Deciding who you'll be at $4 Billion... in advance

Welcome to Season 3! We're kicking things off with a bang interview EY Entrepreneur of the Year, Jason Wenk about his $4B (with a B) sale of Altruist to Vanguard. But this is no "how I built it" story...

It's a story of what trust making is possible when we build for a community and from a community. What happens when we focus down and ignore the noise. What happens when aliens totalizing mission captures every decision including and especially your relationship to capital.

Nick gets down to the real story of Altruist in his interview with Jason. Exploring some of the loudest critiques that have been surfaced since its sale for $4B to Altruist, and tying back the success to core principles that are applicable at any scale.

This episode challenges that prevailing rhetoric around big acquisitions for big dollars being opposed to human-first, trust-making values. In this story, the two are inextricably linked. 

Chapters
00:00 — Season Three: Our Humanity and our Businesses Belong Together
05:05 — Introducing Jason Wenk and Altruist
07:45 — Building Financial Advice for More People
18:09 — Start Small: Focus, Product Fit, and Customer Trust
39:19 — Funding a Mission-First Company
47:10 — Staying Grounded While Building
51:12 — Why Altruist Joined Vanguard
64:40 — Build a Great Company, Not an Exit Strategy

Trust-Made Growth®

Leaders who want to understand how to reformat their growth strategies to address trust decay should explore more at CultureCraft.com

Independent Professionals can join the free community exploring how to return trust to our commerce and our communities at trustmadegrowth.com 

Have a business topic you want us to decide if it's working or broken? Have a question about the episode? You can email us at podcast@culturecraft.com.

Transcript

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SPEAKER_00 0:11

Hello and welcome to Dam's Given, officially season three. We made it. Although I really don't think you guys are probably sitting at your desks or on your walks or in transit between places going, When will Nick launch season three? But maybe you were. We've seen some uptick on the listening, so we love that. Um, so thanks for that, particularly since the book came out. Those of you on video, here's a pretty video of the book. Uh Dam's uh Damn's Given has produced The Damn Rules. Well, I produced The Damn Rules. I wrote it, um, and it's out there in the world. And for those of you who have listened to this podcast and found the idea sort of intriguing and all of that, as always, we'd love for you to pick up a copy of the book and tell us what you think. But for today, we're jumping in to the waters of season three. And I gave a lot of thought to what I wanted to do with this season that was different from past seasons. And what I really came back with is trying to solve for a fundamental divide. And that divide is this idea of the leadership is over here, and that what happens in the organization is over here. And the way most founders, departmental leaders, people who would be the kind of people who listen to this podcast sort of find themselves is they're doing two different things. Over here on the business side, they're getting marketing tips, they're looking to gurus, they're trying to find new systems, they're trying out AI programs or using technology to solve for things. They're operationally focused and incentivized. And then over here on the leadership side, on the human side, they're doing that separate silo. And in that silo, then you have your coach or your therapist or your mastermind group or whatever. And the two often don't interact very much. I find more and more as I talk to leaders, is they believe almost fundamentally that there's a divide, that there's the person over here, there's the business over here. The person just has to kind of survive the business. Or the person has to tie themselves in a pretzel to make the business work, or or whatever it may be, or the business has to accommodate things because people are weird and all this kind of stuff. And so there is a subtle dehumanization to the way that we work. When we know this from obviously payroll numbers and employment numbers and AIs taking everybody's jobs and all this kind of stuff. But I think it's more insidious than that. That really what has happened is we've been led to believe that who we are as humans and what we want as humans, which is thriving full lives where we're productive and meaningful and we're building things that matter and we're creating communities that matter and we're investing in people, that that's not really possible. That's not really the work anymore. What we really got to do is just sort of survive the economy, squeeze as many dollars out of it as we can, get to the other side, and hope that there's an exit strategy for us. The private equityization, um, I don't mean literally every private equity firm, but sort of the private equity mentality of work. That all we got to do is get in, get some money, get some money back out again, and escape. And that doesn't have to be true. In fact, it shouldn't be true. And it often can't be true that our teams and our departments and our businesses are actually giant mirrors that reflect back to us who we are. And it's actually some of our best tools to really go, what's going on with me? And how is that affecting what I'm building? And when we look at ourselves, we can go, well, how do I know that I'm making progress? How do I know that I'm growing? How do I know that what I'm doing is the right thing? Well, we look at the business and the work and the team. And is the team and the work and the business expansive and trust making? Does it build bridges? Does it connect with others? That's not about how do the reviews come in. That's not about will somebody refer us the next time. It's literally about watching the trends and themes of how the relational impacts of the work play out. And those two things are inextricably linked. And because we've lost track of this, because we've tried to hyperoperate the business side and hyperemotionalize the human side, right? That you put your emotions over here in your human stuff, and you put the results over here in the business stuff, and between the two can't meet. And that makes sense, right? Because that's real scary to put those two things together. But they are together because we're one person, right? We're we're unified people. And so when I'm bringing guests into the show this season, part of what I want from those guests is to help us explore this. Help us explore both the systems that have led us to believe in this bifurcation between who we are as people and what we're building as businesses, and people who sort of defy the bifurcation. To me, our first guest is such a great example of that. I wanted to start with a bang. So we're starting with Jason Wank. And some of you are in the financial services or fintech spaces, and so you immediately recognize the name Jason Wank. For those who don't, he runs a custodian technology platform called Ultruist that recently, at the time of this recording, just uh made a sale for $4 billion. And for some people who listen to us, that B word is a little triggery, and you go, well, gosh, how good can it be? How ethical can it be? How trustmaking can it be? If it's got a B attached to it, a $4 billion number. And for others of you, well, maybe it can be trustmaking. Maybe it can be human. Maybe a technology platform can work from and for the best of us. And wouldn't what would that be like? And I'm not saying Jason has all the answers. I'm not saying Altruist has all the answers. But the reason why I wanted to have this interview, and particularly the way I had it, I designed the interview really intentionally so that Jason could tell his story, not do a bunch of selling of the ROI or why it was this way or what the financial modeling can do. He could do that for the Wall Street Journal and has for major financial publications. What I wanted if I was gonna invite Jason here, and we've known each other off and on for years, is I wanted him to tell the human side of the story and how, in the human spaces of this journey of creating something not that many years ago and moving to where it is now and selling to who he did and why he did, there's been all kinds of sturm and drawn about who he sold to and why. I wanted to get to the human decisions around that. And from a very serious business standpoint, I wanted people who have questions about well, what happens with ethical business? Where does it all end up? Does it just all end up in, you know, big more piles of money for a handful, tiny handful of people? I wanted you to hear the story of this incredibly interesting and cool piece of technology and services that is now owned by a company, Vanguard, that is owned by its customers, essentially. And what would that look like to think about business in that way? Of the business is owned by the end user and by the customer. Again, none of these things are presented to you as formulas or right answers or the solution to everything. But what I thought was really, really powerful is the way that it tied in these things that we've extricated from each other: the human and the technical and the operating and the practical. Jason's a superhuman guy who's made huge superhuman decisions to try and build things that reflected his values in the world. And then in his case, this is certainly not true in every case, in his case, there's been a pretty significant financial benefit to that. So I want us to explore that and see how it creates tension for you, see how it creates questions and resistance for you. As always, as you have thoughts, please feel free to shoot them over at podcast at culturecraft.com. Otherwise, I will sprint out of this already too long introduction and get us into the conversation with Jason Wenk of UltraWist. So, Jason, thanks for being here.

