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- [00:00]
Barry Ritholtz
This message is brought to you by Apple Card. Apple Card puts the power of Titanium in the palm of your hand. What does that mean? It means the power to earn unlimited daily cash back on your purchases every day. It means a materially different credit card accepted anywhere in the world. MasterCard is accepted. Ditch the plastic upgrade to Titanium, Apply in the Wallet app on iPhone Today subject to credit approval, Apple Card is issued by Goldman Sachs Bank USA Salt Lake City Branch terms and more at applecard.com introducing B of A Rewards a
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Jason Wenk
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- [01:07]
Barry Ritholtz
So there's a lot of noise about AI. But time's too tight for more promises.
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Jason Wenk
So let's talk about results.
- [01:12]
Barry Ritholtz
At IBM we work with our employees to integrate technology right into the systems they need. Now a Global workforce of 300,000 can use AI to fill their HR questions, resolving 94% of common questions.
- [01:26]
Jason Wenk
Not noise proof of how we can
- [01:28]
Barry Ritholtz
help companies get smarter by putting AI where it actually pays off. Deep in the work that moves the business. Let's create smart business. IBM Bloomberg Audio Studios Podcasts Radio News this week on the podcast yet another extra special guest. Jason Wenk is founder and CEO of Altruist, a new artificial intelligence driven custodian challenging a lot of the legacy entities like Fidelity and Schwab that are stuck with all of their old hardware and software. I thought the conversation was fascinating and I think you will also. With no further ado, my interview of Jason Wenk. Jason Wanks welcome to Bloomberg.
- [02:27]
Jason Wenk
My pleasure. Such a great intro.
- [02:30]
Barry Ritholtz
So I'm fascinated by the through line of your career. You are constantly focusing on creating lower cost tech enabled financial advice. But I'm going to put a pin in that and come back. I got to start with your background. You study computer science at Grand Valley State University. What was the original career plan? Was it technology and computers or finance?
- [02:55]
Jason Wenk
Yeah, no. So I'd never taken a finance class. I never met anybody who had money. My family never owned any stocks or mutual funds. I didn't know what an IRA was or even a 401k for that matter and but I grew up in the 80s and 90s. So I remember getting our first personal computer in the mid-90s. Internet started to pick up a little bit of speed in the late 90s and that was my dream, was to go to Silicon Valley, work at a dot com. You probably recall the, the market peaked out around 1999 and then, you know, a pretty major crash ensued. So, you know, very accidentally did an internship at Morgan Stanley at 19 years old. I was a bit of an odd duck in that I took a lot of college classes when I was in high school. So I was already doing internships my first year of university. And yeah, I was presented an opportunity to move here to New York and to join Morgan Stanley. And that was really my crash course in finance.
- [03:57]
Barry Ritholtz
And you were 19 or 2019 as
- [03:59]
Jason Wenk
an intern and officially joined at age 20.
- [04:02]
Barry Ritholtz
So what drew you to financial services instead of technology? Was it simply, you know, the dot com implosion and there was no jobs to be had in technology?
- [04:11]
Jason Wenk
Yeah, I still, I was still working in technology. So my, my role, you know, the internship was like productivity software, but again just happened before for a big investment bank and, and then I spent about two years building different types of technology like within the Morgan Stanley ecosystem. By the time I joined they were Morgan St. Dean Witter. So they had this kind of big retail wealth business. They also had like prop trading and a number of other divisions too. So I didn't really get too involved into personal wealth until kind of the latter. Maybe the last six months I was there, I was put on a project. We're doing a lot of work with Morningstar, which back then they were still sending out CD ROMs to branches around the country. And so, you know, if you had a big branch, that'd be hard. Who had the CD rom? You. So we, we were just building networked versions of essentially the Morningstar database. But I remember around that time, you know, I was, I was doing some like pre built prompts inside of these like research platforms. And you know, again my, the way my mind worked, which is more around math, physics, computer science. I looked at these prompts and I thought these are terrible prompts. In other words, like the prompt would be let's build a screen so that financial advisors can easily build a portfolio. And the screen will be something like find funds that have been around for five years with turnover under 100% with the same manager for, you know, for the five years or longer that's in the top quartile of their peer group. And it was when you like on the Surface, you go, well, you know, it seems like pretty reasonable and fair, but that is like, that is no prediction of the future result. Like, I mean, there's like, that is a terrible predictor of future outcomes, but it was sort of built as, as though it was a good predictor.
- [05:55]
Barry Ritholtz
Well, you have the data. Past performance is right there. We exactly something with it. I give Morningstar credit. They had an internal survey that more or less said, hey, don't worry about the stars. The data shows if you just buy the least expensive fund, that's the one most likely to give you the highest level of performance. And to their credit, they published that. I want to say that was like 2011.
- [06:18]
Jason Wenk
Yeah.
- [06:19]
Barry Ritholtz
12 really fascinating. So you never really worked, rotated through the departments where you're smiling and dialing. Did you ever work as a broker?
- [06:28]
Jason Wenk
So I got licensed. I took the series 7, series 8, series 24, series 30, like all the classic licenses.
- [06:34]
Barry Ritholtz
24. You want to be supervised?
- [06:36]
Jason Wenk
Yeah, yeah. I'm not sure why. I also like a registered options principle. Like, why I did that, I have no idea. Manage futures. Like, again, not sure why I did that. But yeah, I did all of the, this, the. I did all of the research to understand the space and I, I did go through the broker training program, sort of 20, 21. And part of it was because I wanted to move back to the Midwest.
- [07:03]
Barry Ritholtz
21.
- [07:04]
Jason Wenk
Excuse me, 2001. Yeah. Little mistake there. Yeah. And, you know, I think I had this like, romantic notion of like going back home and, you know, helping people that I knew. The reality is nobody knew any money, you know, so, like, that wasn't really going to work anyway. And really, before I even got started, I made the decision to leave and go start another business. I'm kind of in the space, but adjacent, didn't do direct work with clients, so.
- [07:30]
Barry Ritholtz
So let's talk about that. What was the first thing that you noticed in financial advice that led you to say, hey, this is broken. And I think I could use technology to build something better?
- [07:41]
Jason Wenk
Yeah. I mean, so two things in particular. I mean, one was the. Around that time there was a transition from commission based, you know, sort of sales, you know, brokers, if you will. And there was a transition to more fee oriented financial planners. And yeah, for me, that really resonated. So I think this notion of, hey, can you give people more comprehensive planning advice and be a fiduciary. Yeah. And also, I mean, I look, I looked realistically at the way asset management worked and I thought the, you know, I very much agreed with The Morningstar study that, you know, they published, he said some 10 years later. You know, a lot of this, you know, I'd say goes all the way back to Jack Bogle's work. But I just, you know, looking at, you know, a couple of years worth of research around asset management, I didn't see a discernible benefit to stock picking or market timing. You know, again, high, high costs, high turnover, high taxes, like these things all eroded wealth. So part of me, well, is there a way that you can just get more people access to empirically sort of evidence based investing, maybe that will help people do better. The other part was accessibility. Again. I grew up like in a farming town really. There were no brokers, there were no bank advisors, there were no Edward Jones offices. Like there was really no access to advice. And I could see the direction the Internet was taking us to really flattening the world. Like everybody should be able to find advice and help, you know, through, through the Internet. So really the first business was from an accessibility perspective is going to be Internet based. It was a subscription service and it was designed for people with 401ks because when I looked at the people I knew that was about the closest thing they had to Wall street, you know, to a brokerage account was their defined contribution plan. So the idea was let's make it easy for people that have a 401k plan to get the absolute best results they can from their 401k. And, and I spent about almost three years building that business. It's not in my environment, wealth advisors. This, this is the one that like doesn't exist on my LinkedIn profile.
