Meet José Donato

In Portugal, a country where financial literacy is not a priority at all (currently the worst in all of Western Europe - ref), people are not usually exposed to this topic if not directly related to it either because of work or a huge financial scandal happening (which unfortunately happens quite frequently and has a negative effect on the interest of investing because of the loss of trust in the financial system).

It was only during my masters in Cybersecurity, in 2020, that my advisor, Professor Nuno Antunes, sparked my interest in finance and investing in general. The months went by and I kept on reading more and more books that explained the basics of investing - “The Richest Man in Babylon”, “Rich Dad Poor Dad”, “Little Book of Common Sense Investing”, to name a few. Alongside with that I joined multiple financial subreddits including /r/stocks and /r/superstonk. On the 15th of March 2021, one interesting post from one of those subreddits popped up in my feed. It was about an open source investment tool that had the goal to help individuals do their investment research analysis for free from one single platform - an interesting approach since, for the average investor, information is spread across a range of different channels and is often not free.

At the time I was doing my master thesis about web applications and I offered my help to make a web frontend for this.

first chat with CEO — My first chat with Didier.

Little did I know that this simple message would have such a huge impact in my life. Fun fact: I had no clue that Didier was also Portuguese when I first messaged him, which made everything more interesting. It impressed me in particular that it was a Portuguese guy starting the project as, mentioned earlier, Portugal has one of the lowest financial literacy rates.

Even though I was aware about what open source was at that time, I didn’t contribute much and didn’t see the full potential of open source. I didn’t understand how such an amazing project would gain more by being open to everyone (which made it really easy for everyone to copy it) than closed where no one could copy it. But oh boy, I was never so wrong in my life. In the end of the article I have my thoughts about open source.

After the reddit message with Didier, we kept talking and I quickly found how special and knowledgeable he was - I remember in the beginning Didier spending hours and hours teaching me how the terminal was structured and the reasoning behind it. Eventually a discord server was created and I started getting involved with “Apes” from all over the world and I quickly understood how open source can change the life of a person. From learning python with a PhD in physics, or about jupyter and tests with someone from Russia or France to do a quick React workshop to the very same people (the top advantage of open source). The amount of knowledge that can be diffused is incredibly impressive and that’s what I love the most about OpenBB but I will talk about that later.

I started my contributions to Gamestonk (the name of the project at the time) with a simple landing page for the web. I’m very passionate about the web, and, as I said, I was doing my thesis about that topic at that time so it made sense.

gamestonk landing page — First GamestonkTerminal website

But another magic of open source is that you can jump into other areas if you find yourself bored. The terminal (our primary open source product) is all written in python and started by the most knowledgeable people I know (Didier, Artem, James, Colin, Theo, Chavi, etc) so when I started adding features and fixing bugs on the terminal my skills on python grew exponentially just by looking at their code and getting my code reviewed by them (another important advantage of open source).

Even though I made some contributions I was finalising my thesis and thus had to spend time away from the Terminal for the following months. Fast-forward 2 months and I successfully delivered my thesis - a study comparing the performance of native and web applications for mobile devices. Can web applications with all the right vitamins be as reliable as native applications? …TLDR: Yes but if you want to read more in detail you can check my thesis here.

At that time I had accepted some freelancing web jobs, and planned to keep doing that for the following months. However, Didier had different plans. In August, he told me something that would change my life forever. Someone was interested in investing millions to turn a hobby financial project into a company that could change investment research forever. In September 2021, Didier asked me if I wanted to be part of this. Working in open source, in the area of investments, with this community (and values), and getting well paid for it - was impossible to say no. I don’t think I gave more than 5 seconds of thought.

I signed the contract and joined OpenBB in the last week of September which made me the first full time team member (one of the things I am most proud of in my life).

I met Artem, who guided me in the first months at OpenBB. Artem is probably the most knowledgeable person I have met so far (regardless of the topic) and I feel fortunate that he was my first “mentor” in the industry world. During the first months, I worked primarily on the marketing website and the crypto menu of the terminal.

The people who already knew OpenBB were aware of its potential, but we needed a way to explain our vision to everyone else. OpenBB needed a marketing website ready as soon as possible to communicate with our users and possibly future customers. This tool needs to clearly explain what we do, what we offer and what we are planning to do - a “Hello World, this is OpenBB”. We initially thought about outsourcing this job to a company, but I challenged Didier to built it in-house, and that’s what we did. We hired a good friend of mine, Rita, who is the most skilled designer I have ever seen. Rita started part-time working on marketing website mockups but without any surprise, the team quickly understood Rita quality, and she joined full time.