SPEAKER_01 8:06

I'm honored to be here and I I I love the framing uh because there's uh I think very few of us were going to look back at our lives and uh remember much of anything other than things that we really give a damn about, right? So uh it's a great framing.

SPEAKER_00 8:21

Yeah, well, you have the you know, the prestige of being a you know sort of a multi-hyphenate, right? A multi-exit guy at this point. But I think what has really been struck up a conversation is, of course, the most recent sale of Alturist to Vanguard. We're gonna get to that, but what I want to start with, where I think you and I have a lot of kind of sympatho energy, is you built this thing on purpose from the jump. I mean, one of the things I find most interesting is the level of intention that went to the starting blocks on this. For people who don't know that story, talk a little bit about like you and a few other people sitting room going, how do we build the best ultrarus we can?

SPEAKER_01 8:58

It's a culmination of you know, probably a decade of other things. Uh in my case, probably almost two decades of other things. But you know, the short shortest version I give you is that uh I grew up in a family where you know no one had money. We didn't talk about money. We we certainly weren't like you know, destitute. Um my parents just had to work really hard, you know, blue-collar um, you know, type of jobs, and uh, you know, but certainly no like extra money. There were no vacations, fancy clothes, and uh and and definitely no talks around the kitchen table about like retirement accounts or stocks or bonds. Like there were there was definitely no money for that kind of stuff. So and that was consistent with the whole entire area I grew up. So I grew up in a farming community in western Michigan, and you know, I didn't I didn't really know anybody who had uh stocks as an example. Like that just wasn't a common thing that that we had. And there weren't any places you could go to talk have those conversations for the most part. Like we didn't have a uh we had one small community bank, they didn't have a financial advisor there at the time in the branch, and there were no like Edward Jones or anything like that. And we were an hour and a half from any type of a city that would have had those types of things. And so most people, again, this is like kind of pre-internet era where I grew up. And so there's a little bit of like, you know, kind of the who I am in my soul is yeah, a kid who grew up in an area where everybody got along, everyone helped each other. It was an incredible, loving, warm place to grow up that didn't talk or think much about money, and subsequently, very few people have much money. Um, you know, again, they have enough, but you know, if if they're rich, it's because they have a few more acres than maybe someone else does, but not necessarily, you know, more you know, zeros in their brokerage account. Um so when I very accidentally got into the financial services industry, you know, I always just in my heart of hearts wanted to be able to help people like I knew growing up, like a very common thing, help people like my own parents or my own family. And uh so a lot of like the last 25 years is still anchored in this notion of how do you make how do you make financial services, broadly speaking, how do you make it better, more accessible, make it affordable? When I think about like why did a lot of people not have access when I was growing up, it's because most people didn't have enough money to start and they wouldn't have known where to start. So they were kind of missing on both like the accessible um uh and uh and uh you know affordable. If you like they didn't have money to pay tens of thousands of dollars in fees. Um as I spent more time in this in this industry, I felt like most of the things that were being built were designed to kind of cater to two very opposite ends of the spectrum. You had sort of people doing really comprehensive financial planning and wealth management for very wealthy people, and then you had other people building sort of tech-centric products designed to address the lower end of the market. You know, at first it started off as things like roboadvisors, but eventually it morphed into things like you know, pretty opportunistic uh non-helpful trading, you know, applications that are now littered with all sorts of like bad ideas for people to pursue with their limited resources. And uh, and subsequently, like the demographics of the country, um, you know, it was putting a ton of pressure, like the middle class was sort of vanishing, and you're creating a larger and larger divide between you know the uh the wealthy and the you know the average person. So when we think about altruistic, and the first thing we did, uh, and you know, uh given your background, you might appreciate this more than most, but before there was any talk about the product, like how do we build the product to be the thing it is today, we started talking about the culture and the brand promise. We've spent a lot of time refining what now is a very simple message. You know, altruists exist to make financial advice better, more affordable, and accessible to everyone. And we really anchor on financial advice, which is why we serve human advisors that serve clients directly. I felt like there was an era, you know, where technology was being largely built and marketed to bifurcate, you know, the advisors from the clients. That's right. And my own lived experience was that most people would benefit an awful lot from having someone that they they trusted that that cared about them as a person and would help guide them to make the best, most rational decisions, like within, you know, sort of the different bias that they had in their life. So let's build tools to make these humans better so that the outcomes they can deliver to their clients are improved. Let's bring the cost of delivering advice down. And a lot of the cost to delivering advice is in the amount of time that that financial planners and financial advisors have to spend doing things that is not financial planning and advice delivering. So it's all the other stuff that's taking up a lot of their time. So, what can we do to get rid of that and just generally drive the costs lower of operating a business so that there's more people launching businesses as financial independent financial advisors and planners, more small business creates more choice, creates more diversity, creates more innovation, more competition, like all these things are net good for society. Um and then the last one, so advice better, make it more affordable, make it accessible to everybody. Again, in order to do that, we had to make it to where it actually made economic sense for an advisor to take on a client with just a few thousand dollars that's just getting started out. And uh so a lot of time spent there. And then, okay, well, if we're going to build this, we need to find a group of people to build this that have a shared ethos because our pitch will not be that we're going to build the sexiest consumer app on the planet, you know, designed to get people to day trade options and you know, sports betting or whatever. It is a bit more boring than that. Like we are going to have to build something that really appeals to someone who wants to join this team uh because they care deeply about that mission and maybe they feel personally impacted. Like somewhere in their life, they feel like they or their family were slighted by the financial system, they want to improve it, and they believe in a human-first approach.

SPEAKER_00 14:48

Particularly for folks on the call who maybe aren't don't work in wealth or don't know that space, one of the things you got to understand is like if we're sitting in front of a financial advisor and they're they're advising you, they their whole business sits on an infrastructure of solutions and technology and products and companies and things that in many cases are incredibly archaic. Like these systems were built for stock trading in the 1960s, right? And then just kind of got layer on layer on layer on layer on layer on complexity. So when Jason says, hey, we were trying to address the access and the ease, and financial advisors spend so much time, we're talking about faxing and multiple copies of PDFs and 19 documents to make one transaction. And, you know, as a person who was a financial advisor for a period of time in my life, I sent a lot of faxes, right? So for those of you who aren't familiar, this is like really legitimate, important stuff to make the business work, but also is was run by a lot of really big incumbents. I know we're gonna get to the incumbents here in a second, but I think it's really interesting that you chose this purposeful action in the back of your mind all the time, of course, knowing we're gonna have to take on some of the most boring stuff in the world to pull this up.

