Estate Planning as Privacy Product
Jordan Gonen, CEO of Compound, on software-enabled wealth management
This is really a point about estate planning becoming a privacy product, not just a legal formality. For affluent households, probate can expose a map of who owned what, who is owed money, and who inherits it, because wills and probate filings generally pass through court, while a revocable living trust can move assets outside that court process. In Compound’s world, that matters because startup wealth is often spread across equity, funds, real estate, and tax documents that families would rather not assemble in a public proceeding.
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The practical difference is who does the paperwork after death. In probate, the court supervised process collects assets, pays creditors, and distributes what is left. With a living trust, a successor trustee does that job privately for assets already titled into the trust, which is why the trust has to be funded, not just drafted.
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This fits the broader shift in tech enabled wealth management from portfolio advice to life administration. Compound tracks held away assets like startup equity, crypto, K-1s, 83(b) elections, and legal documents in one vault, while peers like Savvy position estate planning and trusts as part of holistic planning once clients hit major life events or cross $1M in net worth.
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The business implication is that estate work is a high trust wedge into the whole household balance sheet. Once an advisor helps set up the structure for trusts, tax filings, liquidity planning, and beneficiary instructions, that advisor is no longer just managing stocks, they are coordinating the family’s financial operating system.
The next step in this market is deeper integration between wealth dashboards and estate execution. The winners will be the firms that do not just recommend a trust, but make it easy to inventory every asset, keep beneficiary and title data current, and hand a family a clean transfer process when a death or incapacity event actually happens.