Bill Harris, 69, doesn’t have to work. The former chief executive of Intuit and PayPal has started and sold successful companies over the years. Among those was Personal Capital, a wealth management firm he founded and grew to $23 billion in assets under management before it was acquired in 2020 by the retirement services provider Empower for $1 billion.
But not long after the Personal Capital deal closed, Harris was at it again. On the wave of enthusiasm for vastly better large language models and more promising artificial intelligence, Harris began working on his next venture.
Two years and more than $10 million of his own money later, on October 1, Harris unveiled Evergeen Wealth, a wealth management firm that will “combine human expertise with AI analytics to create a new model for financial advice.”
Out of the hundreds of new wealth management firms that launch every year, most announce it with a LinkedIn post and, maybe, a press release on Business Wire. What Evergreen did was unheard of. The startup hosted about 50 people, including journalists, at an immersive art space in Manhattan. Harris gave a well-rehearsed speech from a raised platform, with a presentation behind him.
After he revealed Evergeen, Harris was joined for a conversation on stage by his friend Michael Loeb, another serial entrepreneur who, with Jay Walker, started Synapse Group and Priceline.com. Loeb is also the founder of Uncharted, a collective of more than 3,000 entrepreneurs and family offices that gather for events in New York, the Hamptons, San Francisco and Los Angeles.
Evergreen is, in a way, Harris’s second family office. But as he explains in this interview with Modus, how and why he's doing any of this will resonate with, and differ from, other successful entrepreneurs.
I attended the launch event for Evergreen Wealth, which was well-produced and rehearsed. It had an air of something like an Apple event or a presentation by a company at a financial services conference. And that stuck out to me. I’ve never been to, or am even aware of, another wealth management firm doing something like that. Was the launch something you did because it was natural for you? Why do that differently, and did it accomplish what you wanted it to? Both. It's the kind of thing I like to do. In fact, we're going on the road and it won't be the same thing. We're going to San Francisco, Dallas, and Austin. Why? Well, one of the things you can say about finance, particularly the high finance, is that it's boring as hell. Most of the outreach, and most of the promotional pieces, and the blogs, or posts or white papers, they often have very good content, but I don't think people who are not in the business ever get through them. And that's a real shame. They're supposed to be there in order to enlighten the client. It's really important to present things in a way that is accessible. So that's part of it.
Part is also to establish ourselves as not your father's advisor. We're doing things highly digitally, using a lot of technology, both in investment management and in financial advice. We appeal to a different group. These are folk who are in the accumulation phase, the peak of their working career.
The demo in New York was just a small reflection of that, but hopefully, it put some relatively complex notions in front of people who would say: Yep, I get it.
Today, a lot of wealth management firms offer clients separately managed accounts for direct indexing and customized portfolios. And a digital financial planning experience is becoming table stakes. You’ve even called Evergreen “Personal Capital 2.0.” What’s different about Evergreen, or what can it do better or more efficiently than other wealth managers? That's right. There are a lot of pieces [and] parts that you can buy, particularly with SMAs. Are you going to have multiple managers doing different sleeves? And how do you pull those together, and my God, how do we do asset location?
The really important thing for us is to integrate. And it's not only integrating the tools, it's also integrating the experience. The digital and the human, we're really trying to make those things work together.
But there's also significant new technology. It's a quantitative leap that creates a qualitative leap. The words are not new, but how it's done and the importance of it are really new, as of the past year or two on the AI side. To combine the analytical power, the deep research of AI in a very controlled compliance arena, with the judgment and empathy, and that's the most important thing, the relationship with the client of the human advisor. If we can really do a good job at that, this is revolutionary. And I'm not saying we're the only people that are going to do that, but I'm hoping that we're going to be one of the first and best.
You’ve been an executive at, as well as started and sold, several companies. As much as you’re willing, will you tell me a little about your personal wealth and how you invest today? Do you have a family office? I've got a bunch of money and more than I'd ever need. So the question is, why do I do this? I do it because I like it. But more importantly, this is how I get fulfillment and the sense of mastery. I mean, nobody masters anything, and certainly not me. But as you start to do things and you say, I know how to do this, and then you really bust your ass and you do it well, to me, that sense of mastery, that sense that I did a good job and I knew how to do it, that gives me immense fulfillment.
The two most important words in my life are curiosity and purpose, and they're sort of opposite. Curiosity is: Look at all these things. And the purpose is: All right, this is what we're going to do. I've had the marvelous opportunity in my life to have the freedom to do both, and that's really important.