SPEAKER_01 16:03

Yeah, well, I mean, it's kind of like beauty, right? Like boring is in the eye of the beholder. And, you know, again, if you if you meet a lot of the folks on our team, we take a great deal of pride in taking something that was, you know, really inefficient and unenjoyable to do, and then all of a sudden making it actually fun. You know, so again, you you've you've seen this and we've we've interacted on this, but we've never asked somebody to post about their experience using our product. Like we don't, you know, we're sort of grateful that they do, but you know, we have this like incredibly fervent, uh, very active, you know, uh group of promoters uh that really love the culture we've built, the product we've built. And a lot of that comes be uh from us focusing on those little annoying things that you know like we just sort of accept them because there's not a better way to do it. You know, if like if there's three other custodians, right, brokerage platforms that an advisor can can help their client uh with by using, and they all require the exact same terrible kind of, you know, like a fax to move money from one account to another or download a PDF from a resource center, and then you have to get a wedding signature with a medallion stamp guarantee or something. Like if that's the only thing you know, you become conditioned to accept it. Um and it almost at some point stops being bothersome until we build some new innovation and they're like you know, mind blown because they realize that they can onboard an entire family with a few taps on a phone, on a on our mobile app, and the whole thing is done in like you know, under two minutes, and it's just delightful and fast and easy. So I think that's incredibly exciting, right? But maybe that's the masochist in us where it's like we choose these things that are uh, you know, not quite as confetti driven as other apps, but we we celebrate them nonetheless.

SPEAKER_00 17:52

Well, I think it I think the outcome is incredibly exciting because of what it produces. It produces all the things that you described. I think it takes, to your point, a lot of really strong sense of mission to take some of this stuff on that is so assumed to be the norm. And so, like you have to get a medallion signature guarantee. There is no other way. I mean, that that that is common language around this kind of stuff. I also think one of the things that's that you said that was interesting, that I think is really important, is this again, this group of raving fans and how that connects back, like to getting back to where you left off in the story, to getting some people together who really bought into this mission. And, you know, we have a lot of folks on that listen in that are founders that are trying to think of how to start. And a lot of people we we see technology these days just sort of like, hey, we made this cool thing, don't you want it? And the fact that you guys got together and said, no, we actually want to pick our problem and throw innovation at a very discrete, specific set of problems, that's honestly a very different path than most software companies are trying to the way that they're trying to solve problems. So talk about where you left off, the team, how you built the team, the mission, because I think it matters.

SPEAKER_01 19:07

Yeah, um, well, appreciate that. Yeah, the the um uh so we we've stayed pretty uh religious to that, you know, for the last almost eight years. I uh I I technically started the company, like formed the corporation in October of 2018, started recruiting those first handful of people to join me, you know, in uh November and December. And then we wrote our first lines of code in January of 2019. Most of the team started uh again right around you know, like late December to January, like the initial team of let's call it, you know, eight of us or so. And uh the only two people that were there at the very beginning was myself and uh now is a dear friend John Siena, who uh runs a branding agency, but he he was my VP of brand and design. So again, probably probably not um that surprising that we focused a lot on culture and brand and just kind of like building something that people could believe in because there was nothing. Like there was no product yet. And like the prototyping product we built is one where you can't rapidly prototype this thing and get it to market in uh 90 days. Like it is a highly regulated field for bearing, building clearing, custody, record keeping, product surface area with thousands and thousands of features that require millions of lines of code and millions of hour engineering hours. So we had to start off by you know, really the first year just engaging with this advisor community and going in like very open, like meaning we we had some views, but we really wanted to learn from them. Like, what where are they spending their time? What are the biggest headaches? Like, what are the the biggest challenges from them, you know, doing the things that they wish they could do? And so I don't know how many thousands of interviews you know that we conducted with advisors, but we as a result of spending most of that first year like putting prototypes and a brand message in front of people, we we attracted a certain you know tribe. And and these were folks who they knew they there was nothing they could use in our product for perhaps years, but there was finally somebody who cared about them and listened and valued their feedback enough to come back over and over and keep iterating on the process. And a lot of people in this industry, it's probably true of a lot of businesses, but you know, there's uh 38,000 or so registered investment advisors or independently owned uh you know, uh financial advisory firms in the US. And like most industries, there's a Pareto's law here, right? Where you know the top, I don't know, few thousand firms are controlling probably 80 or 90 percent of the assets. So the majority of advisors, if they're managing a couple hundred million dollars, or maybe they're only managing twenty million dollars for their clients or 10 million, like the big firms do not even know they exist. They're not even a number, they're like a non existent artifact, you know, like that they gets paid no attention. They they are in the other column when they're kind of stack ranking. Like, hey, what are our customers saying about us? Like they are making up a sliver called other. And like that's not okay. Uh, and it was never. Okay to us. It's still not okay to us to this day. We really cared about what those folks had to say because when I started my first business in 2004, I was one of those others, right? I had no clients, 23 years old, nothing really to bring to the table to the big custodians. And two of the top three wouldn't even return my calls or emails. The only one who would was uh back then called TD Waterhouse, eventually became known as TD Ameritrade. And I remember like the chip I carried around on my shoulder for 20 years because I wasn't good enough, you know, uh, and I remember not liking how that felt, and I was never going to ever make somebody feel like that. And so our whole firm, like our culture very on, was like, we just care about these advisors. We've walked more than a few miles in their shoes. We're going to give them time attention. We're going to care about the feedback they give. And the product that we have built, like we refer to this saying all the time, but it is a co-created product. It's not like I'm forcing my view and lording over this group of advisors. It's more like, well, we we talk to thousands of advisors. We care deeply about what they tell us. And we try to find the most sort of diplomatic way to prioritize the product features. So we have this uh, you know, an ideas section on our platform. Any customer can go in there and they can put an ID up there, and any other customer can upvote those ideas. They can interact with our product managers, our designers, they can take a look at prototypes, uh, they can get on early beta access lists. What you'll find is that if there's a thousand ideas, 800 of them no one else cares that much about. You know, so it's it's you know, and that's okay, like because you can't build a, if you build everything for everybody, you will build a loaded, you know, like just you know, just a Frankenstein of a product that's not pleasant for anybody. But it allowed those advisors to kind of feel like they had a voice, but we focused on the things that mattered the most to them and again, a bit more of a diplomatic way. So what was what was the first things people told us the biggest pain point they had, and the biggest point point they had was onboarding new clients. They're like, I get this new client who they trust me, and they say, Yes, I'd like to work with you on an ongoing basis. And then I then I send them five different DocuSign envelopes, and then they don't even know the status of their new account, and then they have no idea how long it will take for the money to arrive. And then it finally arrives and there's some error that neither one of us knew about. Now we've got to track that down, and I just give these people a terrible onboarding experience. Can you build Altras in such a way that you can give my clients a world-class onboarding experience that's on par or better than any direct-to-consumer app? Like easy, automated, transparent. And that's what we spent a lot of our time that first year on was like, how can we make it very easy so that when you do have a new client that gives you that trust, that you deliver to them an unbelievable digital first, zero paperwork, real-time experience. Um, and to this day, we're pretty well known for that. And we do lots of other things too, but that soon gives you some like continuation of the story, like the culture, the relationships we built with our customers. Um, and then what was the what was the first big innovation? It was just doing something that was really painful and embarrassing and turning it into something that was the objectively best in the industry and still is this day. And it's not even remotely close. Like nobody has figured out how to do onboarding as well as we have, but it's because that's what people have told us was the most important thing to them.

SPEAKER_00 25:10

I think people could easily miss the big like thematic elements here. Like so I want to hit on a few of them. One is this decision to often we look at incumbents and we go, oh, we gotta be like them, or we have to, you know, they're setting the industry standards. We have to think like I wonder what they're thinking about, right? And and you did a thing that I find so many entrepreneurs struggle with, but is in such an important move as you said, what are the incumbents ignoring? What's the thing that the incumbents are ignoring? Who are they ignoring? And what might those people need or want? For those people listening, this isn't a really important first step is look where other people aren't looking. Right? There's almost always serviceable space there.

