YouSaid · the spoken record

Adam Nash

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30
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2016-08-12
most recent
2016-08-12
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1
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podcast

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  1. “Investment and move to automating financial advice. But I think within the next three to five years, you're going to see phenomenal improvements in detailed personalized relevant objective advice coming from a relationship that people have not with another person, but with a service like Wealth Fund. And that's the vision that we're building towards.”

    2016-08-12 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Wealthfront's Adam Nash on What Makes Great CEO's & Why Humans Suck At Investing · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  2. “It's hard to believe for me. I've been at Wellfriend just a little over three years, about three and a half years. And it's amazing how far we've come. When I joined the company, no one, almost no one believed that anyone would trust their money to a computer. And now to see us getting close to $4 billion over 75,000 clients and see the entire industry reshaping so that everyone's going to offer an automated service. It's been phenomenally rewarding. So five years sounds like a short amount of time, but it's actually longer than our service has been around. And so I think we're going to be shocked collectively at how fast the consumer market accepts this idea of automation, helping us with services, not just in finance, but across all these different sectors. And I think at WellFront, our job is to make sure that we're always pushing the envelope of what technology can do for people. So I think that right now people are fairly skeptical about this idea that we could move beyond automating.”

    2016-08-12 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Wealthfront's Adam Nash on What Makes Great CEO's & Why Humans Suck At Investing · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  3. “You know, it's very interesting. I played with Nuzzle. I'm actually a big user of Pocket as well. But I still keep coming back to Twitter. Twitter is where I get the best mix of news about the range of topics that I'm interested in from sources that I wouldn't discover otherwise.”

    2016-08-12 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Wealthfront's Adam Nash on What Makes Great CEO's & Why Humans Suck At Investing · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  4. “This is a funny question. It would have been an easy answer five or six years ago. I've actually replaced having that kind of dedicated service really with what I've curated in my Twitter feed. I probably get access to better article and posts by making sure that if Mark Andreessen thinks something interesting, it might be worth reading. I love being in a world where I can read pieces directly from economists. I don't have to work through filters or summaries.”

    2016-08-12 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Wealthfront's Adam Nash on What Makes Great CEO's & Why Humans Suck At Investing · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  5. “I think the biggest productivity tip that I actually have is making sure that you clearly can tell the difference between things that are urgent, where you might be blocking the team versus items where it deserves a little bit of thought and giving a better answer a few hours later is more about giving a quick answer that might be incorrect. When you're in a position where your decisions matter or people looking for you for guidance, that quick decision about whether it's more important to unblock people or give a more thought answer, I think, is one of the most important productivity tips because it lets you divide kind of that inbox, that inflow into things that really matter to get done today versus things that you'll get done either tomorrow or next week or in the future. Or better yet, delegate to someone who's better qualified to actually answer that question and unblock the team.”

    2016-08-12 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Wealthfront's Adam Nash on What Makes Great CEO's & Why Humans Suck At Investing · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  6. “I mean, you mentioned earlier this idea that 20% of the CO's job could be automated. But the biggest challenge being CEOs is there's never enough time in the day. There's so many things to do. And especially when you're working in”

    2016-08-12 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Wealthfront's Adam Nash on What Makes Great CEO's & Why Humans Suck At Investing · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  7. “You know, this is a tough question because I'm an avid reader, but I have to go back to maybe the first book I fell in love with, which was the foundation series by Isaac Asimov. I just found it so appealing, this simple concept that while individual humans are unpredictable, that in the aggregate actually you can learn a lot by what groups of humans do together. And obviously Isaac Asimov was a fantastic writer and visionary in terms of what issues that could raise. You may have noticed that my personal blog, Psychohistory, is actually named after that fictional branch of science, that idea that you could actually predict in the aggregate what's going to happen with groups of people, even if you can't predict them individually. It has a lot to do with my interest in both design and in personal finance.”

