Opportunity

Finance is a professional specialization. It’s not uniquely difficult (or fun), but you shouldn’t expect to be a finance whiz any more than you should expect a random person off the street to be an expert at your job.

Companies employ entire departments to create budgets, manage risk, raise capital, make long-term investments, maintain compliance, and handle reporting. Strong financial planning and operations help companies minimize risk and maximize upside.

Tech people have a similar job to be done. You need to forecast liquidity, pay taxes, source financing/refinancing, and protect your savings. Even the most financially skilled among us cannot run our own fully optimized personal finance departments.

Both legacy financial institutions and mass-market robo-advisors miss the mark.

The largest banks in the world can’t figure out how to make your portfolio seamlessly accessible on your phone. Traditional RIAs treat you exactly like they would treat a dentist (and know as much as your dentist does about NSOs).

Robo-advisors have decent interfaces but can’t offer any meaningful advice about key areas like option exercising, tax consequences, and angel investing. Googling any of these topics drops you in a sea of SEO spam. You’re left relying upon Slack and Hacker News threads as you make your most important financial decisions.

We founded Compound to solve these problems and go beyond what traditional banks and advisors have to offer.