SPEAKER_01 25:55

Totally. And it doesn't take a huge number. I mean, I've heard different statistics thrown around, but look, if you can find a few hundred people to join your tribe that will lock arms with you and you'll go slay dragons together, like you will build a real meaningful business. But there has to be enough passion that they're really going to lock arms with you and go slay dragons. Like they can't just be like lukewarm. Find a few hundred. And you know, today we serve about 6,800 advisors, so the number's growing quite a bit. Um and uh the only thing that I'm bummed about is like as we've grown, I can't, I can't give everybody all 6,800 and growing personal time. But I spend a lot of personal time with advisors to stay. Like I'm very, very engaged like with the advisors. I care deeply about their views and uh want to make sure we're representing them and their clients as best we can. And I'm pretty sure we have at least a few hundred that I mean they would very publicly take arrows for us all day long because they they they know that we have like put almost a decade of care into those relationships and like really building their trust and honoring their trust. But again, I think if you're trying to, you know, if your TAM is like, oh, I need to have 10 million customers, I actually feel like that's a lot harder to do in our space, just the right couple hundred, and I and like you really have an opportunity to build something special.

SPEAKER_00 27:10

And I think another thing that you did intuitively that I want to make sure that the listeners are really put noticing is you can be incredibly customer focused. You built this tight community of customers, and that doesn't mean you have to do everything that they say. Right? You use this little Reddit system of upvoting and downvoting, which is super smart. But I think a lot of people go, oh, we're customer focused, so my customer wants this, so we're gonna do it. And my other customer wants this, so we're gonna do it. My other customer wants this, and we're gonna do it. And you had the business acumen to go, well, loving your community of customers means you actually have to be really, really focused. You got to pick your problems and help them help you pick your problems. Because otherwise you're scatter shot everywhere. Any business is going to struggle if we're just trying to chase whatever person walks in the door and what they want from us.

SPEAKER_01 27:55

Well, it makes it hard to message as well. So, you know, if you can't really clearly articulate what you do and who it's for, like in a couple sentences. I mean, I think building anything of consequence is going to be quite challenging. And to your point, if you say yes to too many things, good luck ex explaining what it is that you do. You know, we we were able to anchor pretty quickly, like we serve modern advisors that are client-centric. And our objective is to help them 10x their business and improve their client outcomes by 150 basis points. Like, I mean, that was what we were trying to do. So, and that was like me riffing off the top of my head, but the point is like it was not like hard for us to explain who exactly was our ideal customer and what was the benefit to them and their clients to use the product. That we wanted our customers to 10x, like meaning 90% savings or 10x time improvement. We wanted their end clients that they serve to get 150 basis points with better outcomes. You know, it it like I see this with a few, especially in this AI era, because it's like so easy to build kind of crappy products with lousy features. Uh that you see products that almost burn through the context window of the AI, you know, kind of code uh uh builders. They they because they start telling to do too many things, like they're like, it's like it's gonna be the thing that does all the things for all the, you know, all the customers. Yeah. And again, probably starting with good intentions, but then quickly becoming an albatross before it ever gets to market, before it ever gets one single customer, it's already too complicated and too hard to sell and explain, or even to build in a product, in like a market readiness state. Like it's uh the the infrastructure is a little bit too extreme because they added too many bells and whistles. So I've always been a big fan of like, you know, less is more. I know polarizing figure, uh Elon Musk, but you know, he has like two principles I find to be like quite useful if you're building products. I mean, one is essentially deleting as much as possible. So actually removing as many things as you possibly can is going to make your product better, scale faster, be more intuitive for customers to use. Um, and there's other, which is, you know, find an area of high friction and then just get like laser focused on removing that friction. So these are a couple of principles that we used here pretty effectively. And again, are pretty universal to almost any business.

SPEAKER_00 30:01

I remember that era when Ultrarist was basically appeared to be like an onboarding engine. You know, like that was the thing. The hook was we've we've made some big solves in onboarding. And I can imagine other founders in your shoes getting really, really nervous about that because you're like, oh my God, people aren't gonna pick us because we don't do all these other things. You know, we don't want to be seen as just the blank, even though you had solved for a really, really significant thing. There is that experience of when you really lean in and you fix a real thing and you and you delete and you get narrow and you focus. There is the side of that where people start to pigeonhole you. And of course, you knew you weren't done, right? But there was, I think, an era where particularly people with a vested interest of incumbency were like, oh, all trust is an onboarding engine. They don't do this, they don't do this, they don't do this, right? And you had to kind of steal your spine a little bit through that era, I imagine. But you tell me.