    2016-08-12 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Wealthfront's Adam Nash on What Makes Great CEO's & Why Humans Suck At Investing · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  8. “Weeks or a couple months, but over decades. And at least what we see in our clients is that most of our clients are young. If you're in your 20s or 30s, there's a whole laundry list of things that you're focused on in your life, your career, your friends, family, passions, hobbies, social change. There's so many different things you want to focus on. Reinvesting dividends isn't high on that list, right? Checking your money every day shouldn't be high on that list. And I'd like to think that we're freeing up people to focus on the places in their life where they actually create more value both for themselves and for society. This is a good area where automation will truly create value, I think, for not just the customers, but for society at large.”

    2016-08-12 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Wealthfront's Adam Nash on What Makes Great CEO's & Why Humans Suck At Investing · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  9. “We overreact. I mean, just look at the recent reactions to the Brexit phenomenon. You see the markets moving all over the place, people asking if they make trades. The truth is good investing is exceptionally boring. It's much more about spending less than you make, saving regularly, staying diversified, and being very smart about keeping fees low and not doing foolish things with taxes. And there are some people who find that incredibly fascinating, but even the professionals who do it every day clearly fall prey to those same emotions that run hot through the industry. And this is one of the areas where computers actually can do it better. Computers don't get excited. They don't get emotional and they don't get bored, right? If a dividend comes in on April 7th, they do the math and figure out where to reinvest it. If it turns out trading opens up an opportunity to harvest the tax loss on a random Thursday in August, they harvest that tax loss. And great investing turns out to be about doing those little things right, not for a couple.”

    2016-08-12 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Wealthfront's Adam Nash on What Makes Great CEO's & Why Humans Suck At Investing · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  10. “Expensive enough that we can deliver to anyone. And I think that Wellfund is already in its short history proven that we can take strategies like tax loss harvesting that used to be the province of people like Mitt Romney and others and actually bring it literally to every wealthfront client who has $500 and can sign up for an account. But I think that it goes beyond that. You know, this trend we talk about in automation, it's not just about democratization. At WellFront, we actually believe that over the next 10 years, we're going to see computers do this better than their human counterparts. Humans have a number of flaws when it comes to looking at money, and it's not about being professional or about being a hobbyist. We're emotionally unsuited to make mundane financial decisions every day. You could argue it's just too boring. You could argue that we're just too emotional. We get caught up in the day's events or we ignore them.”

    2016-08-12 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Wealthfront's Adam Nash on What Makes Great CEO's & Why Humans Suck At Investing · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  11. “I think that's a big part of it. At Well Front, you know, when I joined, instead of a mission statement at the company, we have a core belief. And it's very simple. We believe that everyone deserves sophisticated financial advice. And there's no question that the traditional industry of financial advisors, because of their cost structure, have a combination of high minimums and high fees that really exclude most savers and investors, right? Most people don't have the huge account balances, half a million, a million dollars or more that are the minimums for most quality financial advisors. And that's not because the industry is elitist. It's actually because their economics cannot provide the service they provide to people with smaller accounts. And so I definitely think that democratization is a big piece of this trend. By taking the investment strategies and the advice that previously was only available to the ultra-wealthy and automating in software, we make it in.”

    2016-08-12 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Wealthfront's Adam Nash on What Makes Great CEO's & Why Humans Suck At Investing · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  12. “That's a shocking amount when the entire market return is on the order of 8 to 10%. It's almost half the money lost. And so this happens to be one of the areas where not only do I think that automation and artificial intelligence can help take away tasks that people don't want to do. This happens to be an area where actually computers are going to add incredible value economically for a huge swath of the population.”

    2016-08-12 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Wealthfront's Adam Nash on What Makes Great CEO's & Why Humans Suck At Investing · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  13. “Years ago. And it was shocking at the time to imagine this idea that most professionals underperform the market, that just owning a little bit of everything and keeping costs low can actually beat the concerted efforts of so many brilliant people working full-time. And by the way, it's not like investors and bankers work short hours, right? These are people who are putting their all into it. They're incredibly educated. They have access to almost unlimited resources. And yet on average, they underperform the market net of fees. And that would be bad enough, but the actual research on individual investors, retail investors, people like you and me, and what we do with our own monies makes the professionals look phenomenal, right? The Dalbar research indicates that individuals underperform the market not by 10 or 20 basis points, not by half a percent, but by four to four and a half percent, depending on the time period. I mean, that's.”

