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Okay, you promised we talked to a serial entrepreneur who has a ton of experience in the fintech space. I want to bring in Bill Harris. He's a longtime fintech executive. He's founded or led several personal finance companies, think from companies such as into It, PayPal as well. He was
the founding CEO there. He ran TurboTax, he founded Personal Capital, you remember just a few years ago that was bought by Empower, Right, so he knows a thing or two about, Yeah, how people are using these apps these days.
All right, good to have you here. I got some time with you this morning, so it's good to have you back with us now that the event is underway. I'm just curious anybody you've talked to, any interesting conversations that you've had so far?
Well, sure, you know. The most interesting fella here is, of course, Michael Lowe. And I've known him actually for now. I talked to him just a moment ago with forty years Wow, how forty years ago? We worked together in the magazine industry, which of course is no longer.
But they did a subscription business, right, that Time Warner bought.
That's right, But first we worked together at time Ink and then he left to go build the subscription business that he sold back to Time Ink.
Kind of fascinating. I just can we just go there for a minute.
Media, the changes that we have seen in content production where you get it, I don't know who'd thought. I mean, I used to do subscriptions right in terms of magazines and various newspapers.
We don't do that anymore. What do you think it's all going?
Well, it's you know, finance and media are the two industries most profoundly changed by digital technology. Yeah, because they are all just figments of our imagination and you can create them with no assets, just your mind. And so you know what happened though, is that media. The tsunami of digitization hit media fast, and old media came crumbling down, and new media obviously has just I've done nothing but
the upward tilt. It has not yet happened generally speaking, in financials and services, and you still have the same fifty year old, one hundred year old, one hundred and fifty year old firms that dominate, and so that industry is now ripe for digitization.
A lot of folks are working to digitize that industry. You've been working in that for decades at this point. But it's a very lucrative industry. It's also very sticky when it comes to the way people manage their assets. They don't want to move advisors, they don't want to move firms. I think, especially high net worth individuals still feel like they want somebody to talk to and that service comes with fees eighty basis points one hundred and
twenty basis points. Those fees eat into returns. This is something that you've been working on for years. You did it at Personal Capital. What are you doing now at Evergreen Wealth.
We're doing two things. We're doing wealth management. Wealth management for people who have let's say, investible assets of a million to and these are people who don't get the kind of white glove service that people who have ten
twenty one hundred million dollars do. And so what they need is somebody who can take the tax and investment principles that the people who have more money utilize because they have tax attorneys and all the rest, and then look for someone who can use technology to make that scalable and in fact precision engineering to make it even
better than traditional wealth managers deliver. If we do that, we can give them better pre tax return and then better after tax return, because that's the thing that everyone forgets.
Can everybody benefit by this?
Yes, absolutely, everyone who has sufficient resources that the tax impact is meaningful, and so a couple of one hundred thousand dollars to a couple of million dollars, Yes, you should absolutely be managing your investment portfolio in a tax way way.
You're the founding CEO of PayPal. We talk a lot about the PayPal mafia, those folks we've spoken to Read Hoffman, David Sachs. These guys really don't need any introduction. Elon Musk, of course, is among them. To what extent are these folks still in your universe right now?
Well, for the most part, we've gone separate ways. Even many of the people within within so called mafia. I've moved from Silicon Valley to Miami, so I have sort of a new set of people that I'm.
Working them have too somehow, Yes, that's right. And some of them have moved back to San Francisco too. There maybe Texas some of them as well. Yeah, Okay, so on that and sort of on payments. Yes, I thought of you the other day because the crypto firm Kraken Yes, is launching this competitor to Venmo into the cash app, essentially using the blockchain to transfer money. And I'm wondering how you look at that as somebody who really pioneered
technology for sending money over the internet. Is the blockchain? Is crypto really going to disrupt that?
I think the blockchain is very good for some purposes. I don't have much use for cryptocurrency because we have plenty of currencies that are very good. But the blockchain can do a heck of a lot, particularly on international money movement, because we're looking at Swift, you know, which takes at least a day, sometimes multiple days to get significant money moved from America to Singapore. And with the right crypto networks, you can do it like that, that easy, sure, and that fast.
So that sounds like Western Union gets disruptive in a situation like that. That's what it sounds like to me.
Not quite, because Western Union. Western Union is all about the last mile, and Western Union is doing lots of little payments and for most in most of the world, it's actually agents physical agents who are who are taking the money and giving out the money. So that's a very different thing. But if you're doing bank and bank payments or business to business plan.
The big guys, the big guys. Yeah, So does it happen eventually?
Oh yes, yeah, yeah, there is no reason whatsoever. And to day and age, it should take multiple days to get money from here to there.
Amen.
But Amy we're doing twenty five years ago, we were moving money instantly, skittering it around the world at PayPal. It's not that hard.
So are there going to be big players in it?
I don't know. I don't follow. I don't follow what's happening. You know, Ripple took a stab at it for a while, but I haven't heard anything about that in a while, So I don't know what.
You know, just got about thirty seconds here. I mean, AIS have obviously the trend that everybody talks about in terms of its impact.
Is there anything else though outside of AI? Or is it really just.
About artificial intelligence which is not a new thing but it's certainly on a different level too.
Yeah.
So I'll just say quickly, in what I'm doing Evergreen Wealth, we're doing two things. First of all, we're using AI to revolutionize how financial advice can be delivered. But the other important thing we're doing is bringing tax considerations into investment management, because it's not what you earn, it's what you keep that counts.
Increasingly, right and really, yeah, no, it's huge. We always talk about that in terms of the market.
You don't want to be Yeah, it's not just about gain what you gain, but it's also making sure you minimize your losses. Right, great, thank you so much. Thank you really appreciate Bill Harris, former CEO of PayPal and so much more. Currently founder and CEO of Evergreen Money, which we talked about Evergreen Wealth as well. So delighted to have him here an uncharted community summit.