The Learning Leader Show With Ryan Hawk - 291: Andy Rachleff - What Do You Uniquely Offer That People Desperately Want?

Episode Date: December 31, 2018

The Learning Leader Show With Ryan Hawk Episode #291: Andy Rachleff (CEO Wealthfront) - What Do You Uniquely Offer That People Desperately Want? Andy Rachleff is a co-founder and Executive Chairman of Wealthfront. Rachleff co-founded Benchmark Capital in 1995 and was a general partner until 2004.  Some notes... (More found on www.LearningLeader.com) Commonalities of sustaining excellence: Intellectual curiosity -- Pass this along to kids at the dinner table Ask questions "Bright people think other smart people ask questions." The leader creates the culture "People model the behavior of the leader." "To be a great teacher, you have to synthesize something into small statements.  This helps you be a better leader." Magic 8 Ball statements "A's hire A's. B's hire C's."

Hey, everyone, real quick, before we get going, just in case you missed the announcement, I'll be launching a new course soon where I'll be putting my unique spin on teaching leadership skills to be curated on more than 300 conversations I've had with world-class leaders as well as my personal experiences. And to maximize engagement, we're limiting this first round to just 20 people max. So if you want to be the first to know when we open registration, go to Ryanhawk.com. Put in your name and email address and I'll send you updates as soon as as we're ready to roll. Go to Ryanhawk.me. It's not for everyone, and I think you have to figure out what's authentic to you.

You can rise up through an organization as a superb individual contributor and do almost as well financially as a superb individual contributor, but you have to become superb at that. If you choose the management route, I think first and foremost, you have to realize that people want to be led, they don't want to be managed. And those are radically different skills. To be a great leader, you have to be selfless and you have to put your reports interests ahead of yourself, ahead of your own. And that's not easy for most people to do, to be selfless. But if you do that, people will follow you anywhere, which is the definition of a leader, and make you more successful.

Everyone loves payday, but loving a payroll provider, that's a little weird. Still small businesses across the country love running payroll with Gusto. Gusto automatically files and pays your taxes. It's super easy to use, and you could add benefits and HR support to help take care of your team and keep your business safe. Gusto is loyal and it's modern. Special to listeners of The Learning Leader Show, you get three months free, When you run your first payroll with Gusto, try a demo and test it out at gusto.com slash leader. That's gusto.com slash leader.

Welcome to the Learning Leader Show. I am Ryan Hawk. Thanks so much for being here. It is Mindful Monday. Text learners to 44222 in order to join thousands of other fellow learning leaders from all over the world. text learners to 44222. Now on to tonight's featured leader. It's with Andy Rackleff, the co-founder and CEO of Wealthfront. Wellfront is an automated investment service firm that has gone from zero to $12 billion under management in just six years. He previously co-founded

benchmark capital in 1995 and was general general partner until 2004 also teaches at Stanford. Stanford Business School. Remarkable guy. A few of the topics we got into. Why teaching has made him a better leader and how you could implement this into your game regardless if you work at Stanford or not. Then the one quality he looks for in a person to hire for his team and just this one quality. Interesting. Then it's unique negotiation style how and why he does this and how you can do it too. Ladies and gentlemen, it's Andy. Ratcliffe. All right, Andy, Ratcliffe, so good to have you here on the Learning Leaders Show. Welcome.

Thank you very much for having me. I am curious to get us gone from the jump, Andy. You have lived a life of excellence, and you've certainly done a good job of surrounding yourself with others who have as well. I'm curious from your perspective, what have you found to be the commonalities among people who sustain excellence? You know, the characteristic that I probably most value is intellectual curiosity. It's the thing that my wife and I were most focused on breeding into our kids. And I think it's what makes people successful over long periods of time. You're interested in breeding that into your kids.

How does a parent, as a husband and a dad, how does one do that? Well, you know, around the dinner table every night, we encourage. asking questions. Huh. Like what? On every topic. We discuss a lot of topics, but we want them to engage and we want them to, we wanted them. They're now grown, but we wanted them to engage and ask a lot of questions.

