By David Wignall

For Bill Harris, there are two inevitabilities in life: start-ups and taxes. In 1993, he joined tax preparer Intuit as executive vice president and became CEO in 1998. He soon departed to become the CEO of what wold become PayPal, where he worked briefly alongside Elon Musk, Peter Thiel, and Max Levchin. Since then, Harris has been neck-deep in the start-up world, helping to launch numerous fintech and cybersecurity firms, including Personal Capital, a registered investment advisor that was sold to Empower in 2020 for roughly $1 billion.

Now, Harris is back for his latest venture: a tech-heavy registered investment advisor called Evergreen Wealth. He calls Evergreen "the reinvention of advice as the combination of man and machine." In a conversation with Barron's Advisor, he described the company's focus on after-tax returns, delivered, in part, through direct indexing. He also discussed the fragmentation of household finances, the dangers of alt investing, and lessons from more than two decades running start-ups.

Tell me about Evergreen Wealth. The mission is simple: build lasting wealth for you and your family.

I'd point to two differentiators. First, most firms in the industry, certainly all funds and many advisors, focus on pretax results. And pretax results really don't matter -- or, they matter only to the extent that they drive after-tax results. So we focus on after-tax results.

AI is the other big differentiator. The larger firms tend to look at AI as a cost-reduction opportunity. They will look at a contact center employing 300 people, and wonder if they can run it with 30 using AI chatbots. We're trying to use AI for service enhancement. We have built a vetted and reliable financial and tax knowledge base. And we can combine that with personal financial information: holdings, balances, transactions, transcripts. So we can bring to bear not only knowledge of financial topics, but also knowledge of you.

Do you think worries about AI undermining wealth advisors are overblown? Yes, I do. I believe in the Goldilocks formula: combining the power and research capability of AI with the judgment and empathy of a financial advisor. I believe, at least for the time being, that one plus one equals three will be the best formula for delivering comprehensive, long-term advice.

How do you plan to deliver strong after-tax returns? I'm a big fan of ETFs. If it weren't for the kinds of things we're doing here at Evergreen Wealth, I would be invested in broad-based index ETFs.

However, if you deconstruct the ETF into its 500 individual holdings, now you can do two things that are very powerful. The first is personalization: You can sculpt the exposure. Not everyone should have a market-weighted exposure to the top 500 companies. You can sculpt the deconstructed ETF for preferences, for tilts and weightings, for restrictions and mandates, for concentrated positions. You can build something that is truly bespoke.

The second, of course, is tax. Direct indexing allows you to do tax-loss harvesting. Studies indicate that if you are a moderately high-income taxpayer in a moderately high-tax state, over the course of 10 years, your cumulative return after tax can be 25% to 30% higher if you use tax-loss harvesting.

Why is direct indexing taking off now? Why don't ETFs already represent a larger part of the asset base than mutual funds? It takes a long time. Jack Bogle, who is one of my personal heroes, dragged the industry by its hair into the 21st century, into a belief in diversification and low-cost investment.

Until recently, direct indexing has not been a scalable thing. If you are monitoring hundreds of individual securities, and each of those names has multiple tax lots, you are making 100,000 or more buy/sell decisions every year. You need some relatively sophisticated technology to do it right.

Have fintechs done a good job of disrupting the wealth management industry? Financial technology has tended to create multiple point solutions. One of the most important things for a start-up is focus. If you want to get something done...then focus on doing one thing really well. The result is a whole series of point solutions.

That has led to the fragmentation of your money. An average affluent American family today has upward of 15 to 20 different financial accounts, multiple cards, multiple investment accounts. So what we're hoping to do is bring it all together. We would hope that outside of the 401(k), clients would bring the bulk of their assets to us. We would like to have a fuller relationship with the clients.

We're going to take direct indexing and go beyond what is often offered today. We want to extend that to the entire portfolio, so you are not only doing direct indexing in the taxable account, but also across tax-deferred, tax-exempt accounts.

What did you learn from running Intuit? As the head of Intuit, I was running a public company with 5,000 employees and a multibillion-dollar market cap. I had a great job, but I wasn't really the guy to do it. I came to the conclusion it was not the best use of my skills.

That's why I took the opportunity to join PayPal -- though it was actually called X when I joined. I was there along with Elon Musk, and then subsequently we merged with Confinity, with Peter Thiel and Max Levchin. We were all on the second floor of a bakery on University Avenue in Palo Alto.

You've worked at multiple early-stage start-ups. PayPal obviously did extremely well, and Personal Capital sold for roughly $1 billion in 2020. Many people would have retired. Why do you keep coming back? Fulfillment. This is what I know how to do. I think I'm good at it. I get a thrill from doing it.

The two most important words in my life are curiosity and purpose. I've been blessed in that way, because if you think about starting a company, you start with curiosity: You pick the business, and you consider whether you can deliver something that's not in the field today.

Once you're committed, now you're in it -- it's big purpose. There's much less room for curiosity. You have to get the product built, find the client, and create a formula upon which you can scale. Then the company either matures or is purchased, and then, all of a sudden, it's time for curiosity again. I've had this marvelous tempo in my life, of expansive thinking followed by dedicated thinking.

Have you gotten better at founding companies? I don't think so, because every time is different. You know, the real thing that will allow somebody to be effective at a start-up or very early-stage company is to be comfortable with ambiguity. There's no playbook, there's no rules, and so you have to go figure it out. To the extent that I have an advantage launching start-ups, it's not because I have experience doing it before. It's because I'm comfortable in uncertainty.

How do alternative investments fit into Evergreen's strategies? We don't use alts, for a couple of reasons. The first is that when you invest in alts, particularly private equity and venture capital and to some extent real estate, you're locking up your money for a long period of time. That's fine for endowments, but for individuals for whom the twists and turns of life are unpredictable, I don't believe in locking up money.

The second is the fees. The fee structures are very high, and particularly high if you are an individual investor looking for a mechanism to participate in alts without million-dollar minimums.

Third, it's my suspicion that on the PE side, the returns are not likely to replicate the returns from the earlier years. There's now a lot of money chasing a relatively small number of deals.

Finally, the alts have argued they'll deliver good returns, but at lower volatility. But very often that low volatility is a chimera, because the actual valuations are probably quite volatile, but they're just not marked to market. There's an artificial smoothing of the volatility.

The wealth management industry is currently in the middle of the hottest year for mergers and acquisitions in history. Do you plan to pursue inorganic growth? I will not purchase any other advisory firm, even if I had the capital to do it. We're trying to do things differently; we're trying to build an integrated system.

If you're trying to build an integrated ecosystem, the last thing you need is to try and purchase companies that are doing things differently, because you'll waste a whole lot of time.

Thank you, Bill.

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October 13, 2025 10:52 ET (14:52 GMT)

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