Former Personal Capital Chairman & Founder Bill Harris Talks Entrepreneurship
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Bloomberg Audio Studios. Podcasts. Radio. News. Okay, you promised we'd talk to a serial entrepreneur who has a ton of experience in the fintech space. I want to bring in Bill Harris. He's a longtime fintech executive. He's founded or led several personal finance companies. Think from companies such as Intuit, PayPal as well. He was the founding CEO there. He ran TurboTax. He founded Personal Capital. You remember just a few years ago, that was bought by Empower. Right. So he knows a thing or two about...

how people are using these apps these days. All right, good to have you here. I got some time with you this morning, so it's good to have you back with us. Now that the event is underway, I'm just curious, anybody you've talked to, any interesting conversations that you've had so far? Well, sure. You know, the most interesting fellow here is, of course, Michael Loeb. And I've known him actually for now, I talked to him just a moment ago,

40 years. Wow. 40 years ago, we worked together in the magazine industry, which, of course, is no longer. You did a subscription business, right, that Time Warner bought. That's right. But first, we worked together at Time, Inc., and then he left to go build the subscription business that he sold back to Time, Inc.,

Kind of fascinating. Can we just go there for a minute? Sure. Media, the changes that we have seen in content, production, where you get it. I don't know. Who would have thought? I mean, I used to do subscriptions, right, in terms of magazines and various newspapers. We don't do that anymore. Where do you think it's all going?

Well, finance and media are the two industries most profoundly changed by digital technology. Yeah. Because they are all just figments of our imagination. And you can create them with no assets, just your mind. And so what happened though is that media, the tsunami of digitization hit media fast. And old media came crumbling down and new media obviously has just

done nothing but the upward tilt. It has not yet happened, generally speaking, in financial services. And you still have the same 50-year-old, 100-year-old, 150-year-old firms that dominate. And so that industry is now ripe for

for digitization. A lot of folks are working to digitize that industry. You've been working in that for decades at this point, but it's a very lucrative industry. It's also very sticky when it comes to the way people manage their assets. They don't want to move advisors. They don't want to move firms. I think especially high net worth individuals still feel like they want somebody to talk to

And that service comes with fees, 80 basis points, 120 basis points. Those fees eat into returns. This is something that you've been working on for years. You did it at Personal Capital. What are you doing now at Evergreen Wealth? We're doing two things. We're doing wealth management, wealth management for people who have, let's say, investable assets of a million to five.

And these are people who don't get the kind of white glove service that people who have $10, $20, $100 million do. And so what they need is somebody who can take the tax and investment principles that the people who have more money utilize because they have tax attorneys and all the rest.

and then look for someone who can use technology to make that scalable. And in fact, precision engineering to make it even better than traditional wealth managers deliver.

If we do that, we can give them better pre-tax return and then better after-tax return because that's the thing that everyone forgets. Can everybody benefit by this? Yes, absolutely. Everyone who has sufficient resources that the tax impact is meaningful. And so...

a couple of hundred thousand dollars to a couple of million dollars yes you should absolutely be managing your investment portfolio in a tax aware way you're the founding ceo of paypal uh what

We talk a lot about the PayPal mafia, those folks. We've spoken to Reid Hoffman, David Sachs. These guys really don't need any introduction. Elon Musk, of course, is among them. To what extent are these folks still in your universe right now? Well, for the most part, we've gone separate ways. Even many of the people within the so-called mafia.

I've moved from Silicon Valley to Miami, so I have sort of a new set of people that I'm working with. Some of them have, too. Some have, yes, that's right. And some of them have moved back to San Francisco, too. Maybe Texas, some of them as well. Okay, so on that and sort of on payments, I thought of you the other day because the crypto firm Kraken is launching this competitor to Venmo and to the Cash app.

essentially using the blockchain to transfer money. And I'm wondering how you look at that. As somebody who really pioneered technology for sending money over the internet, is the blockchain, is crypto really going to disrupt that? I think the blockchain is very good for some purposes. I don't have much use for it.

cryptocurrency because we have plenty of currencies that are very good but the blockchain can do a heck of a lot particularly on international money movement because we're looking at swift you know which takes at least a day sometimes multiple days to get significant money moved from america to singapore and with the right uh crypto networks you can do it like that that easy sure

I'm that fast. So it sounds like Western Union gets disrupted in a situation like that. That's what it sounds like to me. Not quite, because Western Union is all about the last mile. And Western Union is doing lots of little payments. And in most of the world...

It's actually agents, physical agents, who are taking the money and giving out the money. So that's a very different thing. But if you're doing bank-to-bank payments or business-to-business payments... So the big guys. The big guys. Yeah. So does it happen eventually? Oh, yes. Yeah. Yeah. There is no reason whatsoever...

In this day and age, it should take multiple days to get money from here to there. Amen. I mean, we were doing it 25 years ago. Yeah. We were moving money instantly, skittering it around the world at PayPal. It's not that hard. So are there going to be big players in it? I don't know. I don't follow what's happening. Ripple took a stab at it for a while, but I haven't heard anything about that in a while, so I don't know. You know, just got about 30 seconds here. I mean...

AI is obviously the trend that everybody talks about in terms of its impact. Is there anything else, though, outside of AI? Or is it really just about artificial intelligence? Which is not a new thing, but it's certainly on a different level today. So I'll just say quickly, in what I'm doing, Evergreen Wealth, we're doing two things. First of all, we're using AI to...

revolutionize how financial advice can be delivered. But the other important thing we're doing is bringing tax considerations into investment management because it's not what you earn, it's what you keep that counts. Increasingly, right? Yeah, no, it's huge. We always talk about that in terms of the market. You don't want to be, yeah, it's not just about what you gain, but it's also making sure you minimize your losses, right?

Great. Thank you so much. Thank you. Really appreciate it. Bill Harris, former CEO of PayPal and so much more, currently founder and CEO of Evergreen Money, which we talked about, Evergreen Wealth as well. So delighted to have him here at Uncharted Community Summit.

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