- [09:49]
Barry Ritholtz
You know, this is before that.
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Jason Wenk
Oh yeah, yeah, yeah, Yes. I spent, you know, from 2021 until 2024 effectively building a 401k subscription business.
- [10:01]
Barry Ritholtz
2001 to 2001.
- [10:03]
Jason Wenk
Yeah. Gosh, it shows how old I am. Very. My dude only gets my decades.
- [10:06]
Barry Ritholtz
The dates, the names, just trends in ones.
- [10:09]
Jason Wenk
Yeah, yeah, yeah. So 2001, 2004. And it was honestly like when I look back at, was just kind of like maybe a little bit too early. This was like pre Robo advisor, pre blogging, like pre A lot of things that you know, just got more people connected.
- [10:26]
Barry Ritholtz
Blogging was just starting. Yeah, we went from geocities to things like type ad.
- [10:32]
Jason Wenk
Yeah, you were a real trailblazer in that.
- [10:35]
Barry Ritholtz
Yeah, it was compulsion. I had no choice.
- [10:40]
Jason Wenk
So I look the, the pay per click advertising was just coming out. So you had things like Overture which was like kind of pre Yahoo, pre Google but you could buy the keyword for something like a phrase like how to manage my 401k for a penny.
- [10:54]
Barry Ritholtz
Right.
- [10:54]
Jason Wenk
And you could be the top ranked, you know, search people. Then land on my website, which was called Smarter than Wall street back then. And yeah, and it would allow you to say, I work at General Motors, answer a few questions and it would say, here's how to allocate your 401k. They'd get an email once a month if there was anything they should do differently. Of course, the emails never said that I should never do anything differently. And after about a year, you know, I started, I built a pretty good sized subscription business. But I started to have some churn because people are like, why am I paying you every month to just send an email that says the same thing as the email the month before? And eventually I started asking people, well, what would be more valuable, sort of like a churn survey, if you will. And people would say, look, if you would just do this for me, I'd pay you a lot more than 20 bucks a month. Like that was really the genesis to retirement wealth. You know, that's even why it was called retirement wealth, because a lot of these four. One folks were retirement folks.
- [11:47]
Barry Ritholtz
And that scaled up pretty rapidly. That when was that the $4 billion advisory shop or where did that go?
- [11:54]
Jason Wenk
Yeah, so I ended up going to about 1.1 or 1.2 billion in assets. Yeah, it grew really fast. I started it in November. December of 2004 was when I got my registration. Ran that for about six years. Roughly.
- [12:11]
Barry Ritholtz
A billion in AUM is not insubstantial. That puts you into a category, especially back then. Yeah, no, inflation adjusted, we're probably talking about 3 billion today. But that's real revenue, that's real clients. What made you say, all right, I've kind of done this now let's look at formula folios.
- [12:32]
Jason Wenk
Yeah, so I was always driven probably more by impact than by like the size of assets or revenue. That company was bootstrapped. I built every single thing myself, wrote all of the code. Although the name was retirement wealth, it was a fairly tech forward platform. I built my own proposal systems to help really analyze a portfolio and then propose a new solution. Digitized a lot of onboarding to really automate getting new clients onboarded. And it was mostly virtual. So it was also before its time. The sense that it was built mostly from blogging, you know, back in like the 2006-10 era. So you know, it was a lot of things. It was doing well before its time. And what ended up happening, really the catalyst to moving into the next business was I was invited to speak at TD Ameritrade's national conference. They were my custodian at the time. I loved the people there. They saw the unusual growth and also that I was still in my 20s and they thought, hey, we'd love to have you come speak and share a bit how you're doing, what you're doing. So I went to San Diego, you know, I gave a session where I just said, hey, here's how I'm getting new clients. I'm writing these blog posts. Here's the framework, how I do it, here's how I take these people then through, you know, from a stranger from the Internet into a defined financial planning process and then a defined portfolio. And it was so structured that I could then train other advisors. And so I hired a few other advisors. They came in, they could then run the process. And so that was the content. And at that time a bunch of other advisors, you know, I'd say hundreds of other advisors started to reach out inbound. Hey, how can I get access to your system? They would kind of call it. And the reality was like I didn't want to hire 50 financial planners. I, I've always been a bit reclusive. So I didn't, you know, I didn't want to.
- [14:33]
Barry Ritholtz
You don't want to manage 50.
- [14:34]
Jason Wenk
Yeah.
- [14:35]
Barry Ritholtz
But selling them the software.
- [14:36]
Jason Wenk
Yeah.
- [14:37]
Barry Ritholtz
Is a fair relationship.
- [14:38]
Jason Wenk
That seemed a lot better. Right. So, yeah. So. So just the idea with spaun. Hey, maybe it makes more sense to license the software, make it easier for people to, to run their own business, but leveraging a lot of our technology. And that was the, Was that formula folios? Correct? Yeah.
- [14:54]
Barry Ritholtz
All right. And how big did that scale up
- [14:55]
Jason Wenk
to someone went zero to 4 billion in five years. And you know, today it's I think 14 billion or something like that.
- [15:02]
Barry Ritholtz
So. So I know that you were a programmer in college. You describe yourself as a developer and a math geek. You very much have a little bit of a hacker mentality. How did that technical. I don't want to use the word self identity, but just your self perception. How did that affect your view of. Here are the services that make sense for investors, for advisors, for this whole ecosystem that has been, especially in the 2000s, mostly ignored by Wall Street. Like it took 25 years for the fiduciary side to pass the commission based brokerage side. So how did the technology background affect just your perception of that market? Sure.
- [15:48]
Jason Wenk
I mean Look, I think I've always been a little bit idyllic. You know, you name your company Altruist, you probably have a, you probably have some like, generally, yeah, idyllic tendencies. But you know, I think, you know, I think people know me well. They would say I'm a bit of a macro thinker, but I don't like working in the day to day weeds of most things. So for me, I've always thought in decades and it wasn't hard to look at the market in the early 2000s and say, well, this is the future. Even though to your point, the RIA fiduciary channel, back in 2004, when I started my first firm, it was maybe 6 to 800 billion in assets. Today it's probably 10 trillion. So today it seems very obvious, but back then it was a relatively small part of the market. It was not obvious, maybe to everybody, but I looked at the demographics of the country and just there'll be such a huge number of people who are going to need good quality advice and planning. And that just again, if you think in first principles, which is a very common technology metaphor and you have no bias of the way things had been done historically to say, well, what is the right way to do things? That just seemed like the obvious and only and objective future for this industry. And I wanted to be on the forefront of that. So yeah, so now some 20 plus years later, the market is very obvious to a lot of people. They want to build in the space and it's the place that seems to be growing the fastest. That was crystal clear to me 20 years ago. I think a lot of that comes from just again that more first principle sort of Silicon Valley way of seeing the world.