    2016-08-12 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Wealthfront's Adam Nash on What Makes Great CEO's & Why Humans Suck At Investing · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  14. “Yeah, I think it's a good question, and I appreciate the point. I don't think it's unique to financial services. I think that we're going to see over the next decade a combination of automation, artificial intelligence, real impressive services and systems take over more and more of the capabilities that previously we had to trust people with. So while I don't think that's unique to financial services or to investing, I also don't think that financial services or investing is immune to that trend. I think we're going to see it across the economy in almost every sector. Obviously, a wealth front, we're huge believers in it in terms of the benefits it brings to investing, largely because there's a fundamental truth that has been documented for decades, which that on average humans are terrible at investing. With a few notable exceptions, I mean, Bert Melchiel, who's our chief investment officer, right? The noted Princeton economist, I mean, he wrote a random walk down Wall Street over 40 years.”

    2016-08-12 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Wealthfront's Adam Nash on What Makes Great CEO's & Why Humans Suck At Investing · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  15. “So, I think you left an organization that's much stronger than when he joined it with incredibly talented people. And he left it in the hands of a leader who had been trained to take over that organization.”

    2016-08-12 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Wealthfront's Adam Nash on What Makes Great CEO's & Why Humans Suck At Investing · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  16. “Is somehow a value to the organization. But great organizations, you keep bringing on great talent. You set up processes and capabilities for them to do great work. So Steve Johnson's a great example, right? When I joined LinkedIn in the beginning of 2007, they didn't even have a user experience team. They had a couple web developers and designers floating around and they had done work before. But I came in, built that team, gave it an identity, brought in a leader for design, a leader for web development, or empowered actually one of the founders to run web development. And once we got the team to a certain point, it brought Steve Johnson in to really take that team to the next level. And he had fantastic experience. And so, you know, even though I stayed at LinkedIn and took on different teams while I was there, I think that Steve did a phenomenal job with user experience at LinkedIn, especially given the starting point of the user experience. And I think that Steve showed that maturity in planning his transition when he left LinkedIn.”

    2016-08-12 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Wealthfront's Adam Nash on What Makes Great CEO's & Why Humans Suck At Investing · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  17. “Yeah, well, you know, it's funny. I saw, it's interesting that you picked up that Twitter share. That article was written by Steve Johnson, who was the vice president of user experience at LinkedIn, who just moved on to another company and did, I think, a fantastic job of succession planning. I think the best leaders in Silicon Valley across different functions, really talented folks, put the company first. And so there's always that question. Look, this happens in your personal life too and with your finances, right? I'm a father of four. And I don't mean to be morbid, but it was very important to make sure that if something ever happened to me, that my loved ones are taken care of. I think great leaders with companies, if you believe in what the company's building and what that organization needs for the long term, you have to ask the question of what happens if you're not there. And I think that if people, unfortunately, are insecure, sometimes they think that making themselves the critical path, making themselves somehow irreplaceable.”

    2016-08-12 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Wealthfront's Adam Nash on What Makes Great CEO's & Why Humans Suck At Investing · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  18. “With colleagues you trust and respect, and you get to build different products and services and companies with them. You know, probably the single biggest gift I can give to the organization or to the team to empower designers to do their best work is to bring someone like Kate on board because she can focus 100% of her time on that effort where I'm divided a dozen different ways.”

    2016-08-12 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Wealthfront's Adam Nash on What Makes Great CEO's & Why Humans Suck At Investing · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  19. “Software through some giant military like hierarchy of engineers just isn't nearly as effective as empowering small cross-functional teams to really own the features and services they're building and drive the strategy. And so a lot of my effort here at Welfron has been investing actually in the team, the people, the leadership, and giving them the authority and capability to change things as they see fit. So you mentioned design. We have incredibly talented designers, wealthfront, incredibly proud of the work they've been doing. And even though I've run teams before, my first order of business, if you want a talented design team that works well is you have to find a talented leader. And so that's one of the reasons I brought Kate Aronowitz on board. She ran design at Facebook for five and a half years. I had the fortune of working with her at eBay and I'd hired her at LinkedIn to run design there for a time. And that's one of the great things I think about Silicon Valley is often you build a relationship.”

    2016-08-12 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Wealthfront's Adam Nash on What Makes Great CEO's & Why Humans Suck At Investing · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  20. “Culture is one of those ephemeral things a lot of people like to talk about. But really turns out, in my opinion, to be the sum of a lot of dedicated efforts that you make over time as you build the company. And companies go through different phases in terms of how they scale. I mean, when I joined Wealthfront, there were 17 people at the company. And now we're just about 140. In some ways, the growth is phenomenal. In other ways, compared to the technology giants out there, it's an incredibly small team. And you feel that way at the company. Like even though we have over 100 people now, there's no excess. There's no one not pulling their weight. There's so many things that need to get done that fall on the shoulders of just one person. And more often than not, there's 12 things that are falling on the shoulders of that one person. The real issue with scaling, I think, would differentiates Silicon Valley is it's not based on hierarchy. In my opinion, it's been well proven that building”

    2016-08-12 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Wealthfront's Adam Nash on What Makes Great CEO's & Why Humans Suck At Investing · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  21. “Responsibility at every level, I think, at a software company. But there's no question that being CEO, it's particularly acute that possibility for the company sits on your shoulders. And for me, that's been a fantastic experience and continues to be.”

    2016-08-12 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Wealthfront's Adam Nash on What Makes Great CEO's & Why Humans Suck At Investing · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  22. “Stands for what it believes in the long term. And so for me, that's probably been the biggest transition but the most rewarding is the chance to represent a company like Wealthrin for me as a dream come true. I mean this is everything that I believe in personal finance and helping people with their money since undergraduate days 20 years ago. Combining it with how do we take advantage of trends and technology to do things that weren't possible before to help people in ways that weren't possible before. For me, that combination of the value we're providing to clients and being at a seat where we're transforming an industry and being the person who can represent that to the world has been amazingly rewarding for me. And then inside the company, the chance to offer so many talented individuals, you know, whether they're engineers and designers or incredible executives and opportunity to build a company like this, it's been phenomenal for me. You feel that responsibility.”

    2016-08-12 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Wealthfront's Adam Nash on What Makes Great CEO's & Why Humans Suck At Investing · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  23. “The most rewarding part about being the CEO of Wellfront is one of the things I love about Silicon Valley and the equity culture is companies are naturally built for everyone to think like an owner. I've always loved this idea that everyone at the company, regardless of Rolla, owns equity in the company, right? And there's this alignment that comes that you're all trying to build the company together. And probably the most rewarding part, I always felt like at the companies I worked at an amazing amount of responsibility and ownership for what happened at those companies, right? Even go back to early days as an engineer at Apple or as a product manager at eBay, certainly at LinkedIn, I felt a lot of responsibility and pride in the work we were doing and the products we were building and the services we were building. At Wellfront, as CEO, you really get to not just take responsibility for, but represent the company, what it's trying to build, who the company is, what it's.”

    2016-08-12 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Wealthfront's Adam Nash on What Makes Great CEO's & Why Humans Suck At Investing · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  24. “Why did they leave one physical button on the bottom of the phone? And then you ask this other question, why did they actually add a switch to turn the sound on and off? They actually added a button. After all that work to get rid of the keypad, number pad, et cetera, and you're competing with the BlackBerry, which felt like it had 100 keys, why would you actually add a switch on the side? And so you find that great product managers have a detailed orientation, I think, as a CEO, I think it's much more important that you are able to organize a team of experts that you trust with all the different elements of the business. And very often you're responsible for being the one at the 50,000 foot view who's looking ahead three, five, ten years to make sure that the company is still going to the right place in the long term, because you're one of the few people at the company who has the freedom to look strategically beyond what you need to get done today, this week, this month, and building a high quality company for the long term. And so you tend to focus a lot.”

    2016-08-12 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Wealthfront's Adam Nash on What Makes Great CEO's & Why Humans Suck At Investing · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  25. “You know, there are some things that are in common, and there actually have been some leaders through Silicon Valley who have spoken about product managers as being many CEOs of their products. I don't think that's quite right. Great product managers and great product leaders tend to have an incredible detail orientation, right? You'll see them pick up a device, a new toy, a piece of software, and they look at every nook and cranny. They ask the question, why was this decision made? Was it a conscious decision? Was it something that came through in the process? But they asked the question why? On my blog, I wrote a piece about Einstein's razor, like this idea that you want to make things as simple as possible, but not simpler. You look at a product like the iPhone, the original iPhone, not the current iteration, and just looking at it and say, wow, they went to all this effort to reduce the number of buttons to as few as possible. But why didn't they go all the way?”