SPEAKER_01 30:58

Yeah. Well, in the very early days, I had to bite my tongue a lot more often than I bite it these days. But that was intentional. I think you have to know, you know, know when to be heads down and building and then know when it's time to take the gloves off and, you know, be ready to go battle. But giving credit where it's due, early on, um, as we were building out the product, uh we'd nailed onboarding to a point where it was getting a lot of attention from firms of all different sizes and complexities. And so all of a sudden we had a lot of different ideas coming in, like, okay, you did this thing well. I need these other hundred features or whatever. And our chief product officer is a guy named Harpreet Alawalia Harp as we know him, been with me since the very, very beginning. Um, an amazing product builder, just incredible, you know, discernment and taste and understands like uh user experience incredibly well. Um, but I remember he came to me and we'll tell him to this broader leadership team, and he said, Hey, I think that we're getting, I think we're trying to serve too many people. And he goes, and I think where I think where we'd have our most success, if you really look at like where were we really landing, where were we really winning? If you talk about like what firms were saying yes at a high rate, and they were moving a material amount of their clients and assets on a relative basis to altruist. And he comes back and he says, I think the the space that we're really winning is advisors with less than $25 million in assets. And that's a very small segment of the market, right? I mean, well, it's not small by number of firms, right? This is probably 5,000, but you know, they don't manage a lot of assets on a relative basis, right? The total size of the space today is about 10 trillion. Back then it was probably 6 trillion. He's talking about let's focus all of our attention on dominating and being the most valuable, sort of the most obvious and objective best solution for solopreneurs with no employees that manage less than $25 million, and they probably work entirely virtual. Um, so they don't even have a physical office, like they were doing all their work online. And this was before the pandemic, by the way. Like, and he's like, this is who we should be building for. And he had his data, so just why, and he was very much right. Like in that era, our win rates, so if you think about like go-to-market metrics, you know, if we had an opportunity, what converted to a win, we were winning north of 50% at that size. And our average share of wallet was at the time, I forget the exact number, but it was you know high. It was like north of 70% or 80%. And then we had almost all of those firms that would say yes, almost all their business, of course. Now, granted, not many people even wanted those firms. Um, but you know, and and that was part of this, like the pigeonholing, like part of it was not just that we were great at onboarding, but we also got, you know, sort of like boxed into we serve just the small advisors. We don't serve the and you know what? Like, I was okay with that. I was like, I'm not going to defight the narrative because the reality is when you're building a business, ours included, if you can pick up a couple thousand of those firms and they have 20 million, and these are mostly younger people serving younger clients that have much higher organic growth rates than like the firms that are already at 100 billion in assets, because it's a lot easier to go from 20 million to 30 million, right, than it's to go from 2 billion to 3 billion. You know, it's like the the the the kager is there, even though the notional dollars are different. And so we just kind of looked at and said, well, why don't we just do that? Let's get the first couple billion of assets on the platform with these generally younger, more tech forward firms that are doing their whole business virtual anyway. So it's they don't care if we don't have paperwork because they're already doing everything digital. Like they only do digital. They don't even have people coming into their office because they literally don't have one. We don't have to build tons of users and roles and responsibilities and all this like architecture that becomes important when you serve enterprises because these are literally one-person shops. And that one person can have all of them, they can have the owner rights and they can do all the things, right? Because they are doing all of the things. So we de-scoped our ideal client like down to this very narrow, like again, like probably tech forward. Most likely they're younger, serving younger clients that are tech forward themselves, always younger by age, but like people who are more youthful in their mindset, I suppose. Like they're willing to try new things, like willing to be early adopters. What that allowed us to do is one is we built, again, like a very loyal base. Now, some of those firms today are over a billion in assets, right? So we took a couple of risks on firms that were small, and those firms have grown organically to north of a billion in assets. They're now big, successful firms with, you know, dozens, multiple dozens of employees. And um it's really cool that we grew with them. But we we we really stood up for like an audience that was underserved, and I think that has served us really well. Now, the other thing it did is it allowed us to prove out the economics of running this business. If you can profitably serve a business that only generates, I don't know, $10,000 a year of revenue. Imagine what your margin profile looked like when your average customer's $100,000 revenue or $500,000 revenue. Or like we had to build enough automation in the middle and back office. We had to make the product intuitive enough that it didn't need an army of customer success people to figure out how to make this thing work. So it forced us to be incredibly good. And we had to leverage things that no one else had ever had to leverage in this space. We were the first ever to use chat first support, the first to ever use AI-based support. We still have phones and things like that too. But like we have this multiple ways of serving so we can serve a broad audience really efficiently. Almost everything on the platform is self-serve. So you know, there's very little need to send us support tickets or call us for help. Like we try to surface every single insight to the customer directly so they don't have to ask us what's the status. It's just there, they have the same view we do. So that was one of those early product decisions that I remember like cringing a bit, being like, I don't know, that's gonna be tough because we have this firm over here that they're telling us they love us and they've got $2 billion. And if we just built these 13 features for them, we could win this customer. And I trusted Harps Instincts, which they turned out, I think, to be brilliant. We we ended becoming dominant in that segment. And then we just slowly moved up market. We eventually expanded and said, let's just try to be the best place in the market for firms under 100 million. And guess what? Like today, if you look at our numbers, again, our win rate's insanely high, north of 50%, aperture of wallets north of 80%. Once we kind of felt like we were dominant in that segment, now let's move up to firms that are 100 to 500 million. Last year, that was our fastest growing segment of growth. This year, 2026, all of a sudden we have dozens of firms that are multi-billion dollar firms, even multi-decad billion dollar firms. That's now our fastest growing segment, what we kind of call like the small enterprise customer. But this took eight years to build almost, right? Like, and you, you there's no shortcuts. But what happened is that we never were actually selling a product deficient to our customer needs because we just descoped the customer down to like the simplest business with the you know simplest kind of needs. They wanted digital first, they wanted automated fractional share trading so they could build portfolios for clients of any size, right? Um, you know, and one of our big KPIs we celebrate here is how many accounts do we have that are under $10,000? Because again, if we can profitably serve those accounts, we are going to be unstoppable over the next couple of decades, right? Because we will have efficiencies and automations that just nobody else has. So a long ramble there. Hope that gives you some context of like, you know, the early days, like things that we look back at, they were hard at the time. And I look back and go, man, I'm so glad we did that hard thing, and said no to 90 plus percent of the market and just focused on very narrow set that was the small end of the market that nobody else cared about.

SPEAKER_00 38:10

From a principal standpoint, you did what a lot of people resist doing, which is going small. Instinct to go, hey, let's go smaller. So hard and so hard to accept. But you didn't just do it out of a whim. You you had a principled idea for doing it. And I think what I want people to notice is then you figured out how to make the business, you had the business case for the principal. So it isn't just, hey, we love small advisors, we want to make this work. You built that into a business case of this is how we're gonna make build a business serving in this market. We have a proven result of serving in this market. Where some firms would struggle to be able to do what you did. One is they wouldn't have the product leadership to do it, which thank God you had. But some of them would struggle because they don't have the capital support to do it. Because sometimes the tripping line to be able to focus down, narrow the market, really get good, all the things that you just described, sometimes the thing that keeps that from happening is is capital and investors. You had a vision for that as well, in terms of how you were going to think about capital and who you were gonna bring into the party so that you could keep your mission clear. Talk a little bit about that.