- [17:32]
Barry Ritholtz
Coming up, we continue our conversation with Jason Wenk, founder and CEO of Altruist, discussing how he built the firm to compete with the big guys. I'm Barry Ritholtz. You're listening to Masters in Business on Bloomberg Radio. This message is brought to you by Apple Card. Sometimes life's journeys take you on the roads less traveled. That's why Apple created the Titanium Apple Card to use anywhere in the world where MasterCard is accepted. Plus, with Apple Card, you can earn unlimited daily cash back on every purchase, every day, whether you're in Paris or Pulau. And no matter where you are with Apple Card, you won't pay annual fees or foreign transaction fees, no fees, period. That's the power of Apple Card. Apply in the wallet app on iPhone and use it right away. With Apple pay subject to credit approval. Variable APRs for Apple Card range from 17.49% to to 27.74% based on creditworthiness rates as of January 1, 2026. Existing customers can view their variable APR in the Wallet app or@card.apple.com Apple card issued by Goldman Sachs Bank USA, Salt Lake City branch terms and more@applecard.com get
- [18:57]
Jason Wenk
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Barry Ritholtz
Start your day with Bloomberg Daybreak, the
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Jason Wenk
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Barry Ritholtz
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Jason Wenk
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Barry Ritholtz
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Jason Wenk
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Barry Ritholtz
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Jason Wenk
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- [19:26]
Barry Ritholtz
I'm Barry Ritholtz. You're listening to Masters in Business on Bloomberg Radio. My guest this week is Jason Wenk, founder and CEO of the new custodian Altruist. So Altruist describes itself as a modern custodian, emphasis on modern for independent financial advisors. What does that mean in the real world? And this has always been such like a boring, you know, plumbing type of industry. What was broken that required your attention?
- [20:01]
Jason Wenk
Yeah, well I guess, you know, the, the, the opposite of modern is not modern, you know. So the whole rest of the industry is pretty old. If you think about most of the infrastructure that's used by financial professionals, the majority of it's 50 to 70 years old.
- [20:17]
Barry Ritholtz
That's amazing.
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Jason Wenk
And it operates on mainframes, not, you know, cloud native platforms. So I think like starting point is, and with no disrespect, these were innovative companies 50 years ago, you know, they're just not that innovative today. So as far as like I get,
- [20:32]
Barry Ritholtz
you're saying the electric typewriter isn't cutting edge anymore.
- [20:35]
Jason Wenk
I mean they're still fun to use. You know, the click and they make
- [20:37]
Barry Ritholtz
a nice noise, right?
- [20:38]
Jason Wenk
Like it feels very, you know, reminds me of like my grandparents house in the 90s or something, you know. So look, I think getting to the problem statements, having been in the space a long time for the longest time, I would look at the industry and go that just doesn't make any sense, you know, why do we, why do we do it this way? Right.
- [20:58]
Barry Ritholtz
So you've always done it that way.
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Jason Wenk
Yeah, exactly. Right. It doesn't mean it's the right way. And so some examples of that. I think it's a Bit crazy that if you use, if you're a financial advisor, wealth manager, and I think if someone's listening to this and they're not one of those who, they'll think this is literally crazy, this is the way it works. But so first you have to have a custodian, right? And this is a place where you'll open accounts for your clients, they'll safeguard your client assets, do all your record
- [21:21]
Barry Ritholtz
keeping, processed third party who is not managing the money. And that creates a built in checks and balance somewhat.
- [21:29]
Jason Wenk
I mean, or it could be a built in limitation keeping that advisor from doing high quality work, right? Which is I think what I sort of discover as I kind of peel back the layers of the onion. But so these custodians, one would think a very simple thing they should be able to do is let's say you have three accounts with your, your financial planner, you've got an ira, maybe a Roth ira, a joint account with your partner, and you want to know how am I doing over the past 12 months. You'd think you could just log on to Schwab or Fidelity or Pershing or wherever and just click a button or something and it would tell you that. But the reality is that you cannot get that information from your custodian. The custodian will only be able to tell you what you have today. It will give you access to your statements. The statements are not bundled at the household level. And what the custodian will tell you is that if you want that type of information, you need to buy a third party portfolio accounting software. We'll send them a daily file of all of your positions and transactions. That third party will reconcile all that data and it will then allow you to run reports for your clients. And you're going to have to pay, depending on the size of your firm, anywhere from tens of thousands to millions of dollars for this third party software. This just fundamentally makes no sense at all. The custodian has all of the data. It should easily be able to reconcile that and run reports for advisors. But they can't and they won't. And you could go down this long list of things that they should be able to do. Again, just like logic would tell you, for example, if you want to bill a fee to your client, client signs a fee agreement, says I'm willing to pay my advisor 1%, hypothetically, and I'm willing to pay them that every quarter, you know, by calculating the average daily balance. And bill me in arrears, right? Something simple. Custodian will say that's cool. What you need to do is we'll send you the data to a third party. They can reconcile the data. You can then run a billing schema, it'll create a CSV file, you can then upload that to our system will then debit those fees from the accounts. But this whole process can take days and by the time you go to debit those fees, sometimes a client will have had a distribution in their account or a trade or something and the fees get busted. It creates an account that gets overdrawn. Like just fundamentally, again, there's hundreds of these things and you go, this makes no sense. Like, why is this the way things operate? This is largely the genesis to why would you build a brand new custodian from scratch? And if you were going to build it but in a modern way, you would probably make sure all of these things are just built in automatically.
- [23:55]
Barry Ritholtz
So that raises really a fascinating observation. Altruist first came to market 2020, was it.
- [24:04]
Jason Wenk
We wrote the first lines of code in January of 2019 and I think we went into beta in early 2020 and then launched the product right in the heart of the pandemic in 2020 21.
- [24:14]
Barry Ritholtz
So I remember when the first firm first launched and I remember hearing about it and the initial reaction was, I don't want to say crickets, but kind of low key. Yeah, someone's going to disrupt these 10. We got $10 trillion. We know what we're doing custody wise. And what started out as sort of a shrug, it didn't take very long before there was a little bit of a freak out. Like, wait a second, what's going on here? They're actually winning clients. How is this a thing from your seat within building the company, how did you see the rest of the custodian market react to altruist launch and to just rolling out one new capability after another.