And I think that fortunately we were successful and it's really fun to see. So what do your kids do? My daughter, who's almost 27, works with the San Francisco Film Society on funding new filmmakers to do socially conscious films. And my son just graduated with his master's in computer science from Stanford and joined a company called Data Bricks, which builds a platform for storing and manipulating big data. Wow. Well done.

It couldn't be more opposite, which I think is pretty typical for two kids. Really cool. When you talk about intellectual curiosity, maybe think a little bit of Chip Conlin. You may know no Chip, since you guys are... Chip is a business school classmate of mine and my partner. Are you serious? My projects, yes. Wow.

The phrase that the Airbnb guys, as you probably know now, that they brought up in regards to Chip is that he is catalytically curious. And they said that that what, but the reason they use the word catalytically curious, that adjective is because it became contagious at Airbnb, and that was so healthy for the growth of that business. So it's interesting that you bring up that phrase and that that's been a commonality recently among some of the greats that I've spoken with. You know, it's really funny. I think that most people think that asking questions leads others to think that you're not bright, but I think that bright people think more highly of people who ask questions.

And also the fact that the people have put in thought to those questions. You know what I mean? I'm curious, is that from a culture perspective now at Wealthfront, a company you co-founded and lead, how do you work to embed that curiosity into the culture of your business? Well, first and foremost, by modeling that behavior, one of my, teaching partners at Stanford Graduate School of Business, Mark Leslie taught me something really interesting. He founded and ran a very successful company called Veritas Software. He grew it to about a billion and a half in revenues from nothing. And he made the point in our class years ago

that as soon as the CEO changes, the culture changes. So it doesn't matter what you codify into a document, people model the behavior of the leader because that's how they think they're going to get ahead. So if you model kindness, then guess what? Others are going to be kind because they think that's how they're going to get ahead. If you model being an asshole, then other people are going to be an asshole. Because again, they think that's how you're going to get ahead. So as leaders, if you ask a lot of questions, I think that you're going to do that with your people. I am curious. Somebody who is teaching some of the smartest up-and-coming kids in the world,

as well as someone who has to be a practitioner of leading others in a business. How has one helped the other? How do you think about that in regards to your life and to your life? leadership, the bouncing back and forth between teaching and then from a practicality standpoint, doing? You know, that's a really great question. I think that in order to be a really good teacher, you have to synthesize issues into very short and pithy statements.

My students kid me or my family kids me and some of my students kid me about my magic eight ball of sayings for business. And I do this just to make sure that they remember the statements. And getting to the point that you can synthesize something into a five-word statement lets you execute it much, much better. You know, I never really had to be a leader as a venture capitalist, which was my primary career. And as an operator, there's nothing more important, as a CEO, there's nothing more important than leadership. So I constantly think about how I have to convey leadership issues to my employees based on what I do in my class. And we have the incredibly good fortune of being able to have some amazing leaders as guests for our classes.

and I get to watch them and learn from them. Magic eight ball of statements. What are some of those? Oh, there are some fun ones like A's higher A's and B's higher C's. Cash is oxygen and oxygen is life. So you don't have product market fit until the dogs are eating the dog food. So a lot of little short statements like that. Now, I was speaking with one of your team members, Kate, Kate Walk, and she, by the way, I love having pre-calls and I don't always get to, but with CEOs of businesses, usually I do, or at least I request it and the good companies say yes.

She was fantastic, so she should publicly get some applaud here. I was very, very helpful, and she's obviously very bright. she and I talked about the fact that you actually were the person who coined the phrase product market fit. And I've heard that a million times from all over the place. I didn't know who actually coined that phrase. And I learned on that call that it was you. Yes. And I've been teaching a course on it for 10 years.

Wow. So what was the genesis of that? Because now it's just ubiquitous. It's around everywhere. Everybody says it daily. But most people misuse it. Okay. So the guy who created it, so let's talk about real quick product because this applies to whether you work at a huge company or a startup.