SPEAKER_01 39:19

I think de-scoping your product and narrowing your customers is cheaper. You know, so your capital, what capital you do have will go farther than if you try to like shotgun whatever resources you have and just hope that you you land a whale or something. Like that's a great way to you know not make it very far. So I will say one advantage I had, and you know, not all founders have this, um, but is I had built two prior businesses. I bootstrapped both of them, I did it the hard way. And uh the second in particular was quite successful. Um, you know, we got up to about 60 million of annualized revenue, around $7 million of EBITDA. Um, and I built that on 100 grand, right? Of like personal investment and then a shit ton of hard work and you know, like elbow grease uh and and other people's, right? Like we had a team, 100 plus people, like we we had we just busted our butts, you know. And so it is a little bit easier to even attract capital for people to say, hey, I know how to steward capital, and I can contribute some of my own because the business is worth, you know, multiple hundreds of millions of dollars and I could, you know, I could afford to put some of the cash in here. So those things as a like disclaimer, right? It's uh it's easier if you have a little bit of start, but even then, there's no guarantee that that first money you raise will lead to a second round or a third round if you need that kind of money on an ongoing basis. And this was the type of business where there is no capital shortcut. Like people have asked me before, if I wanted to build all through sell over again, what would it take? And I would tell them it's been the same answer for a long time. You need at least $250 million in at least five years. AI does not shortcut the fact that it be because of like how much regulatory red tape, some things just take a year, and AI doesn't help you, right? Because you start you're filing for different registrations that just take a long time, and then you have to get another sub-registration, another sub-registration. And so this stuff is just not, you know, not uh not one where you have a low barrier for entry. So knowing all that going in, I wanted to find the right type of investors who would think in decades and not necessarily think uh in terms of like, well, this is a little seed roll of the dice, and hopefully this lasts uh for a year and we can uh you know attract a second investor. So my first investor was Nick Byme from Venrock. Um and Venrock uh is the you know, the name is kind of gives away, but it's the Rockefeller Families Venture Fund that they started back in the 1960s. They were the first ever investor in Apple Computer and a whole bunch of other legendary companies. They have a very long time horizon. Uh, they they like to get in early to very innovative, disruptive companies that could potentially be industry leaders, but again, that does not happen in two or three years. It happens in decades. So they were my first investor. They've been unbelievable. Nick's become a dear friend, and I just can't be more grateful for both the mentorship at the individual level, but also the fact that they've just been such a great partner. They are who introduced me to a guy named Bill McNabb. Uh, Bill was the former chairman and CEO of Vanguard, and uh Bill was on the board of United Healthcare, which is uh one of the other Venrock partners, was also on that board. And so that's kind of how we made this, you know, uh two degrees of separation kind of connection there. I shared my my vision for for uh for altruist with Bill. Uh you can imagine it struck a chord given where he came from and spent his career at Vanguard. It wasn't too long after that I actually met Vanguard, right? And they became an investor. Uh, Bill eventually became an investor and a board member. He's been absolutely an incredible, like what a what a you know, like advantage as a founder to have uh like a legend, you know, sort of in your industry who's a cell phone call away, you know, when you need when you need some help and is operated at the highest scale. So we kind of started there, you know, just we built this. And again, I don't take too long to go through all the investors, but with each time we needed capital, sort of a very intentional process of, you know, who's the right people to work with? Do that do they have the same long time horizon that we do? Um do they understand that we're a mission-first company? That's hard to sell to venture investors, by the way. You can name your company altruist, you start telling people that, yeah, it's named this because we intend on putting our customers' interest before our own. Like we need to find a way to demonstrably improve the outcomes of these advisors and their clients. And one of the ways we're going to do that is by driving down the cost. We're not going to be maximizing monetization opportunities. We're going to find ways to use scale efficiency technology to radically undercut the existing infrastructure costs. That doesn't resonate with everybody. Some people want to see like maximum monetization and 95% margins and all this stuff. And like, you know, we were being a bit more calculated and realistic and thinking in a longer time frame that appeals to some people and doesn't appeal to everybody. So that was a little bit how we thought about capital, but I would say like this also plays into Why do we take the product strategy? Because if you know you're going to have to go through this multi-year slog and raise a lot of capital, you better have milestones that you can kind of present to people and then achieve or exceed. So that way it's more believable when you come in and say the next milestone that we're raising this next round of funding for is we're going to move up market into this new segment. And here's the seven features we have to have to do that. And here's the support model we we need to do that. Here's how much engineering hours it'll take to build. And here's how many, you know, upfront kind of J-curve investments we have to make on support in order to go win those assets and have a payback period, you know, of whatever X or Y. And because we were able to consistently deliver, we were able to go raise money. Again, if we just had this like big bold idea with this kooky founder that was out there, you know, making big bold statements all the time, that does not matter. Like that, that maybe that worked for some other, you know, like founders like that are you know probably in jail now, but real entrepreneurs building real businesses, like you have to deliver real results. Um in especially in our case, we've we've done five rounds or six rounds of funding or series post-series F, you know, before uh Green Principle to be acquired. You know, that wasn't ever, and all those rounds uh were inbound, meaning like we weren't like doing rounds where we're going out to talking to 500 investors. It was like we we built a reputation, people knew about us, they would come seek us out, and we had to kind of pick and choose, okay, well, these are the folks that seem to resonate the best. And if they want to preemptively lead around, we'll let them do that and they'll write a term sheet and then we'll go fill the rest of the round. And like this was basically our process for the last you know six, seven years. So uh it is very important people get it right. I guess I I never knew this at the time, but as it turns out, I'm a very good capital raiser. And uh maybe someday, you know, we'll do a session on just how to raise capital. But I'll tell you that like much of what we've accomplished, there's no way it could have been, I don't believe, no way it could have been bootstrapped. It definitely required outside institutional capital. Yeah. And if we had the wrong investors, we could have gone sideways at any point, but we had the right people and they had the right time horizon, the right intentions. And because of that, you know, we were able to build something that uh, you know, uh had enough enduring value that we had a lot of people over there who wanted to buy us, right? And it it really just was a fact that uh most companies I wasn't that interested in. Uh and uh when when Vanguard came, again a lot of like the groundwork had been laid because of the type of investors we already had.

SPEAKER_00 46:24

I worked with so many different founders who accidentally they don't mean to make these mistakes, right? They accidentally start to silo these things, like, oh, the financial decisions are over here and the brand decisions are over here. Here, let's bring in a brand person and fix the brand thing, and the culture decisions are over here, and the product decisions are over here. And all of a sudden you've created an entity that is in a constant state of conflict because capital and brand and product and the customer are all sort of vying for the identity of the thing that you're building. And the level of intention you had is to say, no, this is who we are. And so everything that dovetails into us, whether it's capital or product plan or how what customer group we're next expanding to, all has to fit into the core thing that we are. It's I've learned over the years that that's really hard to do. It sounds really simple when you're telling the story, but it's really hard to do because it there's so many ways to get distracted and so many ways to get drawn into other things. Before we talk about Vanguard, is there anything that you would say was integral for you to sort of keeping the vision clear, keeping yourself from getting distracted from all the ways this thing could have spun out?

SPEAKER_01 47:38

Well, yeah, I'd say there's quite quite a few. In my case, I'm very fortunate I have just an amazing wife who is not easily impressed. And I could I could go around the office all day like and get a lot of head nods. Oh yeah, Jason Brun idea. I could come home and shirt with my wife and she'd be like, that's the stupidest thing I've ever heard in my life. And you're an idiot for even bringing it up. And I'm like, okay, I needed that. Somebody had to tell me that uh from time to time. But uh but it's it's really nice to have if you have some people you you trust and they have the confidence to give you really direct uh feedback, and you know that like they love you no matter what. So it's okay if it's harsh feedback. That's pretty important. And if you don't have that with like your team, some companies have it because they have co-founders, and those co-founders are friends, maybe, and they and they can have debate and they can have they can have full-blown fights right about things and like and the company's better for it. I'm a solo founder, and so naturally there's a little bit of hesitancy that people would have to speak up uh against maybe some of my ideas over the years. Now that's changing, like as I've worked with people longer, some of those, especially senior leaders, have become, you know, uh again close friends and and they know that I very much admire their their views, even when we're in conflict and it makes us all better. Uh but I I would say, like, uh in my case, can very very fortunate have like a wife who's uh takes deep interest in my work, knows me personally, and she also knows what motivates me. So, you know, like yeah, financial motivation. Again, we we all have no matter how pure we think we are, we all have some form of financial motivation. But I I like to think mine's, you know, not not that not as high, you know, as other folks I know. You know, and and my wife knows that. Uh, and some of that's because I've built and sold some businesses and you know, like I already kind of know what it feels like to have a liquidity event or something, and life didn't really change and that it hasn't really changed since. And and so uh so but she does know like I will not sleep for like multiple days on end if like I'm having an internal struggle. You know, and it's not a it's not it's not a struggle over uh my bank statement or something. It's like because like something I believe so deeply in my heart of hearts needs to be done and it's not being done. And uh so she's just you know very uh very good at helping keeping me balanced personally. We're going to be in one other thing I'd say like to any other founder, um, again, regardless of size of company, is um I I have this saying that probably a bad saying, sometimes the team hates it, but I I tell them that um, you know, look, I reserve the right to change my mind at any time, especially as the inputs that would that would cause me to change my mind change themselves, right? So you think about like the era I built Ultras, like there was when I first started the company, TD Ameritrade was still an own-independent company. It got bought by Schwab. The custodians used to charge commissions, then they all went commission free. Uh we had a global pandemic and the whole world went into shutdown mode, had to work virtually. You know, we've had some radically different political uh you know environments like over the last uh you know 10 years or so. Um like things change, you know, like you just and you have to be flexible. Um and so even though a lot of the original founding ideology never changed, like we had to make a lot of changes along the way. Like the you know, this whole AI boom is like, you know, not this wasn't relevant in 2018 or 19. Although AI was in our roadmap back then, it was just a different the tools were different and the the possibilities were were more limited. And so I think like you know, never be married to the idea you had 10 years ago. You know, like you inevitably are going to be wrong about things, and that's totally okay. Like never fear being wrong and like make a pivot when it's important to pivot.

SPEAKER_00 51:12

Yeah. Well, part of what got us into this conversation, I mentioned this in the intro, is you know, LinkedIn can be a powerful place for building relationships and connections, but it can also be a place where, you know, the dark side of people come out. And anytime you, you know, I I know from all my experience with this, sarcastic. Anytime you sell a business for $4 billion, right? You're going to become the target of a little bit of feedback. It's been interesting to watch people who misunderstand why Vanguard is in the mix. We don't need to like debate the the crowd control on LinkedIn, but I think the particular thing that I find most fascinating is to me, it was quite obvious. Vanguard is was in some ways invented to solve for small investors and making sure for the democratization of financial access, that was really core to its essential mission from its very earliest days. It's core to your essential mission from your earliest days. You're two very different companies, but man, these sort of this sort of Venn diagram becomes obvious, was obvious to me. Clearly it was obvious to you. You made a really important agreement because of it. What I want to talk a little bit about, though, is as you watch the industry, which can sometimes be very insular in a good way, like we're all on the same team and we're all doing this together, and then sometimes it can be insular in a dark way of going, Jason, you abandoned us, you abandoned us for the big guys, you did it for the paycheck, you know, like how do you navigate that feedback? What do you want people to know about the Vanguard decision that maybe you see people consistently misunderstanding?

SPEAKER_01 52:43

Well, I guess what I'd say is like it unfortunately it takes time, but the best absolute best thing is just to show people. You know, so if someone has some belief of there being an ulterior motive or something that's untrue, well, you know, you just show them with your actions that that they didn't have anything to be worried about in the first place. That will take some time. So until then, all I can do is, you know, kind of address things head on. And what I'd say is like, um it, and it should be somewhat obvious, but if not, I'll reiterate it here. From the very first days I got into this industry, the company that I admired more than any company in the entire industry was Vanguard. And I've talked a lot about this. I mean, going back, there's people that when this happened, I had some old colleagues that are like, I remember you talking about this in 2007, you know, or 2008. It's like, yeah, like I've been talking about this for a long time. When I did that first uh, you know, Series A fundraising with Benrock, uh, Nick, the uh uh partner of Benrock, had asked me, Hey, is there any strategic investors? Sometimes when you're in a space, you know, it's nice to have a strategic investor or any company that comes to mind instantly. Vanguard, that's like the one company. I was like, I don't know if they can ever even do this, but like that's the company I just admire. Like a lot of our founding principles were based on the principles of Vanguard. How about any uh any individual? Sometimes it's good to have a good independent board member, like this is gonna sound redundant, but the guy would be Bill McNapp. Again, I have no idea if we could even get a hold of him. He doesn't know who I am from Adam, right? So and he's like, no, and I think we know Bill. I let me see if we can get his info, right? But why? Because Bill uh spent 25 plus years at Vanguard and again, like uh at the time had just stepped down from the chair role uh of the board and it was the the prior CEO. The uh the entrepreneur in this space that I've admired the longest of anybody, and I've just like hung on almost every word they've ever said was the late Jack Bogle. And if someone goes and looks, even on my LinkedIn profile, the idea they have the part where you can say it, you can like have like saved articles. Like I wrote a couple medium articles in the very early days before there was any product here. Jack passed away just a few months after Altrus was founded, and so I wrote kind of a little ode to Jack and like how we in this industry could think about his life's work and apply it to our own to make a bigger impact. The mission statement at Vanguard is I think I'll nail this word for word, but it it is to take a stand for all investors, to treat them fairly, and to give them the best chance at investment success. And my favorite words, uh, which I wrote in my little, you know, kind of uh blog post when I announced this, was my favorite words in that whole thing are to take a stand. And again, those who, if you go back, some of the people might be too young and they've been around the business long enough, again, but go find some old YouTube interviews of Jack Bogle when he would go on CNBC and he would rip the heads off of other guests if they were charging high fees or you know, uh using deceptive sales practices uh or encouraging things like market timing. Like he just had a very principled view. And, you know, I would never have wanted to be on the opposite side of a debate with him because the debate would be something like, Nick, I think investors should get better returns. What is your response to that? Like you all you can do nothing other than be like, that seems like a good idea, Jack. Right, right. Okay, well, do you want to know what data shows us? Data shows us that the fees you pay are inversely correlated to the results you get. In other words, the higher your fee, the higher the likelihood that you will underperform the market. So therefore, low fees are good. What do you have to say to that? Again, if I'm the other side of the debate, I'm like, damn, I cannot debate this guy and win. But I love that he took a stand, and again, it was take a stand for all investors, investors of every dollar amount, every geography, every ethnicity, of every background you could possibly imagine, like it didn't matter, like investing was meant to be for all, not for the privileged few, but for everybody. And when you look at their 50 now one plus years of history, um, when they started, a very small percentage of people in America owned investments in, you know, I want to say this something like under 20% had any form of investments 50 years ago. And today that number is over 80% or nearly 80%, so north of north of 70, under 80%. You know, the average cost, when I got in this business, I got in business in the year 2000, the average expense ratio of a mutual fund was 1.62%. That number is down almost a full percent. Like, these are not coincidences. Like, this is the Vanguard effect. There's been now books written about it and articles and data around the vanguard effect. And so I think that people, before this deal ever happened, before I started this company, I could have recited all of these facts. Like I was deep into the Kool-Aid, right? Because I was just like, if you're gonna do something, you're gonna spend your life, I'm like, in my mind, I'm going, man, when all of the dust settles and you look back, like you hope you do something that's so, at least I do, like other people might have other missions, right? But I'm like, I want to do something that's so impactful, that it reaches so many people, that improves so many lives, like that I just can be really, really proud of that work, and my family will be really, really proud of that work. Um and again, I realize fully that not everybody's obsessed with work. I happen to be a bit obsessed with but so therefore I measure a lot of uh a lot of my my my own value on like the output of that work. And I just can't think of really, I can't think of any company in any industry, uh, at least again in my purview, which is a bit of a limited purview. I work in fintech, so I know this area, that's been more impactful in a positive way for society than Bangor. It's measured now north of a trillion dollars of impact. Some people are calling it north of two trillion, and like over the next 20, 30 years, that number is probably going to swell to 10 trillion plus. I don't, I don't know that you could even say like any of the most innovative technologies. I mean, like you have to go back to like the first ever vaccines to come up with something that had like as remarkable a change on society as something as simple as what Vanguard's done. And so to me, look, I get a little bit worked up when I hear somebody say like, this is a bad thing. I'm like, how is that a bad thing? Like you have a company that is owned by its shareholders or it's owned by its funds, its funds are owned by its shareholders. It doesn't have a motivation to extract a bunch of unnecessary profits because those excess profits would go back to those fundholders in the in the form of lower fees. That's good. If you're if you care deeply about getting advice in the hands of more people and you think it should be done in a way where it's better, more affordable, and accessible to everybody, there's no better partner, in my view, right, than than Miguel. At least they've they've they've they've proven it with their last 50 years of history. So there's a lot, a lot there, but I'd say like, so for for us, you know, and for me in particular, of course, like we have to be thoughtful about all of the constituents. I took money from investors and and I had a fiduciary obligation to ensure that that they get a good outcome. I have hundreds of employees and many hundreds of former employees that own stock in this company. People have given big, meaningful parts of their life to building this. Like, I want them to have a great outcome. We have thousands of existing advisors and many hundreds of thousands of end clients. Like, I want to be able to look those people in the eye and zero lip service, be like, I am confident this is the absolute best thing, not just for you and for your clients, but for this entire industry. It is better than me staying independent, trying to IPO in five years and dealing with public shareholders. And who knows, there could be a hostile takeover from some other company that just wants us to go away and there's nothing we can do about it. Like there's so many things that can go wrong that would make it hard for me in 50 years to even know if my company would be here. This is a path where it's like we are going to be here for effectively all of eternity, right? Like there, like there is no future IPO, no one can sell this or buy it, or what it's like it is designed and structured and in such an interesting, unusual way, owned by effectively its customers. And so as a result, like every single day when you show up for work, your customer and your shareholders are the same. You know, so you're not kind of having to make these conflicting decisions, which I find to be like one of the scariest things for an entrepreneur is if you do get to a point where you go public or you know, get in the recapitalization rat race, like like rabbit hole, you're constantly kind of going, like, you know, who am I building for today? Am I trying to optimize for you know gross margin expansion or like you know, certain eBIT target or quarterly uh you know earnings estimate? Or am I existing and putting every ounce of my effort every day into improving the outcomes of my customers? And like that just feels like a heck of a lot better path, at least for me, right? And like you know, for the like I brought along for this ride, like that's the right path. So yeah, I could go on and on and on about it, but you probably got enough uh for me on that one. But I would just say, like, obviously I'm super proud and honored. It's like uh it feels like the culmination of my life work. Uh and uh, but I'm still young enough that I mean, I want to keep doing this, like I want to do it for a long time. Um, and I want to make again the biggest possible impact in a good positive way as I can. No doubt about it. We'll make some uh you know mistakes along the way. We have in the past, and nobody's perfect, uh, and not nor even remotely close, or should they uh you know, try to presume presume they are. Um, but I think our intent is is in the right place. And and I think that again, if someone just goes and looks back at Vanguard and goes, what exactly have they done that's been bad for humanity? It's like, you know, 56 million customers brought the cost structure down, eliminated commissions. Um, you know, they have a direct consumer platform. They don't treat anybody else unfairly. There's no commissions on Fidelity products on the on the Vanguard platform. Like everybody's commission-free. There's no tolls like Rev share tolls that they're forcing people to pay. Like everybody gets to distribute their products on their platform, they don't charge anybody additional fees for, right? So they've already have a demonstrated history of not doing the things that people are like somehow worried they will do. And I even think from an innovation perspective, we think about name a company that's been more innovative in our space the last 50 years. I mean, like, are you gonna say it's Robinhood? I mean, yeah, like I'm I'm sorry, but like in terms of actual innovation that proved out to be extraordinarily useful for society, I just don't see anyone that's even close. Now, again, we have a lot to prove. Can we maintain our velocity and our hunger and all this stuff? Like, I'm, you know, I've had the same chip on my shoulder for a long, long time. I don't expect it to go anytime soon. And so uh again, with time, we'll prove everybody who had their fears, they can be assuaged and they don't have to worry about it coming with rocks, you know, to the officers' headquarters. But for for the majority, you know, 90 plus percent of people that I interact with, uh, they get it, they got it pretty quickly. Um, and it's mostly because like they've taken the time to get to know me and our company and our people. Uh and so it just doesn't take a lot of creativity for them to come to the same conclusions we have. The folks who've been a bit more naysayers, it's you know, people who don't know us, you know, they're not customers. Right. You know, they uh um for whatever reason, they are you know angry at the world and have a generally pessimistic view of life. And I cannot change that. So and so I'm not gonna worry too much about it.