- [25:04]
Jason Wenk
I wish I could remember where to properly attribute this to, but there's a great saying that is that first they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then, then you win. So it's not surprising when somebody has a big bold declaration they're going to change an industry and make it better. If you're, you know, effectively like a duopoly or oligopoly as our industry was, you know, almost all the assets were held by at the time, three custodians. Back then it was Schwab, Fidelity and TD Ameritrade. TD Ameritrade shortly after we launched, was acquired by, by Schwab. Really making the, the, the power dynamic like two companies that have 80 plus percent market share. So you know, respectfully, I think, yeah, like there's going to be a natural rent seeking sort of mentality from those people who are the dominant players. Why would they ever want there to be any change? You know, why would they want to change their cost structure? Why would they want to modernize their systems? Like things were great, you know, for those companies. So not surprised that some folks may have been dismissive but advisors never were. Like when we first started putting prototypes out in the public and sharing our vision, we had thousands of advisors that signed up for our wait list. Hundreds that decided to become design partners. Like very early kind of design partners help us build the platform and you know, we have this sort of very loyal base of users that are very loud about, you know, how happy they are with the product and we've, we've done this by co creating it with the advisors. So you know, it's not lost on me that there are literally thousands of features that you have to build to support, you know, the wealth management industry. We can't possibly know all thousand internally. So you need to have some awesome partners that can help, you know, shine a light on like what are the most important things. So yeah, in the end I think we have more than caught their attention. I think now, you know, there's fairly deep rooted fear actually from a lot of the bigger.
- [27:07]
Barry Ritholtz
Yeah, so you have the three big incumbents. It's a little bit of an oligopoly of Schwab which is now Schwab TD Combined, Fidelity, Pershing, bank of New York. Everybody kind of looked at them and said there's no way we're going up against, against those behemoths. You're one of the first companies to say we're going to take on the custodians because their legacy platforms just can't do the things that we can do at scale. How do you think about the challenges of going up against what is fidelity 18 trillion and Schwab is 12 trillion. Like these are monster. My bank of New York, Pershing is the oldest bank. That's Hamilton's bank. Literally like these are not, oh, I think I could disrupt Nokia with a better product. These are just the most entrenched, well thought of partners for advisors. What gave you the confidence to say we could beat them at their own game?
- [28:14]
Jason Wenk
Yeah, I think so. A big part of the confidence came from that early advisor reaction. But you know, the truth is that these companies don't have high nps. Like these aren't like loved by their net promoters.
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Barry Ritholtz
Net promoter. Okay. Yeah, we do one of the surveys every year. I know that's become super popular everywhere the past 20 years.
- [28:38]
Jason Wenk
You don't have to look very far and wide or have too many conversations to hear wealth managers gripe about their custodians. I mean again, I was running one of the largest, I think when I stepped down from formula flows. At the time it was the fastest growing RIA in the history of the entire industry. We were growing at 16,000%, had a three year growth rate. It was a true rocket ship in the sense of the RA space. And I felt tremendous pain. My biggest pain point was my custodian onboarding new clients. Again. They were making you download forms from a form library, populate the forms by hand, send them out via DocuSign at best, sometimes requiring wedding signatures or medallion stamps, signature guarantees. Like it was literally like going backwards in time, 20 years. Meanwhile, you had companies like Robinhood that you could download an app on your phone at 18 years old, have your account open in 30 seconds, fund it with $100 and buy fractional shares of Berkshire Hathaway stock commission free. I mean it was so obvious to me that the old way that custodians been operating, they were still charging commissions using paper. This was definitely not the right way to do things. And if you started looking at the impact to clients, so what is the impact of forcing people to use whole shares? Like why would the big custodians force you to use whole shares versus fractional shares? Fractional share trading had been around for over 20 years.
- [30:02]
Barry Ritholtz
Well, it's just math. It's not that difficult to correct.
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Jason Wenk
This is even like hard geometric algebra. Right?
- [30:09]
Barry Ritholtz
You're not talking about exponential algos or anything like that.
- [30:12]
Jason Wenk
Precisely. But a lot of it is, you just start kind of going, okay, maybe this is a good tinfoil hat theory here, but I'd say what would the benefit to them be by not enabling fractional shares? Maybe that means more cash will be in client accounts. Maybe they make half of their revenue from the cash spread. Right. The net interest income on cash that sits idle in client accounts. Maybe it also forces you, if you do want to use fractional shares, the only vehicle you can use that trades in fractional shares, in other words, you can do notional dollar based buying, are mutual funds. And these mutual funds pay tremendous fees for distribution through these brokerage platforms. What if they are are not allowing fractional shares because they really don't want to disintermediate packaged Products in general. Right. So make things like direct securities more accessible to more people. I mean, I just went down this rabbit hole. But the end result is it costs investors a ton of money. You end up limiting the amount of tax benefits, you end up increasing the average client account size. So if you really want to have great efficacy kind of investment outcomes, you'd have to have tens of millions of dollars. And if you had fractional shares as just one example, all of a sudden, you know, a ton of that entrenched, you know, kind of history goes away completely. Everybody can get access to the same type of investment strategies individually, you know, managed accounts, you know, lot level tax trading. So you can get the best possible after tax outcomes. You can compress cash down to the lowest amount, so you're reducing cash drag. This incredible increases, increases outcomes. So, you know, I think in the end if you, if you put yourself on the right side of the client and you have time on your side, like, you will absolutely win. I think one of the best examples of that in our industry is vanguard. Like what they did, they were laughed at for decades, a long time, you know, and they didn't even really reach massive scale for 25, 30 years into their journey. But I think again, if you just put yourself on the right side of the client, the end client, hey, we're going to do things that objectively and obviously produce better outcomes on an after fee, after tax, after cash drag basis. We're going to provide delightful experiences with a true partnership with our advisor clients. These things will work. And again, I think you have to have a certain amount of craziness. One of our early investors you might know, Omani Carson, formerly known as Ron
- [32:38]
Barry Ritholtz
Carson is his new new name, post retirement name.
- [32:42]
Jason Wenk
And I love him dearly. But I remember I met him very early in building Altruist and I, we met for coffee in Venice, California, where the company was started. And Omani, you know, looks at me after I explained the company and he's like, that's the. And you know, pardon my French here, but he's like, you know, this is the craziest effing idea I've ever heard. I'm in, like, how do I give you part of. I think there's a certain number of people who just like, we've been doing this a long time. You eventually become numb to the status quo. The status quo was totally shitty, right. It was not good for anybody. Right. And so except for the custodians, yeah, there was one party that really was happy with the status quo.
- [33:20]
Barry Ritholtz
Right.
- [33:20]
Jason Wenk
And so I think as soon as we shed a little bit of light, now there's a ton of challenges you have to overcome. But again, there's no doubt in my mind this was going to work. When I started.
- [33:27]
Barry Ritholtz
You mentioned Robinhood and zero commission, which I want to say was 2014 or 2015. Then Schwab rolled out, you know, commission free trading in 2019. What did that shift in cost structure due to the relationship between investors and custodians, advisors and custodians. Did that change the way everybody looked at this or was this just okay, I guess this is an even lower margin business?
- [33:58]
Jason Wenk
Yes, I think that's a, I think it's a huge misconception, you know, so what's interesting is that I wrote this piece in 2018 and you know, we had one of our designers kind of draw infographic kind of behind it. And it was the classic sort of tip of the iceberg where we showed the, you know, what you see above the water line and then what exists below the water line.
- [34:19]
Barry Ritholtz
I just did one of those two weeks ago and.
- [34:22]
Jason Wenk
Great metaphor. You know, it, it really is just
- [34:25]
Barry Ritholtz
so perfect to like, hey, here's what you're focusing on. But you got to look at the things that matter even more.
- [34:31]
Jason Wenk
So we did this for custodians, right. And, and the, the thing people saw was the commission. So there was this belief and advisors even didn't know, you know, the facts. They would go to clients and say, hey, when you work with us and our independent third party custodian, here's how they get paid. They get paid $7. If you do a trade. It's a pretty cheap price.
- [34:52]
Barry Ritholtz
What about payment for order flow?
- [34:54]
Jason Wenk
Correct.
- [34:55]
Barry Ritholtz
I mean, the big money is the commission is just a break even 100%. Right.
- [34:59]
Jason Wenk
If you look at the big public companies that were in the space, they were making maybe 5 to 10% of the revenue is from, from transactions. And commissions were maybe half of the transaction revenue. Right.
- [35:10]
Barry Ritholtz
The transaction before we get to the float, which everybody loves.
- [35:14]
Jason Wenk
So there's, there's a ton of like on things that I'd say historically been ignored or unknown. The biggest revelation when everybody went commission free was people started asking the question, well, how the heck do you make money? Like how does this business actually work if you're giving away everything for free? Only then did people start to go, oh, wait a minute, like that wasn't even how you made money. That was literally like just a complete smoke and mirrors way to fool me into believing you only made $7 a trade when the reality was all of the real money was made by paying me 0.01% interest on my idle cash, making me trade whole shares, which makes me have more cash in my account than I really should. Making me buy these different funds that all have bunch of conflicts of interest through all of their various forms of 12 B1 and 15 C3 revenue sharing agreements. Very esoteric stuff that very few people ever talk about. To your point on float and liquidity through Pfaff payment for order flow, it really opened everyone's eyes into the fact that the clearing and custody business, turns out it wasn't a high scale low margin business at all. In fact it was a very high, you know, margin business. And that was just one kind of irrelevant piece that, you know, confused people into believing that was the full, full price of admission.
- [36:36]
Barry Ritholtz
I recall a couple of years ago it was after Schwab went free commission, zero commission, free trading. I don't remember if it was it was TD or Schwab that one of the public companies in a quarterly earnings 57% of their gross came from. The float came from what they got paid. The difference between what they were paying investors, point zero, whatever and the actual rate that they could generate internally. How does, how does altruist deal with that?
- [37:15]
Jason Wenk
So I think the key is doing whatever you're doing transparently and whenever you can, giving as much of the economics to the client. So I'm a big believer in, you know, the flywheel kind of made popular by Good to Great, one of my favorite books and you know our flywheel is that the first spoke is invest in innovation that drives better outcomes for advisors. The second is invest innovation that drives better outcomes for end consumers, the end client. If we do those two things, it will drive the highest satisfaction amongst our user base. This will increase the amount of assets on our platform, which gives us the scale to invest more in innovation which drives better outcomes for advisors, better outcomes for clients. If you're going to do that, you have to earn revenue, of course. But in our case we built a very integrated wealth platform. So yes, we have custody and clearing revenue. We make money on net interest income, the float if you will. We make some revenue on payment for order flow. But we built what's called the Wheel order routing system. It's 100% optimized to drive the best possible execution for every single client transaction. If we happen to get a better execution through Citadel or Jane street or whomever, we might make a tiny amount like literally measured in fractions of basis Points Mills. It's the lowest amount of revenue we earn. But like there is something there. We do earn money again on float, but we offer fractional shares so we have the lowest cash holdings in the entire industry. People can hold virtually nothing. We also have some earnings from things like mutual funds, but we have the lowest amount of mutual funds in the entire industry because we offer fractional shares. So people are who can buy ETFs, they can buy individual securities. So we have very, very little in way of rev share through fund companies. But there's definitely money that is made at that clearing layer. Where we've really innovated is that we also do all of the software layer, you know, for advisors, we offer an asset management layer for advisors. So each kind of component of the Altrus business is generally going to be 60 to 80% cheaper than if these things were bought individually. So you may recall, you know, when I shared the story about how you go to a custodian, you say, why can't you do my fee billing? That makes no sense if you buy a third party software. We built all of these things natively and most of them are either free or very low cost because we have this sort of benefit, if you will, of stacking the various forms of services that advisors and their clients need on a modern platform. Correct. And we do it with I'd say fairly insane amounts of automation. So the kind of knock I made on using PDFs, like there's no PDFs necessary at Altruist.
- [39:56]
Barry Ritholtz
You're not exporting CSVs and then having to upload it to Claude to get an ROI on a quarter or a year.
- [40:04]
Jason Wenk
100%. Yeah. You can open an entire family's accounts, do all of their account transfers, link all their bank accounts and do the whole thing in under two minutes. The accounts are being real time validated, the transfers are being real time validated. 98 +% of these workflows, there's no human being ever involved in them. So every time we build a new innovation or automation, we're able to operate with a much higher amount of operating leverage than anyone else in the industry. This allows us to invest back into more innovation which allows us to offer more services at lower price points. So look, we earn revenue just like everyone else does. I think one interesting tidbit we don't talk a lot about, but is the fact that on the aggregate Altruist earns more revenue than I believe any other RA custodian on a per dollar basis means per dollar. On our platform. We earn more revenue than the big players. And it's not because we charge more. In fact, we have the lowest fee schedule in the entire industry. But it's because we do more for those advisors than just provide custody and clearing. We're offering software and services, AI products, asset management services, automations around things like, like tax management and tax loss harvesting. So because people use more surface area, we end up having in more and more diverse revenue as a business. And we have much better operating leverage because we have so much automation that we don't have to hire a lot of people to actually offer this at scale. So these are a lot of the benefits to modern, right? You do it this way in this day and age, you're not going to build the same way you would if you did it 50 years ago.
- [41:33]
Barry Ritholtz
You're earning more revenue as the custodian per dollar on the platform, yet at the same time the advisor is paying less costs per dollar on the platform because they're not working with five or ten third party add ons. It's just one turnkey solution, correct?
- [41:52]
Jason Wenk
Yeah, it's material. And consumers, you know, consumers, if using the platform correctly, are getting better results as well. So because they don't have things like cash drag, because they can be more fully invested, because they can reduce the need for third party investment products, they can hold securities directly on the platform, reducing expense ratios. Because we have automation on tax management, they can drive down the tax consequences of investing materially. So again, it's one of these things where it almost sounds too good to be true, right? But like yes, advisors should be able to run more efficient, better businesses. We can have a great business and consumers can win too. Like that is very much a real possibility. There doesn't have to be a loser. It's a win win system.