    2016-08-12 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Wealthfront's Adam Nash on What Makes Great CEO's & Why Humans Suck At Investing · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  26. “I've spoken in the past where I think that the best product managers do a good job for their cross-functional teams of leading them by defining what game they're playing. And then second, how do you keep score? And it sounds simple, but actually if you're going to lead a group of incredibly talented people who have specialties in design or engineering, analytics, and you're going to align them towards a common purpose, simple leadership techniques by clearly defining what you're trying to do and how to measure success, you'll find that the best product leaders do that for their teams.”

    2016-08-12 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Wealthfront's Adam Nash on What Makes Great CEO's & Why Humans Suck At Investing · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  27. “The product management role has really evolved in my career the last 20 years in software partially because the businesses and the products and services themselves keep evolving. And product is one of these roles where actually everything has to come together, right? The strategy, the technology, the design and customer focus all have to come together into something that really captures all the elements you need to be successful in the market. In a world where you make hardware products, it's pretty obvious what the product is, right? You look at the iPhone and you have a really good idea of what the iPhone is. But in a modern world, the cloud and software and the web, it's not always obvious where those lines are, what makes the product is a website, a collection of pages. If you do focus on the customer experience, so I love the role because actually it's multivariate and it depends on the situation. But overall, the best product manager, I think, exhibit the traits that you see in great leader.”

    2016-08-12 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Wealthfront's Adam Nash on What Makes Great CEO's & Why Humans Suck At Investing · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  28. “he hired you in the first place. First he is CEO. I mean, kind of to get the generational transition started early and get you kind of gradually onboarded. Andy and I, Andy's incredible student of business history and technology history, not just in his accomplished career, but I think in the history of Silicon Valley. And we talked a lot about what it meant to come on board and have the moral authority to act as the CEO of a venture-backed company. And I was very influenced by the transition that they did at LinkedIn, right? You know, Reid Hoffman, who I'm very close with, is obviously the founder and has been the person guiding LinkedIn since the get-go. But the way that he brought Jeff Wiener on board and kind of empowered him to run that company, I think is a model for how those type of transitions can happen. And so we try to do something similar here at Wealthfront, where it felt natural for the company, but also gave me time to really understand the product and the business before having to be the one who has the answer for any questions.”

    2016-08-12 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Wealthfront's Adam Nash on What Makes Great CEO's & Why Humans Suck At Investing · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  29. “If we could make something like this work. And over the course of a few months, I really, really began to believe that the world would be a better place if a company like Wellfront was successful. And so I made the leap in the fall. I joined as the chief operating officer to help build out the product of engineering teams. And by the end of 2013, we had grown so quickly. I moved over to being CEO to run the company, which is something Andy had been looking for. Andy, you know, it's the first to tell you he's not an operator, he's an investor.”

    2016-08-12 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Wealthfront's Adam Nash on What Makes Great CEO's & Why Humans Suck At Investing · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  30. “So fantastic to have you on the 20 minute VC, having heard so much from Andy Ratcliffe. So thank you so much for joining me today. Yeah, I appreciate it and happy to be here. Now, I'd love to get started today with a bit of background on you and how you came to be CEO and president at Wealth Front. You know, in some ways it's relatively simple story. I was actually a client of Wealthfront before I joined the company. Wealthfront, the service launched in December 2011. I think I had signed up as a client a few weeks later in January 2012. I just moved from being VP of product at LinkedIn over to Greylock Partners, where I was an executive in residence. And I love the service. I've always believed in index investing and obviously a huge fan of software and what benefits automation can bring. And so I think Andy Ratcliffe reached out through a common connection Jeff Markowitz at Greylock and the discussion started about the product and the service and it quickly turned to the company and how important it could be.”

    2016-08-12 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Wealthfront's Adam Nash on What Makes Great CEO's & Why Humans Suck At Investing · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source