Lenny Rachitsky: belief

Transcript context

…Yeah, so we had an engineer at the time who came up with this idea called Self-Driving Money. I was like, "Gosh, what if you could automate and optimize your entire financial life and you didn't have to rely on human financial advisors?" And we heard from our customers forever that they pay us to not talk to someone, our demographic doesn't want a bunch of humans in the mix. And so we had this idea but we didn't really know what it was. So Andy was like, "Gosh, you've been spending time thinking about financial planning and software and as an entrepreneur, could you come in and help us build Self-Driving Money?" And I was like, "What is it?" They're like, "Well, we got a bunch of ideas from an algorithmic standpoint about how to do it." But, "What exactly is it?" So it was thrown into, "Let's do a bunch of customer research, let's talk to a lot of people and let's try to come up with as audacious of an idea as we could for how you fulfill the promise of automating and optimizing someone's entire financial life to the point that they don't have to think about their finances on a daily basis and they know the right things are happening." When I think Self-Driving Money, I'm picturing money just driving around, like a Tesla. Money meets Tesla. Yeah, the vision I had was what are the core pieces of financial life that are stressful? It's like, "I got to move money, I got to contribute to these different accounts. I want to make sure I have enough to pay my bills." And so what we ended up with was a product called Autopilot that would monitor your core banking account, whether it was a checking account at Wealthfront or not at Wealthfront or whether it was an account at Wealthfront. And we would say, "Let's make sure we leave a certain amount of money." And you could tell us that much. And then we would say, "Great." Now we had basically a series of things to fulfill with any excess. It was like, "Let's make sure you keep this much as a three-month emergency fund, max out your Roth IRA. Let's make sure you max out your 529 for your kids and let's put the rest in your kind of taxable just brokerage account." And we would just periodically say, "Oh, you got extra money, let's sweep it over and do what we need to do with it so you don't have to think about it."…

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