YouSaid · the spoken record

Jon Stein

lines on the record: 73
first: 2018-10-29
most recent: 2018-10-29
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“We think of our target customer as being someone who's making over $100,000. That means they're a professional. I would love to help literally everyone in America save and invest. The reality is that 50% of America that's saving, about half of them don't have enough to really make a meaningful nest egg. And I can't solve every problem. I would love to solve that problem. But we're focused on helping people who are saving and help them save and invest better.”
2018-10-29 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Betterment: Jon Stein · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I did. I went to business school knowing that I wanted to start a business. And by the time I started business school, I had the name betterment. I knew it was going to be consumer oriented because my passion was people. My passion was consumers. I think institutions and really wealthy people are well served. There are so many smart people out there helping them make more money. I think for the average American, there's a retirement crisis because most people don't really understand the long term and we're not evolved to understand the long term. We don't do well with thinking about things three weeks from now, much less 30 years from now. We evolved from a time when we were more likely than not going to die before we had to worry about these long-term problems. And so just focus on survival. And so we have this now retirement system in America where”
2018-10-29 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Betterment: Jon Stein · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, the ease of my online savings account through ING combined with the smart investing efficiency of Vanguard. And if I could just help people get the best of both of those things, I've made the world a better place. And that was the initial pitch for betterment.”
2018-10-29 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Betterment: Jon Stein · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“But the interface was terrible. The experience was just not keeping up. And my initial idea was, what if I just kind of combined these two things?”
2018-10-29 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Betterment: Jon Stein · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, I wanted to help build a new customer centric financial service. I wanted to build financial services around the customer. And I wasn't sure where to start. So I looked at a number of different business models. Again, I had narrowed down from like, hey, my business could be anything to it'll be financial services. And now is it payments or is it I want to build a better savings account or I want to build a better investing account? Well, of those three, let me tell you, investing is the least sexy. And this was back in 2006 when this was a long time ago. In the savings market, online savings, I saw ING Direct. And that's a company I had tremendous respect for. I thought, wow, what an amazing brand they've built. I can't do better than them. I can't beat these guys. They've owned it. But then I looked at investing and I had a Vanguard account and another company have tremendous respect for. I had some great Vanguard mutual funds.”
2018-10-29 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Betterment: Jon Stein · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And that was a great example of just like what was I thinking? In retrospect, I bought it because it seemed cheap. And I thought, well, there must be a market overreaction here. It was probably playing on something behavioral. But I learned that I was subject to the same kinds of biases that I had learned about in college, the things that my professors had told me to avoid. I was doing myself. And I realized through that experience that if it was that hard for me, someone who's had all the benefits of business school and a degree in economics and a CFA and all of these and working in the industry, wow, it must be impossible for the average person to manage their money well.”
2018-10-29 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Betterment: Jon Stein · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Broke even, right? I kept up with the market. I kept pretty good track of how I was doing. And I made some great investments. I also made some terrible investments. Like what? I bought Enron on the way down. Wow, you bought Enron. I did. I bought it at $11. It had fallen from like $70. And I sold it at zero.”
2018-10-29 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Betterment: Jon Stein · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Know, I opened each of them because I wasn't satisfied with any of them. I found they would tell me whatever it was they wanted me to do for them, right? So all the brokerages wanted me to trade and were showing me the signals around what I should trade around and give me more research and pushing me to the next trade. None of them really focused on what was right for me or how I might make the most of my money.”
2018-10-29 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Betterment: Jon Stein · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I challenge you to really find many people who are really good at that. I was not. I had seven different brokerage accounts over the years. I had a bunch of different mutual funds that I'd bought. I had an E-Trade account, a TD, a Scotch trade account.”
2018-10-29 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Betterment: Jon Stein · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I thought about it from probably the first or second week in the job. You know, I didn't seriously get the itch maybe for a couple years, but I knew from day one, I felt like I had been let in to figure out how the industry works. And I was going to someday come back and start a company and do something innovative and different. That was probably three years into my 10 year at FMCG”
2018-10-29 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Betterment: Jon Stein · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I found many times that we were working on projects and we could go six months on a product development and never talk to a customer. And I thought, that seems strange to me. I mean, we should be innovating here. We should be really thinking about what's the future of this industry, not just perfecting, transfer rates and default rates and all these kinds of internal metrics. But what do customers really want? And I talked to a partner at the firm about this. And that partner said, John, there's some industries that make money off of people and there's other industries that make money off of money. We make money off of money, which was a way of saying, you know, don't worry about that customer so much. Now, of course, there's a lot of well-intentioned people in banking and financial services who do care about their customers and so on.”
2018-10-29 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Betterment: Jon Stein · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And he said, I think you should come by and apply. I think you would like it here. And I did. First Manhattan does consulting for banks and financial services companies. And I never thought I'd be in that industry, but wow, I was getting access to CEOs and I was getting to develop new products and work on really interesting problems at a high level travel all around the country around the world. But when people would ask, what do you do? I'd say, my job is helping banks make more money. And of course, I was tongue-in-cheek about that and knew that ultimately I couldn't see myself doing that for my entire career. I had to do something more meaningful and impactful.”
2018-10-29 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Betterment: Jon Stein · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I came to New York City, and New York was where I had the highest concentration of friends. And I thought, I've got to get a job. And I started looking around. And I talked to enough friends. I kind of got a sense for who was doing what. And my happiest friend, the one who seemed to be doing the best, was working at First Manhattan Consulting Group.”