I mean, this is still something to think about. So product market fit, the guy who created the phrase coined the term, what is the true definition? Well, what I have observed over many years is that in technology, and I can only represent its efficacy in technology because that's the only industry in which I've worked. that success as a startup depends solely on product market fit and not execution. You know, the most talented managers in the world can fail if the dogs don't want to eat the dog food. Conversely, if your customers want to grab the product out of your hands, it doesn't matter if you don't have any experience in business. you can still be very, very successful. How else can you explain a 25-year-old running a billion-dollar business?

They're not prepared to run that kind of company, but if customers grab the product out of your hands, you're going to be successful. So toward the end of my venture capital career, I retired at the end of 2004. What I came to realize was my greatest value added as a board business, member was to hold the mirror up to management so that they could be intellectually honest about the quality of the product market fit. How badly did their customers want their product? And more

recently, my teaching partner Bill Barnett and I have come to summarize our entire product market fit course in one question, getting back to synthesizing. And so what we we asked, one question, and that one question is, what do you uniquely offer that people desperately want? Because if someone isn't desperate, they'll buy the good enough alternative. So as a startup, if a good enough alternative exists, then the market is going to buy that product because it's safer. They know the vendor. So you have to deliver something that's unique that someone desperately wants.

It's really interesting. One of the other, I think, unique qualities in you as a leader that I've learned, and I'd be curious to dive deeper, is your approach to negotiation. What is your overall framework or philosophy when it comes to negotiation? Well, I've had the good fortune to have had an amazing partner through most of my professional career, and his name is Bruce Dunleavy. We, we too were business. school classmates. I think, you know, you mentioned Chip Conley before, that privately, that Chip was a business school classmate of mine and someone that I worked with quite a bit in business school. And Bruce Dunleavy was the business school classmate who I most looked up to to the point that I recruited him to come be my partner in 1989. Well, he is an amazing individual who is the best influencer I know because he never tells people what to do. but somehow he always seems to get them to do what he thinks is the right thing.

And one of the techniques that he uses, and by the way, it's just instinctive for him. It's not that he's trying to manipulate people, is that he always puts the gun in the other person's hand. So if you negotiate with Bruce, he will say to you, you tell me what the right thing to do is, and I'll do it. And he means it. Now, what he learns from that is that most good people feel guilty or embarrassed that they might take advantage of you. So they're not going to come back and ask for something that's outrageous because they don't want you to think they're bad people. About 10% of people will take advantage. Now, they might take advantage a little, which is fine.

but if they really take advantage, then Bruce just won't work with them. Because you know that if you give someone the opportunity to take advantage of you and they do, that's someone who's going to continue to do that in the future. So he'll walk away. And I've found that to be just an amazing way to build relationships with people. So let's put that into play. When has that, maybe you could share a story or related to somebody who may be listening, whether it's a salary negotiation or think of another time where it actually, you put it into play or somebody else could execute on this? Oh, salary negotiation is an example.

Negotiating a deal with another company with a supplier as a venture capitalist when I was discussing value, when I would discuss valuation. with a company, the valuation at which we would invest. I do it in literally everything. Yeah. Promotions. So if somebody that works for you really likes you and you put the gun in their hand and they, but they ask for an outrageous number for a raise plus title, how do you handle that given the fact that you already know them,

you already value them, but then they get a little outrageous? I know that person isn't the right person for our company. and they've now shown me that. Wow. And then you're willing to make a change? Yes. Wow. So you've put this into play for many years.

Yes. And by the way, you know, some people are just that way. Yeah. Now, look, if they were that way, they wouldn't have gotten to that stage. Yeah. So I don't want you to seem as though I'm going to fire someone because they take advantage in a negotiation. You know, look, if the market salary for a position is $180,000 and they ask for $200, that's not outrageous. Right.

Or maybe $2.10. But if they ask for $300, that is outrageous. Now, remember, I've done this all along the way. I'm a really big believer in the golden rule that I always try to treat people the way that I would like to be treated. So if you knew that you were treated well the entire way, would you ask for something outrageous? I think you would if you felt as though you weren't treated well and you needed to catch up. Right. You just kind of build up that integrity, that honesty that you expect, you lead with trust it feels like and you expect people to do the same.

