Wealthfront

You know, I saw one the other day for...

It was Wealthfront or Betterment or one of those kinds of places that was like, hey, we're paying, you know, three and a half percent or three percent.

Yeah.

Yeah.

This week, I'm joined by Amethyst Martinez to talk about what happened when Amazon blocked Meta's Muse shopping agent and whether competing platforms could end up fragmenting agentic commerce before it really gets going.

Then I'll be speaking to Adam Nash, co-founder and CEO of Daffy and former CEO of Wealthfront, about bringing modern fintech infrastructure to charitable giving, why donating stocks can be so powerful and how AI agents could completely change the way we manage our financial lives.

Let's get into it.

First up, our story of the week.

Thanks, Amethyst.

And our guest this week actually takes us neatly into the next part of that agentic commerce conversation.

What happens when AI moves beyond giving us information and starts taking financial actions on our behalf? Adam Nash spent his career at the intersection of technology and consumer finance with roles at Apple, eBay, LinkedIn, Dropbox, and Wealthfront.

Today, he's the co-founder and CEO of Daffy, a platform designed to make donor-advised funds and charitable giving much more accessible.

I wanted to keep $5,000 in an emergency fund and put the $20,000 in something that would gain some interest over time.

What do you think would be the best setup for this? Something such as laddering CDs? I have a high interest account with Wealthfront.

One more wrench in the mix.

I'm also a little concerned about shielding this asset if I got in a car accident or for her FAFSA.

We don't have all the information, but I would be very... very...

And gosh, given where savings interest rates are now, you're not getting penalized.

She mentioned she's got a Wealthfront account, right? And so the ability to park that money there is earn healthy interest on that while getting comfortable with being financially fully responsible for this kiddo, thinking through, all right, what does it feel like? And then, okay, maybe in a year or what did I say? 15 months? 15 months from now, you're thinking...

Actually, I think I do want to invest some more.

As a taxpayer with obligations to both Japan and the U.S., there is literally no entity on Earth that all laws I'm subject to consider worthy of tax subsidy, so I do not have the typical use case for DAFs.

But since I'm fascinated by infrastructure, I started using DAFI, a startup by some Wealthfront-associated folks who apparently don't care about unbeatable competition in their brand search results from cartoon characters.

I find it useful just from a management perspective.

DAFs, DAFI, allow you to donate anonymously and the app functions as a single figure out how to give these do-gooders money for me portal.

It's why we started offering it for our clients.

Vanguard, Parametric, Wealthfront, they've all published studies showing direct indexing adds roughly 1% to 2% per year in after-tax returns in the early years, with a realistic long-run average closer to 80 bps to 1.2% annually.

And that doesn't sound like much, but on a million-dollar portfolio, that's $8,000 to $12,000 a year.

In tax savings, over a decade with compounding, that becomes a lot.

But it was through that journey that I realised that there is a huge misconception between people that are in marketing that think they're growth hackers and the actual, the art and the science.

And for me, it really came to be when I met a guy named Andy Johns Andy was ex-Growth at Facebook, Twitter, Quora, and now leads, I think, growth and revenue at Wealthfront.

He's an incredible human being.

We were at an event, we were both speaking at the Growth Hackers Conference, and in the green room, he shared with me the concept of stacking growth channels, almost as the way he looked at it as like compound interest on an investment.