Family Office for Startup Employees
Jordan Gonen, CEO of Compound, on software-enabled wealth management
The real disruption is not just a lower sticker price, it is changing what clients are buying. A traditional advisor often gets paid a percentage of invested assets and then sends clients elsewhere for taxes, estate work, or private equity questions. Compound is trying to bundle those jobs into one workflow, especially for startup employees whose hardest problems are concentrated stock, option exercise timing, secondary liquidity, and tax planning rather than simple ETF allocation.
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In this market, 1% of AUM is the norm for many advisors serving $1M to $20M households, though fees often fall at higher wealth tiers. The important comparison is economic, not cosmetic. A client with $2M to manage can pay roughly $20,000 a year under AUM pricing before paying separate accountants or tax specialists.
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Compound’s wedge is that startup wealth is messy. It pulls in Carta and Shareworks data, tracks private stock, fund interests, crypto, real estate, and bank accounts, then pairs that data with tax aware scenario planning, tax filing, and advice around secondary sales and post liquidity diversification.
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That makes Compound closer to a software enabled family office for upwardly mobile tech workers than to a robo advisor. Comparable firms like Savvy still largely inherit percent of AUM pricing through advisors, while pre wealth tools like Secfi focus more narrowly on option exercise financing and liquidity rather than the whole household balance sheet.
The category is moving toward all in one financial operating systems for affluent, equity heavy clients. As more wealth sits in private company stock and other held away assets, firms that can combine custody adjacent advice, tax execution, and a live balance sheet will take share from advisors who only manage a brokerage account.