And every once in a while leading with trust can get you burned. and then you obviously you act on that. But in the end, it's just a better, healthier way to live that you trust that people are going to do the right thing. Well, that's a value statement. And so I really believe in giving trust to get trust. But there are many people in this world who do not trust. And they feel like you have to earn their trust before they give it to you. I tend not to work well with those people.

Right. Agree. You mentioned values. They're entitled to be that. way. Those are just not people that I want to work with. Gotcha. It makes a lot of sense. Let's talk about wealth front. I'm curious, one, why wealth front exists, why you wanted to start it and what it does for the people that you serve. Well, it's an automated financial advisor and it actually came to life quite by accident. I had never intended to be an entrepreneur. I was

a career venture capitalist. I did it for almost 25 years and then retired to give back. So the venture business is a young person's game and the entrepreneurs are typically very young and you get to a certain age and you don't relate as well to them, nor are you willing to work as hard in many cases. And at benchmark, when we started, we decided that the only way to build the best firm in the business, which is what we aspired to do, was to have a team of partners who were giving it their all every single day. And so we agreed that if you weren't willing to go 110%, you had to opt out. And by that time, hopefully you were in a good financial position. And in my case, it was beyond anything that I ever could have imagined. So I wanted

to give back and I decided to teach at my grad school alma mater. I became a trustee at my undergrad alma mater. My wife and I started an innovative cancer research funding initiative. And one of my responsibilities as a trustee at University of Pennsylvania was to sit on their endowment investment board, which I actually now chair. And the premier university endowments are probably the best managed pools of capital in the world. But the techniques that the managers of those endowments use are not broadly understood or used. Well, one day, the team was explaining how they generate their great returns, and it's very similar to how all the other endowments do it.

And I know this because we had all of the major endowments as investors in benchmark. And my previous firm, Merrill Pickard Anderson and I, are. And it struck me that a lot of what they did was manual or with spreadsheets and that if we could automate it through software, you could democratize access to the world's most sophisticated financial advice. Well, this was important to me because in my years as a venture capitalist, I would often recruit people who would go on to financial success. and when they did, they would come to me for investment advice. And even though they were now worth one to five million dollars, they still couldn't afford access to the minimums associated with the best investment products and services that I was incredibly fortunate to be able to access. And so I still couldn't give, I could never tell them to do what I do. And I always thought this was really, really wrong.

And so sitting in this meeting one day, it just struck me. me that if we were to implement what they do in software or at least an 80-20 on what they do, that we could address this problem that always bothered me. And I thought, well, I'll start it as a hobby. And if it succeeds, I'll hire a CEO and we'll just move on. Well, it took a long time before we figured out the product market fit for that. Well, what obviously it's I shouldn't say obviously, but currently it's it's obviously, it's going well. How has it got to this point?

What are some of the keys to that success along the way? Well, we deliver an investment service that is completely automated, which is different from what everyone else in the market offers, even the people who've tried to apply software to financial advice. And that's because we serve a market that's under 40 years old, typically 25 to 40. And our clients generationally are different from their parents, meaning that they tell us, we pay you not to talk to us, whereas their parents, I'm 59 years old, are the exact opposite. We've been conditioned to want to have someone to talk to. So in our world, in which I believe we're the innovator, we've brought all the new services to market first. Others are adding traditional planners and advisors to a thin layer of software and charging more than we do for that.

Whereas we deliver everything via software. So we offer planning. We offer investment management. And we offer, over time, we'll offer banking services the first. of which is the ability to borrow very inexpensively and immediately, based on your account size, we put all of those things in software and deliver it for a very low price of only a quarter of a percent of the assets under management. So the three pillars of value are low price, simplicity, and automation. Why hasn't anyone done this before you?

You know, because it's non-consensus. My investment idol is a fellow named Howard Marks, who founded a firm called Oak Tree Capital, which is the premier distressed debt investor in the world. And Howard is as well known for his quarterly letter to his investors and clients as he is for his fantastic returns. Well, all of his letters are based on the same framework. And basically, that framework is used to explain investing.

