of operating in the last two years at a deficit is not kind of in our DNA in terms of how we think about managing this company. So one of our top priorities really is to get that number down to kind of where we’ve been in the past. But at the same time, continuing to do — to gain traction, all the announcements that we’ve talked about in the last several years, right? It’s been that delicate balancing half.
Kelly Rodriques: Yeah. Look I want to make sure, Alex, you hear this, though. We are looking at our path to profitability now. We understand that as a public company, that there’s an expectation that we’re not going to burn forever. And our commitment two years ago was to systematically reduce burn each year. And I’d say, as we get through part of 2024, we’re going to look at this and we’re going to obviously be looking at what are the other scale drivers beyond just our organic growth and cost controls. One of the reasons we went public was to use our currency to consolidate other interesting players in the market. We view 2024 and the continued improvement, an opportunity for us to look at other inorganic ways to get additional scale.
And that’s part of the calculus for how we see our path to profitability, including our organic growth and these cost controls. But under all circumstances, we’re reducing burn in 2024. I want to make that really clear with Mark on this.
Alex Kramm: Super clear. Thanks, guys.
Operator: Your next question comes from the line of Owen Lau from Oppenheimer. Please go ahead.
Owen Lau: Good evening. Thanks for taking my question. So a follow-up question related to the outlook and new products. How should investors think about or even model out the revenue impact from some of the initiatives like Forge Pro, Forge Europe and Forge Intelligence in 2024. And is there any way you can help us get our arms around these numbers? Thanks a lot.
Kelly Rodriques: Yes. Let me start with just a couple of broad base points. We just started our initial trades in Europe. Mark will talk a little bit more about some of the specific modeling guidance, Owen. I’d say, you should think of Forge Pro, as I said earlier, as a subscription product that’s meant to be driving revenue that would be in our marketplace revenue line as subscription revenue, but also as a bundling component with transactional revenue. And we think that, it’s an evolution of the market as we see it. And then I’d say, Mark, you can jump in and talk a little bit more about any of the other new products ranging from the index and the investable index as we see it and how its contribution should be considered as well.
Mark Lee: Yeah. Hey, Owen.. So look, on Forge Pro, as Kelly has described and I mentioned earlier, I mean, we see it as a product where the trading capability, state-of-the-art trading capability, combined with data is kind of completes and creates this experience for our customers, which will be superior to anything else kind of out there in the market. And that the way we’ll roll out the product, the way we’ll price the product, it will be done as a bundled product. One of the things we’ve mentioned in the past is that when we first rolled out Forge Intelligence, and we measured this some time ago that we saw an up-tick, right, in our customers’ engagement with Forge from a trading perspective, right? And so I actually think that beyond the subscription revenue that we’re talking about for the data product itself, a lot of the upside, right, isn’t creating that stickier relationship that with our institutional customers, and that will result in higher revenues, not just through subscription revenues, but higher trading revenues as well.