SPEAKER_00 1:03:21

Yeah, I think what I want, thank you for sharing all of that. And what I and what I want from our listening community, because some some people go, well, I don't know, my experience is so different from this. So no one's calling me with four billion dollars, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. But I think what you start to see here is that there are through lines that go through the whole story and this intentionality on stuff that I think some people take for granted or they're unfamiliar with or they get scared about, you know, like Eric Reese's book Incorruptible came out, you know, about the same time as this came out. And it's about capital structure and and and who you who owns you and how how they own the outcomes and all that kind of stuff. And and for you to have this happen in the midst of that conversation to sell to a company where fundamentally there's a few layers in between, but fundamentally the customers own the company, I think is remarkable. People are gonna tell this story of this transaction for a long time. Because I think it exemplifies so many really fundamental things about what makes a business work. And I just really grateful that you took the time to share it on our on the show and to have a chat with me about it when you could have been doing other things.

SPEAKER_01 1:04:27

So my pleasure. I I appreciate the opportunity. If someone is listening and they take the full hour plus or whatever, right, I hope it makes some form of impact in how they think about, you know, the the the the operas in front of them. One thing that, you know, we were a private company, uh, we are a private company until the deal closes. We're a totally separate company, so still still some time. Uh and uh one one thing we didn't talk a ton about, but it'd be useful for any entrepreneur who's building, is build a great company. You know, forget about like what your exit will be, like build a great company. Um and it's that's probably one of the things written the least about about altruist. Uh and part and part of it's our own fault. Like as a private company, we didn't really want to uh invite a lot of new competition. So we thought let's just kind of quietly go do our thing. We never had an issue raising capital, so we never had to go climb the mountaintop and tell everybody how great our numbers were. But it shouldn't take again someone with uh, you know, uh I'm sure there'll always be some hater who thinks like we got lucky or something. But it's like, no, this is you don't raise six rounds of funding from places like GIC and Iconic and Insight, Fen Rock and Banker, like these are discerning people. They're not throwing money willy-nilly at things. Like we had to build a great business. If you focus on anything, like you build a great business, a great product, great company, great relationship with your customers, like the financial outcome will absolutely take care of itself. We we never ever once tried to optimize for that. That was never the intention of any of our financing rounds for raise the highest possible amount of money at the highest possible price. It was much more about what do we have to do to build a great company, great product, great culture, people who are like-minded, who think long term. And I always knew someday I'd have to, I'd have to address the notion of like, well, what is the end game? Like that was for sure something that was going to come up. But don't obsess over that early. Like it's probably the last thing you should be worried about, like when you're building. Um and for us, it really only came about because we are now far enough along that we had to start kind of thinking like, do we plan to IPO in two, three, four years? Um, you know, or do we fight to stay private for as long as humanly possible? That's a little different capital structure if we try to do that. You know, we do get a lot of inbound and companies were interested in buying the company, some very, very forward about it. Um you know, that part always made me feel a little sick to my stomach. That's why my wife's a good proxy, like, you know, like follow have a good guide at home that keeps you honest. But I probably spent less than like an hour of the last eight years really caring that much about the outcome. So anyway, I'd say for our lesson, like don't obsess over like the number, build an extraordinary business. If you build an extraordinary business, you know, whether it takes you eight years like us or it takes you 18 years, or you keep doing it privately for 50 years or more, like it's going to probably be a phenomenal outcome. Yeah. But not because you focused on the outcome, because you focused on all the other things.

SPEAKER_00 1:07:18

Well, thanks, Jason. Really appreciate your time. And uh thanks for all of you sitting on listening.