And so Howard believes that investing can be described with a two-by-two matrix. On one dimension, you can be right or wrong. And on the other dimension, you can be consensus or non-consensus. Now, obviously, if you're wrong, you don't make money. But what most people don't realize is if you're right in consensus, you don't make outsized returns because all of the returns are arbitraged away. The only way you make big returns as an investor or an entrepreneur is to be right in non-consensus. Well, that's very uncomfortable because you know your non-consensus, but you don't necessarily know that you're right.

Now, what distinguishes the premier venture capitalists from everyone else in the top two percent of venture firms generate 95 percent of the industry's aggregate returns. It's the most Pareto-optimized industry that I know. And the premier guys do this through embracing investing in things that are non-consensus. But most human beings want to be consensus because that's comfortable. So what we're doing is highly non-consensus because most of the money, most of the wealth in the United States, is owned by baby boomers. And baby boomers want to talk to someone. So when investment firms talk to their clients and ask them,

do you want a fully automated solution? Of course they say no, because that's not what they're conditioned to want. Whereas this other audience, which is the fastest growing wealth in the country, wants something completely different. And that's what we're betting on is we're trying to serve young people with what they want.

They live digitally native. All of their services are delivered through their phone. Why not their financial advice? It makes sense. So you're placing your bet on not where, to use a Wayne Gretzky quote, to not where the puck is, but where it's going to be. So I use that quote all the time to explain the strategy. That was the perfect quote.

Perfect. Well, I think in this, is, it's, you know, I can't tell the future, but this is, it feels to me like one of those businesses that, I don't know, 10 years from now, people will look back and say, well, that was so obvious. But you know something? That's true of every successful company. If you look at Google, if you look at eBay, Airbnb, yeah.

Facebook, Uber, all of them, right. When they, when they were first funded, people thought, most people thought those were the dumbest ideas they'd ever heard. Google, you need another search engine. Didn't all the search engines go out of business? eBay, beanie babies? Really? You think that's going to turn into something? Uber, hailing a car via your mobile phone? I mean, come on. That's for wealthy people. Yeah. Yeah, that's what I feel like this could be years down the road and somebody, it just takes somebody to say, well, yeah, that's obvious. But right now it's not. Although it's becoming more obvious because I would imagine from where you started to where you are now, what's the

growth been like for wealth front? Well, we've gone from zero to almost $12 billion under management in about six years. And that's probably the fastest growing investment management firm among the most fastest growing firms ever. And it's a phenomenal business model because you don't need to grow the number of people. You start this as essentially a hobby to see how it would go. And now there's $12 billion in six years. What is the company structure like now? because it sounded like you wanted to relax.

It's far from a hobby. There's 100. I know. I know. You wanted to relax and now you're doing, I have to imagine you're doing the opposite of that. Well, to be honest, I left. You know, I never, I always thought that I was pretending to be CEO because that's not what I was trained to do.

And I, as soon as we found product market fit, which took it took three and a half years to find the product market fit so a year after we found it I found someone to replace myself and he was in that role for three years and then we started straying from the path of

what I believe needed to be done to grow into the optimal company and about two years ago a little under two years ago I came back as CEO. So I had a three-year hiatus where I was the executive chairman, and here I am again, back as the CEO, as the person who never intended to be the CEO. Why did you come back?

Well, there were a couple of initiatives that I thought needed to be pursued that I didn't think that we were going to pursue. And the former CEO was just an incredible gentleman about it. He knew my passion for it. Founders often come back into companies, and he supported that. Is he still part of the business, too? He isn't. He actually just became the VP of product at Dropbox.

Oh, wow. Well, so he's doing okay. Oh, he's doing fine. So there are, Annie, a lot of people listening who have gone from this individual contributor to manager or maybe they'd like to. And you in a way have done this. And I'm curious for those people listening, I always like them to learn, and me as well, obviously, learn from our guest.

