[bfrink]

I think perhaps the worst thing about Addepar is the way it sells itself to prospective (inevitably young) employees: that's it's on a mission to "fix finance." While there are some operational inefficiencies to be alleviated in the wealth management performance reporting space, the savings from which might at some point be passed along to asset owners, the actual result of Addepar's work, at least in the short term, is much less grandiose. I would characterize Addepar's effects as enabling wealth managers to continue to capture more of this value as you point out, while also assuring tax-efficient inter-generational wealth transfer.

This is perhaps a cynical and short-sighted view of Addepar (and I've been told as much by Addepar's management), but based on my experience in the investment management industry, I feel it's more true than false.

[dcposch]

I think your criticism of startups overselling themselves to college grads is fair.

However, I don't know if Addepar is more guilty of this than any other local tech venture. It's an industry wide issue.

Just curious, did you previously work there? Your only HN submission was over a year ago, and it was an obscure news article about Addepar cutting sales staff:

https://news.ycombinator.com/submitted?id=bfrink

> While there are some operational inefficiencies to be alleviated in the wealth management performance reporting space

Addepar already does more than just "wealth management performance reporting".

And all successful startups, as far as I can tell, start by shipping something simpler and smaller than their ultimate vision.

Facebook started as Thefacebook. It was a PHP+MySQL site that had the names of your classmates, profile pics, and a Poke button.

[bfrink]

I think there are other wealth management-related startups that are actually changing the paradigm, e.g., Wealthfront, whereas (to the extent of my knowledge) Addepar is helping the incumbents in the space continue to capture fees in excess of their value add (your original point). Relative to other local firms, Addepar operates at an information asymmetry advantage - the finance and especially wealth management industry is less well understood by the average CMU SCS graduate than, say, the social media industry. I think Addepar exploits this.

Of course everyone starts smaller than their end state, but as far as I can tell, Addepar still focuses on client reporting. There's a lot of data aggregation, etc., that goes into that, but from their website: "Addepar gives you a competitive advantage. By eliminating the manual burden of aggregating your financial information, and making it easy to generate customized reports in just seconds, we free you up to spend more time designing and advising on client investment strategies." If there's more there, like portfolio construction/rebalancing, order generation and execution management, clearing and settlement, etc., it's not easy to apprehend from publicly available information.

Look, I think Addepar is amazingly beautiful software, exceedingly well executed (though it may be pearls before swine.) It also has tremendous hype (which is often seen as an unalloyed good in the Valley). Is it a viable business? Is it revolutionary, or is it a much-better executed Advent with the advantages of no legacy code- and userbase? I think those are interesting questions.