- [42:36]
Barry Ritholtz
Let's talk about AI and automation and your platform, Hazel. I know my team loves it. Everybody is super, super positive about it. Is Hazel a standalone AI bed? Is it part of the long term vision? Is it planning and and custody, custody, ship and other services as one seamless workflow on a single platform. Tell us all about Hazel.
- [43:03]
Jason Wenk
Yeah, so the, the basic thought. So first, to answer your question, it's very tightly integrated with Altruist but it's available totally separate. So really any wealth manager can use it. We have people using it all over the world in many different industries. So we have have large CPA firms that are using Hazel and obviously large financial advisory firms. So part of the thinking here is that the altruist business will eventually be a very large scaled business with trillions of dollars in assets but the total size of our industry is going to be tenfold that right? So we don't want to limit the power of AI to just the whatever percentage of market share that Altruist has. We want everybody to benefit from these innovations. And so the things that are really cool with Hazel is that again it can be used by any financial advisor or really a lot of different segments of financial services. It's been a ton of fun to build and a lot of what we're doing is just taking the hardest, most like laborious, non glamorous but you know, important work that used to really be hard to get if you didn't have tens of millions of dollars. And we're just bringing the unit cost down to like $3 to $5. So you can do like incredibly complex tax planning and do it for again effectively like a dollar to $5. This makes it accessible to everybody and AI, you know, people have their fears about, you know, what could go wrong, but we like to think this is a lot of the what can go right.
- [44:34]
Barry Ritholtz
Coming up, we continue our conversation with Jason Wenk, founder and CEO of of Altruist, discussing how he built the firm to compete with the big guys. I'm Barry Ritholtz. You're listening to Masters in Business on Bloomberg Radio. As markets move and headlines break, what matters most is context. A Bloomberg subscription gives you unmatched reporting, sharp analysis and powerful tools that help you connect the dots. Visit bloomberg.com podcastoffer to learn more. I'm Barry Ritholtz. You're listening to Masters in Business on Bloomberg Radio. My guest this week is Jason Wenk, founder and CEO of the new custodian Altruist. I've seen some crazy numbers as to what advisors manage. I don't want to talk about mutual funds. I want to talk about straight up RIAs who are your prime clients as a custodian? 10, 12, $20 trillion. Just crazy numbers out there. What is the total addressable market there and how much do you know does the oligopoly, the big three have of that total market?
- [45:52]
Jason Wenk
So the approximate number is 10 trillion. Today it's about 35,000 firms. These firms are roughly half are SEC registered investors, investment advisors meaning more than 100 million. More than 100 million. And then the other half are state registered firms that are sub 100 million. Some of those are just new entrants. Like they're just firms that are first registration. They, they'll probably mature into the SEC within a year or two and others just, you know, they operate small, independent, you know, businesses serving a loyal but small group of clients. The, yeah, the top of the market. You know, I think it's pershing gets oftentimes lumped into the big three. They don't have much market share of the RIA segment. It gets, it's a bit muddy, but the reason is they support all the big broker dealers that usually they have a companion corporate ria and so that's kind of how they get in here. But true standalone RIAs, I mean 85% of the assets are with just two companies. Schwab being the largest, they're north of 50% market share and then Fidelity being the second largest. So it's your very classic disruption. Like if you were to just kind of say, hey, what would be the recipe for disruption? You'd say big, fast growing market dominated by old companies using old infrastructure with generally low nps, like low customer satisfaction. That is exactly the market that we are in today.
- [47:15]
Barry Ritholtz
Really fascinating. So given the fact that you got to build the clean sheet custodian, you're not built on this legacy hardware that can't do all these things fast and easy. What's the biggest take up from advisors? Where are they still inefficient? Is it just paperwork and portfolio management? Is it tax, is it compliance? Is it client service and disbursements? Like where are the biggest advantages or is it just the whole thing?
- [47:46]
Jason Wenk
Yeah, I mean, so we break this down into like two elements. So you know, with Altruist we have our core wealth business. This is like the custody and related software to custody we started there. It's a super big hairy build. Like it just takes a long time, you know, just hundreds of thousands of engineering hours. You know, there's no shortcuts, very expensive, time consuming.
- [48:06]
Barry Ritholtz
But was that a BHAG reference?
- [48:09]
Jason Wenk
Absolutely. This is like as big and hairy as they get, right? And there's just again there's no shortcuts. But that infrastructure is so critical because what it allows you to do if it's done the right way, is it allows you to tackle all the other work. Right. So I'll start with this work. Right? The, the, the, the custody part, you can open account super fast, you know, do all of the automation around onboarding clients. This is great. But you only onboard a client once, you know, ideally. And so if you serve a client for 30 years, the custody part is really a pretty small part of the picture. It was a huge, you know, kind of friction Point because it was oftentimes one of the first experiences that a client would have with their advisor. And if it was a bad experience,
- [48:50]
Barry Ritholtz
like as it often is.
- [48:52]
Jason Wenk
Yeah, it's usually not fast. Like it's, it's. You don't have a lot of clarity like, hey, when is my transfer going to be done? Like, why did this thing get rejected? Why am I redoing this paperwork? So we solved a lot of the infrastructure now with our AI products, Hazel, we're tackling like the rest of the 30 years. Right. So maybe there's again a 5% or less of a client relationship that's really connected the custodian, you know, you're onboarding the client, you're setting up rules around trading and rebalancing and tax management. But a lot of the work really is all of the, the one to one hard to scale work. So you meet a new client, they're a prospect at this point. You need to uncover a bunch of data that they have. You need to then analyze that, build a financial plan, create a proposal. Once they agree to it, then you do that onboarding. And now you have to serve that client for decades. And there's going to be all of these life events that happen, all of these emotions that kind of, these folks will live through with you. So it could be massive changes in macro conditions, it could be changes to their family, whether it's, you know, death, divorce, new children, etc. I mean there's so many things that happen and advisors have to be able to react, ideally, be proactive, but react to all these things and make sure your money is aligned at all times. And this is where AI is like incredibly powerful, where you can take a ton of that work that used to be heavily compromised. And you know, compromise is interesting because every advisor, whether they want to admit it or not, historically has been making compromises for the clients. And it's kind of one of two directions. Like one compromise is, I want to save the world. I've got a hero complex. I'm going to take every client under the sun if I do that. The compromise is I can't possibly give the highest level of quality care and service to every client. It's just not possible. You can't earn enough money and revenue from the lower end of your client, you know, client base. The other compromise might be I am not willing to compromise in the quality of in service and attention. But as a result, I can only serve 50 families. And so my minimum is going to have to be $10 million or something like that. Right. So the compromise is I can't actually give my advice to as many people as I'd like to. AI is this great equalizer where we think about all the infrastructure we built on Altruist and you then layer all of the agents that can do things like gather data for you, build financial plans, build tax plan plans, help you be incredibly responsive to client emails and questions, to build a level of intelligence across your client base that no human being could ever possibly attain. So it's very easy to have, you know, incredibly precise, you know, and highly personalized, you know, perspective on every unique client that you serve. So these are the things that we're building. I mean, I think in the end, you know, the clearing and custody business will end up becoming very agentic. Like these agents will be the ones who are probably, you know, logging on, if you will, and they'll be performing functions, you know, that today humans have to log in and do. But it's a pretty exciting, you know, time to build.