What are some of the mistakes made from making that jump? Because I think it's a really big jump in one's career to where you mainly take care of yourself to now you're leading and serving and managing a business. business as well as people. So what are some pieces of advice or potential or mistakes that you made that others could learn from so perhaps they could not make those mistakes when they get the opportunity or they currently have the opportunity? Well, it's not for everyone. And I think you have to figure out what's authentic to you. You can rise up through an organization as a superb individual contributor and do almost as well financially as, you know,

a superb individual contributor, but you have to become superb at that. If you choose the management route, I think first and foremost, you have to realize that people want to be led, they don't want to be managed. And those are radically different skills. To be a great leader, you have to be selfless and you have to put your reports' interests ahead of yourself, ahead of your own. And that's not easy for most people to do, to be selfless. But if you do that, people will follow you anywhere, which is the definition of a leader, and make you more successful. The other big thing that I think you need to do is figure out what is your one superpower, if you will, and just focus on it. And don't try to be well-rounded.

Don't try to be very good at a number of skills. superb at one and higher for all of the others. And trust the people who are the best at those skills to do what they need to do, but give them the context to make sure that they do it consistent with what you want to do. What do you think is your superpower? Asking questions. So how do you model that within your business? what do you mean

what is your day like I think maybe a better question you know it's changing our controller pointed something out some months back that there's this

observation by a phone name Dunbar that's now referred to as Dunbar's law that when companies get to a hundred 50 people, a lot of the processes and procedures break down. And I think that's because you need another layer of management. And so you need to start to do things. You need to do things differently. So I used to spend a lot of my time teaching when the company was smaller. I learned that that was my most authentic way to lead. And now what I'm doing is spending a lot of time

codifying our context in documents and then sharing that with people in the company in groups of 10 so that they can ask questions about it. I used to take the context that we as a management team created. I think the number one job of a CEO and a management team is to create context for the people who report to them. We used to do it via our all-hands meetings, which happens. once a week. And what I came to realize is that people are distracted. They want to catch the train back to San Francisco. They're thinking about other things. They might be thinking about a problem

that they have at work. And it really didn't, a lot of the concepts that we talked about didn't stick. And people kept asking the same questions. So now what we're doing is we're codifying important issues. And then one of the exactions, is assigned to write the memo, which I edit with them. And then we have the entire management team give their comments on the memo. And then we roll it out with that one management team member who sits in with the staff meetings of all of the VPs in the company to roll it out. And typically that's fewer than 10 people in a meeting so that they can ask a lot of

questions, and that prepares each of the functional VPs to then sit into their staff members' staff meetings so that they can answer questions about the memo. And it's leading to much better understanding of what it is we're trying to do as a company, which is really critical if we want to push decision-making down lower. And I think the only way you can scale is if you push decision-making, decision-making as low as possible, by the way, it doesn't always mean to the bottom. And pushing decision-making down isn't binary, meaning it's not always I make the decision or you make the decision. There are layers of delegation. And we try to be explicit about what

kind of delegation we're looking for in a particular project. The commonality of what I heard in your response was that there are others involved, whether they're groups of 10 leadership team members, people that you work collaboratively with. So it made me think naturally about hiring. So you've probably made, given the fact that you've grown to the size that you are now, you've probably had to make a lot. of hiring decisions over the years. And I know you value having a strong sense of intellectual curiosity. We certainly agree there. I'm curious outside of that.

What are some other qualities you look for in people to hire to work on your team? Interestingly, the most important characteristic to me is success. A track record of success? Yes. And the reason is, I think you learn more from success than you do from failure professionally. I think you learn more from failure personally. I actually, that line came from Brian Nesmith, who was a CEO that I had backed a couple times. I basically, all of my best leadership concepts come from the CEOs that I have been fortunate to observe. So, Brian pointed this out to me a long time ago because we were talking about hiring. This must have been 20 years ago. And what we both realized was that if we fall in love with a candidate immediately, then we tend, then our success rate at hiring tends to be on the order of 90%.

But when we use reference checks to convince us to hire someone, at best were 30% and that we should trust our instincts that if we don't love someone, don't go forward. This was true for investments as well. Now, you should still do reference checks because sometimes the concept or the person you fall in love with

isn't the person that they represent themselves to be. And you only learn that through reference checks. I'm amazed at the number of people who don't do reference trucks when hiring. But when I interview you for a job, I'm hiring you to make us better. And so I want you to have experienced that before successfully so that you bring the tricks of success to us. If you haven't had success, you know what not to do, but how does that help me? I want someone who knows what to do. So the thing that I look for most in an individual is having experienced success.

So if they are 22, what does potential success look like throughout the interview process and or resume? Well, the only 22-year-olds, we hire our engineers. Okay. So they've done well in school. They come from a great school. And we did and they come from they typically come from a great school but you don't have to be you don't have to have to have gone to a great school to be great yourself. Okay. But for engineers it's a lot more objective. I mean, you can do a coding test.

So if they're not an engineer, you, part of your hiring process if they're not an engineer is they need to have a solid amount of experience and not only experience but have done really well over the course of time. Yes. Gotcha. No, it's interesting. What about some, I, I asked this hiring quality question to others and I'd be curious to your thoughts where some would say I hire for intellect slash drive slash energy, um, curiosity over experience. What, what do you say to that?

Well, one of those magic eight ball lines I have is passion trumps talent, assuming you have enough talent. So I really look for passion. Passion. Because the passionate person is going to invest in growing. They're going to try to get better. Whereas the person who's just talented, if they're not passionate, is far less likely to. Yeah. So passion in anything or passion in a specific thing or how to,

How do you measure passion in an interview process? For what we're doing. Yeah. So they've come to this, they've come to the conversation. They say, Andy, I know, at least I've read and watched videos, I know all about Wellfront. I want to be a part of this based on what you're doing. I think it, I think in 10 years it will be the thing that everybody looks back and say, well, of course this is what we do, even though people weren't saying that at the beginning.

Yes. Makes sense. And, you know, if someone comes to us and says, well, I'm not sure if I want to join a big company or a small company. The interview's over. Yep. Because if they don't know what they want, then why should I want them? Yeah.

Someone who's decisive, who's put thought into it as an understanding and is intentional about their actions. Exactly. And the person who doesn't know what they want is not going to invest in getting better the same way someone who has a plan. will. Yeah. Yeah. One last thought slash question, Andy. You talked about the people that are in your wheelhouse to be wealth front clients, customers. I'm certainly one of them very curious. And I'm also just curious at a kind of a life perspective. I talked with Ryan Caldbeck. Another guy from out there, you may know Ryan as well. But one of the things that Ryan said was important was to speak to people who have more life reps than you, more life repetitions, just simply they've lived longer and had

more sustained excellence than you have longer than you have. And so you're one of those people for me, as well as for others who are listening. If you had just general life slash career advice to give to somebody who's, you know, looking to maybe not do exactly what you've done, but, you know, have a similar track, what are a few pieces of advice you would give? them here to close. Seek out experts. You know, it's funny. We succeed as a business because we serve a generation that thinks differently from their

parents. So as I said earlier, our clients don't want to talk to someone. And that's why our vision for our service is ultimately self-driving money. We want to get to a point in a few years. where you direct deposit, your paycheck with us. We pay your bills for you. We don't give you a bill pay system. We literally pay your bills for you

and then route the remaining money to whatever is the most appropriate account for your particular situation and goals. It's the ultimate in what someone who's, you know, 20 to 40 should want. Yeah, I want that. I'm in there. I'm in that range.

Thank you. Well, we're getting there. We're laying the foundation and no one else is laying the foundation in order to do that. No one else has built the suite of software that's necessary to get you there. Well, the generation that we serve is also different from their parents in that they seek the advice of their friends far more than they do experts, whereas their parents' generation, my generation, looks for experts for advice.

and this to me is one of the deficiencies of the millennial generation that if your friends haven't had the relevant experience, why would you ask them? But they do. And it's really funny. My son who turns 24 this week has heard me say this a number of times. And this past year he said, oh my God, I just realized that I do that, and you're right, that isn't going to get me the best advice that I possibly can.

Now, the problem is not wanting to talk to someone is inconsistent with seeking advice from the experts, because you're likely going to have to talk to them. So you can really differentiate yourself if this is ironic that I'm advising people to talk to someone, given that my entire business is promised on not doing it. But vis-a-vis your career, I think it's really important to try to seek out experts. Now, you're not going to, you can't cold call them. You have to find someone you know in common and get an introduction. Yep.

You could cold call them. I cold called you. Yeah, but there's a benefit for me talking to. Well, maybe you create a platform so that there's benefits all the way around. Actually, you know, our head of data science at Wealthfront wrote a blog post to that effect. So he did that as a way of engaging me. And it worked really well, as did another one of our product managers. But most people don't want to put the effort in before doing something like that.

So yes, if you bring something to the party, an expert might engage. But if you don't, then a cold call really isn't the way to succeed. Right. It's very tough. Very tough. It's very tough. And by the way, this is true of most everything in life. Yep.

Whenever possible, you want an introduction. Right. That's great advice. And then we could go on and on about all of all of that from a relationship-building perspective to be a giver, not just looking to take, not just being transactional, but to build real genuine relationships that lead to those natural introductions to the people who are experts who've done it before you so you can seek them out and learn directly from them like guys like you.

Or you create a podcast and hustle and it creates a platform for other people to want to talk and then I get to do what I do. So it depends. I think there are different avenues to take. But following your genuine intellectual curiosity is a good one. It is it has been for me. And that's what's led to all these great conversations. Andy, I really appreciate you investing your time with me.

Where would you send my listeners to learn more about you online? Well, if you go to www.welfront.com, you can learn everything you need to know without having to talk to someone. We pride ourselves on our transparency. And we'll tell you what we do and what we don't do on the website. What would be a good way to start? Let's say, would you say, I mean, I don't want to, I don't even love throwing numbers out. But if people listening are typically more affluent and ambitious and do, do relatively well financially. And let's say they have an extra 10 grand that's with a financial advisor or, I don't know, in a checking account that should be growing at a higher rate.

Is there a way to then invest that? with you guys that could be beneficial and how would it be beneficial to do that? Why would, and as simplistic terms as possible, why would that be beneficial for somebody listening? Well, first of all, you typically need a million dollars to qualify for an advisor if you wanted to talk to someone. So to get access to a quality advisor, you need a million dollars. So you couldn't have, it's very, very unlikely that you would have $10,000 with an advisor. In our case, our clients are typically either reluctant to it. selfers, meaning because they can't afford the minimums or they don't want to talk to someone,

they have to do it themselves, or they're a little bit afraid and the money is just sitting in their bank because they're scared. They don't know how to do it right. So the easy thing to do to test someone like us out is to just give us as little as $500 to see what the process is like, to get comfortable with it. You know, where, where as a typical financial advisor wants you to give them all your money, in our case, our clients start with a very small portion of the cash they have available to invest and see what it's like. They see how we invest. They get to read our, our white papers or our blog posts, which tells them a lot about our philosophy. They get to experience our automated planning, which speaks specifically to their life stage as millennials.

We allow them to borrow if an emergency comes up if they've invested at least $100,000 with us. So we're very happy if you want to start with as little as $500, you're fine. But the investment product you're going to get service, I would argue net of fees after tax, which is the way that you should measure your investment is better than what you're going to find if you went to Goldman Sachs or Morgan Stanley as a private wealth management client. So just try it before you buy it like everything else you do on the internet. Yeah, try it out. I love it, man.

Well, Andy, thanks again for being here, man. I really appreciate it. And I'd love to continue our dialogue as we both progress, man. I would really appreciate that. All right. Thanks. Thank you. All right.

That was an interesting talk. with Andy. I appreciate his candor and willingness to be open and share his thoughts. I hope you enjoyed it. If so, I'd love it if you would write a review, subscribe and rate the show in iTunes Apple Podcasts. That's write a review, subscribe and rate the show. Hopefully five stars in iTunes Apple Podcasts really helps spread the message worldwide and continues to give me the opportunity to do what I love on a daily basis. Thank you so much. for giving me this opportunity. I will see you next week. Can't wait. This episode is once again brought you by Gusto. Gusto offers modern, easy payroll, benefits, and HR to small businesses across

the country. They were even named Best Online Payroll by PCMag. And as a listener of the Learning Leader Show, you'll get three months free when you run your first payroll. Sign up and give it a try at gusto.com slash leader. That's G-U-S-T-O-com slash leader.