2018-10-29 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Betterment: Jon Stein · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I was never interested in finance, if you can believe it, since I have a career in it. I was interested in economics. I was interested in the science of how societies work and how economics is the science of studying civilization in a sense. And I was trying to put that together with the science of people and decision making. And finance was just like, you know, it's like helping rich people get richer. That doesn't seem that exciting to me.”
2018-10-29 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Betterment: Jon Stein · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, blood for one thing. It's a hard to be a doctor, yeah. And I realized through these types of experiences that really my heart was most likely in business. It just took me a while to find my path.”
2018-10-29 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Betterment: Jon Stein · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Swayed at the time by one of my college roommates, dads, who was a doctor, and he was just talking about how in his career he got to really understand people and their problems, and he was telling their stories, and then he was making them better. And I thought, that's it. That's the way that I'm going to help people and feel good about the impact that I'm having on their lives. And I'll be a doctor. So I said I've got to pursue this. And I did a post back pre made year after I graduated. But I just couldn't stand it.”
2018-10-29 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Betterment: Jon Stein · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I studied economics, was my major, and I had a real interest in psychology as well. I was taking human behavioral biology with Irv DeVore, and he studied how people think and taught me that despite our best intentions, we're highly likely to make mistakes. We let our emotions get in the way. And in fact, we will not make rational decisions if left to our own devices. And I saw that as just a really interesting puzzle to solve. And I was so caught on this problem of if people are so irrational and yet we can make the world better if we help people make better decisions. How do I do that? How do I reconcile those worldviews? And when I graduated, I still had no idea there wasn't a career in helping people make better decisions. That wasn't a thing one could do. But I liked the theory of it. And I was”
2018-10-29 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Betterment: Jon Stein · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Of your world Well, when I was a freshman in high school, I started getting interested in the high school paper. I started enjoying writing. And I got super into it. And by my senior year, I was the editor of the paper. And I interned the year before my senior year at one of the big Dallas papers, the Met. I wrote my college essay about that experience. And they published my college essay. And it said my internship at the Met got me into Harvard, the headline, which was great. It was in their style.”
2018-10-29 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Betterment: Jon Stein · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I was never good at any sports when I would play soccer. I would be the kid on the field watching the airplanes go by overhead as the ball rolled past into the goal. And I never was big into that. But I love scouting and looking back on those experiences, I got a lot of confidence out of leading my patrol and leading the troop and leading these two-week expeditions that we'd do in New Mexico and Colorado. And I became an Eagle Scout. Why?”
2018-10-29 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Betterment: Jon Stein · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Every Christmas, we'd be up there at their Red House in McConnellsville, New York, and all of the community would come by, right? They'd have everyone over for their New Year's party, but even before that, like every day, there would be a half a dozen people coming to the door to chat with them, to bring a gift. And they'd always have a gift to give in return. Like there was always turkeys for every family at Thanksgiving and gifts for every family at Christmas. And they built this real community. And I appreciated that. immensely. I also saw in them a real appreciation like this deep investment in quality. And I just learned it was there because we have the finest craftsmanship because we build things the best from the finest cherry, you know, from our own land. I think I draw from examples and I draw from their example that, hey, they were able to do this. And I think those are things that I learned from them.”
2018-10-29 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Betterment: Jon Stein · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Okay, let's face it, retirement planning is not simple. There are four hundred one Ks and Roth IRAs and SEP IRAs and CDs and ETFs and mutual funds and bonds and individual stocks and well, a million different ways to save and invest and of course lose your money. In John Stein, he understood this problem. And he became convinced that there was a potentially huge market out there for a service that could help people save money easily and simply, especially for people who didn't have tons of spare cash lying around. But what he inadvertently helped to create was an entirely new category in the tech sector. You may have heard the term fintech. It's just an abbreviation of financial technology, basically a way to use technology like big data to make finance more efficient and for consumers a little bit cheaper.”
2018-10-29 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Betterment: Jon Stein · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Been up all night. I knew that I would have to deliver this amazing speech if I wanted betterment to be successful. And this is my baby. This is the thing that I've been working on for the last three years at a BlackBerry at the time. And the BlackBerry timestamps when you leave these notes. And I woke up in the morning and I saw every 30 minutes all night long. I had been awake and writing down edits to my presentation. It was probably the most nerve-wracking day of my life.”
2018-10-29 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Betterment: Jon Stein · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You know, one of my favorite parts of traveling is getting a feel for a neighborhood, the way locals do. A few summers ago, I was in Rome and stayed in an apartment I booked on Airbnb. It was tucked in a quiet neighborhood just outside the Roman forum. Every morning I'd walk to the corner cafe, grab an espresso, and just watch the world go by outside. I even managed to chat with the owner about the neighborhood he lived in for nearly forty years. And he got me thinking about my own neighborhood. There are incredible hiking trails and great restaurants and, of course, the beach. And when I'm traveling this summer, listing my own place on Airbnb could be a really smart way to let someone else experience the area the way I do, like a local. Listing your home on Airbnb while you're traveling is a great way to make some extra money. You could put the money toward your next trip. Your home might be worth more than you think. Find out how much”
2018-10-29 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Betterment: Jon Stein · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT