Wealthfront

“Worldfront is an interesting one because one of the things they were trying to do, they were one of the first customers that wanted to actually do product testing. That goes beyond just asking people what they think about, let's say, behavior experiments and s…”

“It's a deeply broken IPO. You know, it's trading down what? 30 or 40% from its IPO and it's subscale. Like it's worse. It's subscale, right?”

“I think they will compound out. I actually like the company and have a mental note here to go check on it and see the valuation and maybe buy some, but you, Jason is right. It, it's not going to be a liquidity event in the short term because there's, it's not …”

“Over the next 10 or 15 years, that generation is going to get rich. They're going to get rich with Wealthfront. They're going to keep their money there. And it's going to be a compounding machine, just like Charlie Schwab was a compounding machine”

“So Keqing was kind of a brilliant idea that was ahead of its time, which was there. So Andy Ratcliffe started this company because I think he was on the board of Penn University of Pennsylvania, and they had all of these Public hedge fund money managers, long,…”

“I probably made like seven or eight. One of them was Notion, which is probably the best of the bunch, but like Wealthfront, it was like Notion and Wealthfront and this company called Human interest, which is like a foreign provider and a couple others.”

“Betterment wasn't profitable. Wealthfront wasn't profitable. It was a 2015 coming into 16. No robo was making money.”

“Andy Ratcliffe, who started Benchmark Capital, one of the best returning venture funds of all time, and then went on to start Wealthfront. And he was saying, you need to be passionate about, like, the industry, but you might not need to be, like, so passionate…”

“What Keqing had accidentally discovered was that the marketplace attracted do-it-yourselfers, but do-it-yourselfers have a problem. They don't want to put money into your system. They want to do it themselves. And by the way, they don't really want to pay anyt…”

“The contrarian play behind Wealthfront was that people assumed that delegators wanted to work with people, and that do-it-yourselfers would do stuff online, do it themselves. And Wealthfront, no, no, actually, there's a new generation of people. They are very …”

“Wealthfront was the first to do ETF tax loss harvesting automated. And then we did direct indexing. Direct indexing is so hot right now in the industry. It's 20, 24. Direct indexing is so hot. We launched it the end of 2013, my first year there, because it was…”

“I'm just gonna call fintech one-oh kind of what happened in the last 10 years. It was very much single player games. It made it very hard for fintech companies to authentically design products that had distribution built in that would lead to other people beca…”

“I became president and was next in line to be CEO before I had a health scare with my heart that led to me stepping away from the company because I knew I couldn't take on the CEO position.”

“And so we, what we found was it was a win in terms of it moved a lot of metrics for saving more money, increasing, you know, contributions and that kind of stuff, but it didn't become this growth channel. Which Andy would say product market fit is exponential …”

“Wealthfront has said, you know, one of their key insights was when people dropped out of the flow, you know, normally they would just put people back at the beginning. That's really frustrating. If you can put people back where they landed, they're more likely…”

“And so eventually what we did at the Wealthfront in the early days of Wealthfront is I was the VP of growth, but at one point we said, you know what, the best thing for our business at this point is to shut down growth. And in its wake, Replace it with another…”

“So basically what we're trying to do is take the financial services that are delivered to the very wealthy through people called private wealth managers, automate those services and software so we can deliver it for account minimums of as low as 500 dollars, a…”

“So even our closest competitor, which was pure software, has given it up, and they now have married advisors or planners to their software.”

“I'd rather that we build something that's great or superb for 70% of our clients and shitty for 30 than something that's pretty good for a hundred.”

“We will purposely piss people off With what we do if it serves our core target audience.”

“So this is like companies like Wealthfront and Betterment, which are doing a better job and arguably than some financial advisors and charging a lot less because it turns out that software can do a better job of that.”

“Vanguard keeps its lead. Vanguard's done a great job of having a an investment. What most, most people don't spend a lot of time and attention on the cost associated with and having a low cost solution like Vanguard has been a very good, done a very good job o…”

“In the wealth tech space, that's the one of the ones I think is going to be a little bit slower to ramp, but has probably the most staying power long-term because you just keep piling assets on top of each other over the years and the stickiness level over som…”

“Once you get some empirical evidence that these robo-advisor platforms and the value of the lower fees and the tax harvesting and things like that are super, you know powerful over the long haul, you know, that empirical data is going to really propel people t…”

“It's more.”

“In just three years, Wealthfront amassed over two billion dollars in assets under management.”

“With software, we could do an eighty-twenty on what the endowments do and deliver their capabilities to the masses”

“He's been an investor in my two venture capital firms. And when he heard about Wealthfront, he said, you know, I think this is the best way to manage assets other than perhaps the top 10 endowments in the world.”

“Well, the way that we allocate assets or the way that we generate our investment mix is based on the same techniques that he uses. He has access to alternative assets, which we do not because you need to be an accredited investor to access that, but the same m…”

“And the reason is that we're able to do things in software with regard to minimizing your taxes that Vanguard cannot. And the benefit of that tax minimization is worth at least six to eight times what we charge in fees.”

“And if you do tax loss harvesting just at year end, according to our research, that can add about .6% to your annual after tax return. But by looking for these losses daily, it can add, as I said, one and a half to two percent.”

“About 4.4 billion.”

“It's around a 100,000 clients right now.”

“Well, actually we manage the first 10,000 on your behalf for free, and then we only charge a quarter of a percent on the amount we manage in excess of 10,000 dollars.”

“It's the first time a virality has been applied to the investment world.”

“Something on the order of 15%.”

“I don't know that number offhand, but I would imagine it's in excess of 70%.”

“Actually our largest while we're not targeting people of this size, our largest non-affiliated client has sixteen million with us.”

“All I know is that we still have sixty million dollars in the bank, so we've been a heck of a lot more efficient with our capital than any other player in our space, and that's something that we've been paying a lot of attention to.”

“When I joined Wealthfront there were 17 people at the company and now we're just about a 140.”

“At Wealthfront, we actually believe that over the next 10 years, we're going to see computers do this better than their human counterparts.”

“And now to see us getting close to, you know, four billion dollars and you know, over 75,000 clients and see the entire industry reshaping so that everyone's going to offer an automated service.”

“Right now, people are fairly skeptical about this idea that we can move beyond automating investment and move to automating financial advice. But I think within the next three to five years, you're going to see phenomenal improvements in detailed, personalized…”

“And in just three years, Wealthfront now have over two billion under management.”

“Great example of that is Charles Schwab. They introduced a service last year that's the equivalent to what we introduced in It is in no way comparable on a net-of-fee, after-tax, risk-adjusted basis to what our service has evolved to today.”

“And automated investment services, like Wealthfront, have been adopted at twice the rate that ETFs have.”