Fast forward 5 months, we announced OpenBB (it was a semi-secret until then) and published openbb.co. I will do a post in the future explaining the marketing website journey. It was my first big task at OpenBB and according to the feedback, it was a success (🤝 Rita). If you don't know the website yet feel free to navigate through it, it is a living document and we are constantly improving it. If you have any feedback, please let us know.

OpenBB marketing website journey The team quickly grew and we had to organize and I’m now part of probably the most funny team in open source tech companies. I cannot describe how joyful everyday is to me, it’s rare the day I don’t cry from laughing too much with them while we huddle in slack.

It’s amazing how this job (and team) motivates me to always deliver the best and I think this is traversable to everyone in the team. No matter the hour or day everyone is always ready to help each other.

Working at OpenBB doesn’t feel like a job, it’s more like that hobby that you always want to be grinding.

Also, working at OpenBB made me realize how important Open Source really is - In my view, I now see that building in the open should be the natural choice for the majority of the projects. Normally tech people understand the benefits of Open Source, but other areas are now starting to realize its potential as well. For example, in the health field, because of the principle of sharing knowledge and resources between the community, we were able to design the revolutionary vaccine for coronavirus in just 2 days (ref). Hence, in my opinion, these are the biggest Open source pros:

You get to meet amazing communities from all over the 🌎
You get to learn and improve your skills by reading code by some of the best engineers
The projects get to evolve and transform much faster because of the fast spread of knowledge from the most skilled individuals

My goal for the years to come is to keep learning as much as I learned this previous year - “Can’t stop won’t stop” (ref). Besides that, I also hope that I (or OpenBB) can somehow help Portugal increase its awareness regarding investments (and finances in general).

We are growing quick but we are just getting started. Knowing the OpenBB team I’m sure only the 🌙 is the limit and we will not stop until we reach there. If you want to be a part of this journey, join our discord and follow us on twitter.

If you want to know more about me or want to chat with me, you can check my website.

TL;DR: We are open-sourcing the entire OpenBB product suite under a permissive open source license

Today is bittersweet.

On December 20, 2020, over the Christmas holidays, I wrote the first lines of Gamestonk Terminal, what would eventually become OpenBB. My flight home to visit my parents had been cancelled because of COVID, so I stayed in London and started building a tool to streamline my own investment research process.

At the time, the idea was simple: individuals (and firms) should be able to own their research platforms. They shouldn't have to adapt their workflows to whatever a data or software vendor decided to build. They should own the entire experience - from the data they connect to, to the interface analysts and PMs use every day, to the APIs, models, skills, tools and AI agents that increasingly form part of the investment process.

Over the last almost six years, OpenBB evolved far beyond anything I imagined when writing those first lines of code. We started as an open-source terminal and went on to build the SDK (now Open Data Platform), the OpenBB Bot, the OpenBB Workspace, the OpenBB Copilot, the Excel Add-in, and an ecosystem of applications created by our team, our partners and the community.

We kept innovating and being at the forefront of what user experience should be. I was prepared to die on the hill that if we were to become the financial infrastructure software for the buy-side and sell-side, then we could not monetize data. Monetizing data would have made us a data vendor. The margins would have been higher, but the incentive would have shifted from offering a better UI/UX to selling more datasets. Selling an infrastructure platform is incredibly challenging, for many reasons. And so we died on that hill. Along the way, we built an incredible community, reached millions of people through our open-source project, worked with some of the largest financial institutions in the world and assembled a team that consistently built far beyond what should have been possible for a company of 10 people. There is a lot to be proud of.

But despite all of that, we couldn't find the product-market fit needed to build a sustainable business around this vision within the time we had.

As a founder, I've always bet the house on the next customer, the next feature or the next launch to change the trajectory of the company. Until even just last weeks, when we announced self-serve Workspace Lite. If we were ever going to close doors, then we never wanted to look back and think "what if".

In hindsight, we could obviously have made different decisions - e.g., surrounding data, or going more vertical with clients and their workflows. But short-term monetization was not something I was prioritizing over where I thought the industry was heading. Ultimately, I wanted us to stand for something.

In the last phase of the company, I explored many paths to give OpenBB a better home. We spoke with larger companies that shared parts of our vision and tried to find a home where the products, and ideally the team behind them, could continue to grow. Ultimately, we weren't able to make that happen.