If you want to innovate? That's what drives me, that's what I think I'm good at. And just think about where innovation comes from. The Goldilocks solution is somebody adjacent, somebody who's not in it, but is close enough to understand the problem set. And I've been lucky in my financial career to try a whole bunch of different things, from tax to portfolio management to accounting, to electronic payments, that I understand the landscape. I'm far enough away that I can say: Why don't we do this differently?
Family office? No, because I feel like I've built some family offices, or I built one and I'm building another. Now, that's not quite true because neither Personal Capital nor Evergreen Wealth is a family office, and we're focused on levels of wealth that are significantly below mine. But still, I would rather sort of work on these things myself, along with the team that I've got here, not only because I think we do a darn good job, but also because it's my business. It's a learning experience, and I use the management of my own assets as part of my education and learning.
Have you always been the type of investor that you are now? Were you different when you were younger or during any phase of your life? Since I've been, let's call it 40, and really in or around this business and knowing and working with people like that, I've been a long-term, highly diversified tax-oriented investor, personally, as well as in the business. In my twenties and thirties, I really didn't think about it much.
At the launch event, you expressed some disapproval of alternative investments, arguing that good ones are harder to find, as more investors are competing for them, and that this has led to more underperformance relative to their illiquidity and fees. Were you referring to the typical Evergreen client, or do you think this is true for all investors? The clients I serve are going to invest between a little under $1 million to maybe $10 million with us. Certainly, for those people, [alternative investments] just do not make sense.
At a certain stratosphere [of wealth], if you have the kind of money an endowment has, and the kind of predictable expense requirements, the very long, theoretically infinite time horizon? Great. And what are you really looking for there? I think these days you're just looking for things that are uncorrelated. At a certain point, yeah, I'd say, alright, let's get some real estate — and not just REITs and the rest — but don’t make it a dominant piece of the entire portfolio.
The other problem is adverse selection because even if you've got a reasonable amount of wealth, you're not going to see the best deals. The only way you can get into Sequoia is either if you're an institution — CalPERS or who knows what — or you are affiliated with a portfolio company, or you are somebody that they want to let in on a side fund just because they want to be friends with potential founders.
There's nobody else. There's no individual. Not even family offices that are getting into the cream of the crop.
So far, you’ve bootstrapped Evergreen Wealth with more than $10 million of your own money, and I wanted to explore that with you. In a way, this is a risky, concentrated, extremely time-consuming, direct investment in a startup within a very competitive industry — it sounds like one of those alternative investments you might discourage. But, of course, starting a business is very different than simply investing in one, and you’ve done stuff like this already. So, can you describe the financial risk you’ve taken by starting Evergreen? And talk about the upside, the reason you’re so passionate about and willing to do this? For me, if it all comes down to: I can afford the loss. And so I don't do hand-wringing about my own personal finances. I do tremendous hand-wringing about: Is this the right thing to do and is it going to work? Because I'm putting my own time into it, but more importantly, I'm gathering people to the team and committing to them. I can't quite say it's going to work, but we're going to take a really hard run at it, and say I'm going to take care of you.
I think I have a better opportunity to make it succeed in the early days by having complete control. In an early-stage company, board members don’t need to be folks who are asking, did you make your numbers? They need to be cheerleaders who can say: yeah, this is going to work, go for it.
Or is there some part of you that feels like you could be squeezing in a few more games of golf, or whatever? What are some things that you like to do, and are you still making time for that? I think I'm working harder now than I ever have, and that may not be true, but it feels that way. I do 10 to 12 hours a day, and I'm doing weekends and all the rest. I just love it. What do I do otherwise? I love to ski. I absolutely love to travel. And that's the one thing I miss because at this stage in an organization, you just don't have the chance to travel.
Two years ago, I walked into the office on Monday morning, there was nobody in the shop, and it dawned on me that, oh my God, it's Christmas week. Nobody's going to be here all week. And so I took a look that night and flew to Zurich and to ski at Saint Moritz for the week. I loved it, but not many people have that flexibility to just go. It's a huge luxury. I ride my bike to work every day and love it. It's a half hour each way that gives me the physical, the mental, the emotional break from everything.
Anything else you want to say about Evergreen or managing wealth? At the end of the day, somebody who's got multiple millions, even if they're not to the point where they're going to have a family office or something like that, this is really important: A lot of people make the mistake, and a lot of advisors, I think, of thinking that because money is quantitative, that it's fundamentally analytical. It's not. It's the most emotional thing on the planet.
This interview was edited and condensed.
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