- [51:57]
Barry Ritholtz
Really interesting. I recall a couple of years ago, I don't want to put words into anyone's mouth, but it was the CEO of either BlackRock or Vanguard or somebody that size was asked what keeps you up at night? And the answer was cybersecurity and fraud. How do you make sure. And I totally understand, no one wants to wake up one day and a billion dollars is missing. How do you integrate that into Altruist? How do you think about the human element? You know, deep fakes and synthetic identity and voice fraud and cloning and all that stuff. What can the modern custodial platforms do that? Hey, some of the big guys don't have the integration with technology to engage in this arms race against the bad guys.
- [52:53]
Jason Wenk
I mean, I think the biggest reason they'd have that, that, that, you know, paranoia is that if you're working on a, you know, 50 year old tech stack and we see this with like the latest anthropic model, these kind of mythos, you know, connected models where, you know, they sit it on top of some, you know, legacy infrastructure and they'll find, you know, hundreds of critical vulnerabilities that no human being could have ever identified. Because the code base is essentially one giant monolithic code base. Like it is just like this huge albatross that these companies have been dealing with for decades. And replatforming is really hard. If you're already big in your scale and you've got tens of trillions of dollars, it is nearly impossible to re platform and go from Physical mainframe based technology into a cloud based infrastructure using smaller, more manageable microservices. So yeah, it's a huge risk. If I was running a giant old bank or brokerage, I would have the same probably primary paranoia. If you're building today, you know, the best defense is oftentimes a strong offense. So why not just build again in first principles a bunch of protocols to make it much harder for bad actors to even get in the door. And this is like overstating the obvious, but just having like modern multi factor authentication and requirement of security keys, even eliminating some of the highest risk, like for example, like phone calls are a lot easier to dupe ironically than is a properly built multi factor authentication program. So I think there's a lot that will change. We don't rest on the fact that, oh, we're a tech company, therefore we're impenetrable. Of course we have bad actors trying to come after our clients all the time. I think that if you're not building especially AI that can help identify other AI and other bad actors, you're in a bit of a quandary. And it's really hard to do that if your core platform again has tens of millions of lines of code written in languages that you know, honestly nobody uses and hasn't used for decades. That is a major problem with financial services.
- [55:04]
Barry Ritholtz
So you've raised a decent amount of venture capital money. I want to say the 2025 Series F gave you just under $2 billion valuation. I think I'm in the Series Fe.
- [55:16]
Jason Wenk
I don't remember. Correct.
- [55:17]
Barry Ritholtz
Last year. Discuss the need for capital to build out. And we're not talking about the hyperscalers that are spending, you know, ungodly amounts of hundreds of billions of dollars. This is just a nice little startup that's taking a couple of big entrenched companies and working off of clean sheet. What has the capital spend been like on the technology side?
- [55:43]
Jason Wenk
Yeah, so we've raised a little over 600 million in capital over the last seven years. I don't think we'll need any additional capital going forward. Like we still have a lot of, you know, cash and balance sheet.
- [55:55]
Barry Ritholtz
You're cash flow positive now.
- [55:57]
Jason Wenk
You're, you're actually our broker dealer. Has been profitable for about three years. Profitable?
- [56:02]
Barry Ritholtz
I wasn't even talking profitable. Just like at least holding your head above it.
- [56:06]
Jason Wenk
Yeah, well, look, in our industry, every broker dealer's financial records are public. So, you know, you can go look up our balance sheet. It's not hard to find, you know, and then, but we still, we still use cash on balance sheet for R and D investments to keep building, you know, more, more tools. But you can imagine if we backed off from, you know, our aggressive building of products and features, yeah, it wouldn't be a hard business to, to run standalone for decades. But yeah, there's, there's a, there's a serious cost to start a custodian. So beyond the cost of building all of the technology, there's also the regulatory requirements and the capital requirements. So when you run a brokerage business, every time you add a new client and new dollars to your platform, you have to have reserve capital on your broker, dealer. And so there's no shortcut. Like this is something where I tell people every now and again they'll ask me like, hey, you know, what would it take for someone to compete? I'd say, well, take about five years and at least $250 million just to have a shot, just to have any shot in the dark of making it. That assumes, of course, you do it right and what you build is somehow substantially better than anything else in the market and, and you can get enough clients to run it on, but just to give yourself a shot, it's like non trivial. And just to pick up because you made a comment about these, these, these sort of hyperscalers building these foundation models. I'm not so sure that when we look back in 20 years and say, okay, well maybe 30 years, 40 or 50 years, but some amount of time into the future we look back at what were the most impactful companies that made the biggest difference on society. I'm not so sure those are the ones that we'll be talking about really. I think it'll be businesses like Altruist that we'll be talking about and going, wow, like they have managed to unlock trillions of dollars for consumers. And that is not something that any of us can be convinced is possible with foundation models yet at this point all they are are money guzzling machines that have yet to figure out how to turn, you know, sort of inference into profits. In other words, their costs are higher than what they're reselling their products and services for. I'm as big a fan and believer and user of AI products as anybody. But when we really start measuring impact, like what changes the world? You know, that's very possible, but there's nothing proven about it. What we're doing is very proven. Like you can very objectively say if we give every single client, I don't know, 1% back in economic Advantage. And you scale that across trillions of dollars for decades, you can start measuring your impact in hundreds of billions of dollars. That's to me more than like a small startup. Like, that's incredibly ambitious, but it's like incredibly good for humanity. I hope more people do this type of stuff.
- [58:45]
Barry Ritholtz
That's Eric Balchunas column, which became a book, the Vanguard Effect. I want to say it was like 2016, 2018. Vanguard has saved $2 trillion in fees for clients. I mean, that's an insane, insane number. And you guys are looking to push into the same space. I want to be respectful of your time. Before I jump to my favorite question, I just have to ask one other question. You've built multiple businesses in the wealth management and fintech space. What's the repeatable lesson that carries over from one to another? Or is each one a completely different animal?
- [59:25]
Jason Wenk
I mean these are all pretty connected businesses. If someone looks at like the evolution arc of my career, it's sort of like each time I find a problem, you know, again, metaphorically solve it, go
- [59:36]
Barry Ritholtz
on to the next.
- [59:37]
Jason Wenk
Yeah, you kind of go, okay, well that was an interesting problem, but this is an even bigger problem. And this is even bigger problem. Yeah, I'm curious now. I think there's going to be, you know, reasonably good need for a highly specialized LLM specifically narrowly trained for our industry. I'm not sure the big ls. So maybe we'll do that at some point in the future. But the point is like, there's always something that has the potential to make a bigger impact. And you know, one thing that I'll say for me again, I don't spend a ton of time trying to compare what I do compared to other entrepreneurs. So I can't really say like if there's a lesson to be learned broadly. But with each venture that I've been involved with, I've started with a pretty simple North Star, which is I want to help people. These are all mission driven organizations. I'm very passionate about that. This allows you to attract other people that are also mission driven. These are your more missionaries versus mercenaries. And we have some of the most incredible people that I could never even dream of assembling a team like what we have at Altrus. But it's because they share that same kind of core ethos of serving clients, driving better outcomes, being on the right side of the customer, doing things that really matter.
- [60:53]
Barry Ritholtz
So given that it's a huge out, I was going to say, so given that, look at five to 10 years, where is Altruist. What are you doing? How big is altruist at that point?
- [61:03]
Jason Wenk
Yeah, it's hard to predict with precision. I just how big but I suspect will be very large. You know, if we look at the trajectory of the business today again we don't talk a lot about our numbers publicly. So people have to sort of, sort of like we'll take Jason's word for it, you know but in our first five years of operating from we opened our first account through five years we had more assets on our platform than Robinhood, Betterment, wealthfront, public stash, M1, acorns combined. When people wonder is this working? It's scaling very, very rapidly and it's growing at a really really fast pace. People I think sometimes don't understand that the sort of network effect you get when you serve advisors and those advisors are growing fast. Firms like yours are growing super fast. The clients are adding deposits to their existing accounts. The market tailwind is pretty material.
- [61:54]
Barry Ritholtz
15% a year the past 15 years.
- [61:55]
Jason Wenk
It's better for advisor clients than it is for self directed clients. These are all things that create enormous tailwinds for businesses like ours. I think in 10 years out will be multiple trillions in assets serving many millions of end clients. Likely we'll be doing has capped out at 100 or 125 or 150 like those things these laws of physics will sort of be removed and I think that's a net great thing.
- [62:19]
Barry Ritholtz
All right. I want to be respectful for you of your time and I'm going to jump to our speed round. We're going to do these really quickly. Sure. Starting with who are your mentors who helped shape your career?
- [62:30]
Jason Wenk
Yeah. So Nick Baim was our first investor at Altruist. He was also a big supporter my last company. He's a partner at Venrock and he's just awesome.
- [62:39]
Barry Ritholtz
What are your favorite books? What are you reading currently?
- [62:42]
Jason Wenk
So right now I'm reading Life 3.0 by Max Tegmark. It's like a book from 2016, 2017. He's one of the, he's a professor at MIT and one of the like real forward like early thought leaders in AI and so he kind of like yeah, there's three phases of AI and I'd say we're in like life 2.0 right now. So human powered and like get to read the book. You'll find with 3.0 it's a good one.
- [63:09]
Barry Ritholtz
That's interesting. And you mentioned good to great. Anything else you want to mention?
- [63:12]
Jason Wenk
Yeah, I mean look, these are a little bit cornier but some of the most important books for me. I'm a total math nerd so I can live in a Max Tegmark book for forever. I had to learn a lot of soft skills to be a better entrepreneur. I learned a lot of those from reading Seth Godin's books. One of my favorite amazing books. Great blog as well.
- [63:30]
Barry Ritholtz
Let's talk about what you're listening to, streaming or watching. What's keeping you entertained on these cross country flights.
- [63:37]
Jason Wenk
Yeah, so I don't watch much tv, although I did watch your Knicks. Congratulations.
- [63:42]
Barry Ritholtz
That was talk about perfect timing and a fairly easy path.
- [63:47]
Jason Wenk
Yeah, perfect storm avoided my Pistons. You know I'm a Detroit Pistons fan but so yeah, I don't watch a lot of tv. I do listen to a lot of podcasts, so listen to yours. I listen to. I'm a big fan of Henry Stebbings so 20 VC is a good one. I listen to quite a bit and then I listen to Lenny's podcast. If you're a tech person, everyone who Lenny is, he's a product person that goes into deep on like how different tech companies are being built, especially kind of product led companies. So those are some things I listen to a lot.
- [64:17]
Barry Ritholtz
Really interesting final two questions. What sort of advice would you give to a recent college grad? Interesting. In a career in fill in the blank entrepreneurship, fintech or even financial services.
- [64:29]
Jason Wenk
Yeah, I think in any career I would become the most AI forward person in your field that you could possibly be. So it does not matter if you're working in sales, if you're working in tech, if you're working in financial services. I mean if you can become the person when you walk into the room, you are the athlete, absolute master of Claude for your, you know, kind of job function. I think that's one of the most important things for any person. I think young people have an actual advantage there and it's one they should definitely be leveraging.
- [65:00]
Barry Ritholtz
You're not going to be replaced by AI. You're going to be replaced by someone who uses AI better than you do.
- [65:05]
Jason Wenk
And it's, it's, it's getting cliche, but it's very true.
- [65:08]
Barry Ritholtz
And our final question. What do you know about the world of technology, entrepreneurship or financial technology today that would have been helpful back in the 2000s when you were first ramping up?
- [65:22]
Jason Wenk
I mean, I don't know that there's necessarily some innovation that I wish I knew. I just, I wish I would have spent more time getting proximate to really high caliber people. Now that I'm older and I've done a few things, I've got the chance to meet some just outstanding people. Man, if you can get close to those people early in your career, it's just going to be such a massive accelerant because your way of thinking is going to be so much better and sharper and inspired. That's what I do.
- [65:51]
Barry Ritholtz
Thank you Jason for being so generous with your time. We have been speaking with Jason Wanks. He is founder and CEO of Fast Rising Custodian Altruist. If you enjoy this conversation, well, check out any of the previous 648 we've done over the past 12 years. You can find those at iTunes, Spotify, Bloomberg, YouTube, wherever you get your favorite podcasts. I would be remiss if I didn't thank the crack team that helps put these conversations together each week. Alexis Noriega is my video producer. Anna Luke is my podcast producer. Sean Russo is my head of research. I'm Barry Ritholtz. You've been listening to Masters in Business on Bloomberg Radio,
- [66:43]
Jason Wenk
The Bloomberg this Weekend Podcast, News, Politics and the Lighter side of Bloomberg. The most coveted cosmetic enhancement in Asia
- [66:51]
Barry Ritholtz
right now are elf ears.
- [66:53]
Jason Wenk
Elf ears?
- [66:53]
Barry Ritholtz
Yes.
- [66:54]
Jason Wenk
People are getting injections to enhance their ears. I really do. I don't need anything else to learn to be self conscious about. This is not something I needed to have on my radar.
- [67:04]
Barry Ritholtz
The Bloomberg this Weekend Podcast subscribe today
- [67:08]
Jason Wenk
on Apple, Spotify or wherever you listen.