I left London with my wife to build OpenBB and dedicated almost six years of my life to it. So did the team. We built at the intersection of finance, AI, open source and software infrastructure, often working on problems before they became obvious to the broader market.

Before MCP existed, we had created our own API protocol so agents could interact with the data and analytics widgets in the workspace. In 2023, we built askobb, which let anyone ask investment research questions in natural language that required joining multiple different datasets together.

What this team created deserves to continue existing.

More importantly, I still believe the original vision is inevitable. The future of financial software is not a single platform every firm is forced to use. It is thousands of firms building environments that reflect how they actually work - their own data, internal systems, investment processes, risk models and compliance requirements. Increasingly, their own APIs, MCP servers, models and AI agents too.

If that future is coming, then the technology we built shouldn't disappear simply because we weren't able to commercialize it successfully.

It should become available to everyone.

Today, with the support of the team and OSS Capital, we are committing to releasing the entire OpenBB product suite under a permissive license. This includes OpenBB Workspace, Open Data Platform, OpenBB Copilot and the OpenBB Excel Add-in.

These products represent over 5 years of engineering, millions of dollars invested in R&D and thousands of decisions, experiments and iterations with users. They will become a foundation that individuals, startups, data providers and financial institutions can freely use, modify and build on top of.

We will share more details about the order and timing of each release as we complete that work. In parallel, we will determine the right long-term structure to steward the projects, support contributors and preserve what made OpenBB special in the first place. Existing customers and users of the hosted products will hear from us directly about timelines.

For the partners who built applications for the OpenBB ecosystem, I hope this decision makes your products even more valuable. You already did the work of turning your datasets and analytics into applications that users can interact with. Now, those applications will be able to run inside infrastructure that firms can fully own, extend and customize, while combining them with data and tools from other providers across the ecosystem.

The same applies to the broader community. Developers will be able to use the entire OpenBB stack as a starting point rather than rebuilding the same infrastructure from scratch. Firms will be able to deploy it, adapt it to their requirements and connect it to the systems where their differentiated knowledge already lives.

Over the years, many talented people helped make OpenBB what it is today - employees, contributors, partners. Every one of them left a mark on the product.

But I want to recognize the people who carried OpenBB to the very end. Through the uncertainty and the final stretch, they kept building. They are engineers, product builders, designers and operators who have worked across financial data, AI, developer infrastructure and open source. In alphabetical order, they are:

Andrew Kenreich, Head of Product Engineering - LinkedIn
Darren Lee, Software Engineer - GitHub, LinkedIn
Ihsan Saracgil, CPO - LinkedIn
José Donato, Software Engineer - LinkedIn, X, GitHub, Website
Juan Alfonso, Software Engineer - GitHub, LinkedIn
Minh Hoang, Head of Product - LinkedIn, GitHub
Ogonna Nnamani, DevOps - LinkedIn, Medium
Rita Figueiredo, Head of Marketing - LinkedIn, Website
Rita Soares, Head of Design - LinkedIn, Website
Theodore Aptekarev, CTO - LinkedIn, GitHub

To our customers: thank you for trusting a small team with such an ambitious vision.

To our partners: thank you for building alongside us and helping create a more open financial data ecosystem. I hope the next chapter gives you even more freedom to serve your users.

To our investors: thank you for believing in us, including when OpenBB was little more than an idea being built from my living room in London. In particular, I want to thank OSS Capital and Joseph Jacks for supporting this decision and enabling the technology to live beyond the company. Two people I want to name separately: Justin Hoffman and Larry Augustin - working with both of you made me a better founder, but more importantly, a better person.

To every contributor who opened a pull request, reported a bug, wrote documentation, answered a question in Discord, built an integration or simply told someone else about OpenBB: thank you. OpenBB would not have been possible without you.

Finally, to every person who spent part of their career building OpenBB: thank you. We pushed the industry forward and proved that world-class financial infrastructure can be built in the open. The commercial outcome doesn't change the quality of the work.

OpenBB didn't become the company I imagined when I started this journey. But the mission was always larger than the company, and I still believe the ideas behind it are right.

If, ten years from now, firms around the world are using OpenBB as the foundation for software they truly own - connecting their own data, building their own workflows and deploying their own AI agents - then what we built will have achieved something that lasts far beyond us; which was my goal all along: have an impact.

Thank you for one hell of a ride.

Didier Lopes
(LinkedIn, X, GitHub)

Meet José Donato

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