My co-founder Dan Carroll and I chose to partner over a common desire to democratize access to sophisticated financial advice. We came upon this mission from very different experiences. As a venture capitalist, many of my former portfolio company recruits came to me for investment advice after their companies had been acquired or gone public. Unfortunately, I couldn’t recommend anything I would use because the minimums associated with a high quality financial advisor were too high. Dan’s interest in solving this problem arose from the poor financial advice his hard-working parents received from a family friend who was a financial advisor. We both knew sophisticated financial advice was too exclusive, and we were determined to change that. This mission sustained us from our founding in 2011.

Nearly a decade later, we are extremely proud of the progress we have made towards achieving our mission. We weren’t just the first company to offer a globally diversified and rebalanced portfolio of low-cost index funds that, thanks to software, could be managed automatically for less than a quarter of what an advisor charged. We were also the first to offer many other investment features that were previously only available through an advisor that required a $1 million account minimum (and sometimes as much as $10 million). These features include ETF-based tax-loss harvesting, tax-loss harvesting within an index, multi-factor smart beta, risk parity and even tax-minimized transition to a more optimized portfolio. The investment management industry took notice. Because of our success, every brokerage firm now either offers or plans to offer an automated investment service, although none have the breadth of features we do. According to Statista, automated investment services will manage over $1 trillion by the end of this year.
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