Jack Sharry: Hello everyone, thanks for joining us for this week’s edition of WealthTech on Deck. Today we’re gonna speak with someone who I’ve been following for many years. Our guest is Steve Chen. Steve is the founder and CEO of Bolden. was formerly known as New Retirement. Steve has built what he calls the Turbo Tax for financial planning. He and I, say that one again, he and I recently caught up at the Turbo on CEO Summit as we do from year to year. And I left our conversation very impressed. Steve is a classic entrepreneur who prides himself on building a new way to help anyone get on a path for financial independence. As we will learn, Steve has been creating a platform spanning SaaS, classes, coaching, and CFPs for consumers, advisors, and companies. And so much of what he has built is crowdsourced. Steve, great to have you on the pod. Welcome to WealthTech on Deck. I look forward to our conversation.
Steve Chen: Yeah, thanks for having me on here, Jack. I’ve listened to your podcast before and heard it referred to or referenced by a lot of folks in the FinTech, WealthTech world. So it’s awesome to be here today.
Jack Sharry: Good to see, good to see. Or hear, I should say. Steve, let’s start with what Bolden is all about. Please share with our audience what you do, who you do it for, and what differentiates you’re offering.
Steve Chen: Sure. Yeah. And Jack also want to give you a shout out as an OG entrepreneur, right? And I’ve followed your story on Light and Light. Yeah, it’s good. I appreciate it. And I appreciate that the journey continues. Yeah. So Bolden is a financial planning platform. You described it aptly as like, we think of it like TurboTax for planning. So we want anyone to be able to build their own financial plan and through planning.
Jack Sharry: Very, very OG.
Steve Chen: Get literate, make good decisions, hopefully take action and achieve better outcomes in their life. So that’s the main thing. And we started as a D to C company, so direct to consumer. so back in 2018, we first made a paid version available. like back then, we would get, I think, 75 people like a month signing up for something like that. now it’s over 100 people a day that are signing up to pay. And so…
Jack Sharry: Interesting.
Steve Chen: We’ve definitely seen that evolution. then we also, in 2021, we got to deal with Nationwide and we added Enterprise as a channel. And so they’re both going. Our big thing is just making it more accessible by having it kind of start with software so that planning is great and having an advisor is great. Not everyone can afford it or it gets, know, can basically the business models and always get them the attention of the advisor. So we wanted to make it like, you can start it with software and through that make it more accessible, but it still aligns with the rest of the industry.
Jack Sharry: So I want to just back up a little bit because it’s no small feat, even at 75, I don’t know if it was a month, I guess it wasn’t a day, and now it’s 100 a day. That’s unusual to get people to embrace financial planning, which has its own complexity, lots of details and information. Talk about how that transpired. How did that come about that people embraced it? Because I remember when you told me when we were at Tim Raad, I couldn’t believe it. It seemed like a remarkable feat to get that many people to embrace.
Steve Chen: Yeah, I think it shows that, you know, well, one, there’s demand, right? So I think there are a lot of people that have built their own spreadsheets and they’re kind of, you know, Hey, you you, you, kind of hit 50 plus, you know, you’ve been working and maybe making 150,000 bucks a year or something, but, know, you’re not necessarily going to work forever. And you have to figure out how I’m to pay for the rest of my life. And then like now people are living longer. Great. but it’s complicated, right? Like as you go to retire.
Jack Sharry: Sure, sure.
Steve Chen: You know, it’s like social security, healthcare, Medicare, right? You know, where am going to live? How am going to stay socially engaged? It’s all this like, it’s both money and your human capital. And so, you know, we’ve learned a lot of, a lot of, a lot of this is about our community and learning with them. So we get that feedback. You know, people use the software. They interact with our support team. There’s classes, there’s coaching, there’s live events like office hours. We do a lot of one to many things. And so we’re always listening to our audience and kind of our community and learning with them. There’s 20 plus thousand people on Facebook. There’s thousands of people on Reddit, just kind of like asking questions. And so that’s been a big way that we, that we have learned. yeah, no, I mean, now it’s like 300 plus people a day sign up for free and a hundred people a day are, you know, signing up for like a paid thing. And those it’s interesting, like those hundred people, they’re actually, even though we’re not trying to serve wealthier people.
Jack Sharry: Wow.
Steve Chen: They actually align with what advisors do. Like they have two to $3 million each. So every day people have two to $300 million swipe their credit card to like pay for this product, which is, you know, not nothing.
Jack Sharry: And so kind of like they might do their own taxes using Turbo Taxi, using your financial planning software as they go.
Steve Chen: Yep, exactly.
Jack Sharry: Interesting, interesting. I would never have thunk, but it’s great to see. And it’s a testament to the software itself. If they’re finding it that user friendly, that too is a feat all by itself. And I gather you would credit to the feedback you’re getting from your users.
Steve Chen: Yep. Yeah. think, uh, and there’s still a long way to go. mean, you know, you kind of grow, you’re shaped a little bit by your community. And I think our early users, there are a lot of engineers, there are a lot of folks that have their own spreadsheets and they’re like, I want to this or that. And you know, people show up, they’re like, I have this incredible spreadsheet made them have, you know, that does Roth conversions or decumulation and investment and portfolio allocation. It does Monte Carlo. It’s pretty amazing what people build. Um, and so that does, I think in the beginning, it shifted us to serve more of this really planning enthusiast market, which is a key part of what we’re doing. But for us to really change the world, it needs to get simpler and more accessible for everybody else that doesn’t necessarily have 2 million bucks saved, but is like, I’ve got a house that has 200,000 in home equity and I’ve got $300,000 saved and I’m 60, how do I figure this out?
Jack Sharry: Sure. Sure. So let’s go way back in terms of how all this started. So you’ve been in the technology world for a while. I know you’ve done some work around marketing. Talk about your career journey. How did you get started? How did it evolve to what you’re doing today?
Steve Chen: Yeah. think when I was in high school, I had this vision of like, I want to build things and then maybe get rich and then become a philanthropist. Like literally I had that thought way back. And, you know, I mean, you know, it’s been a journey. did, you know, in school I was a systems engineer. So it’s like half computer science and half electrical engineering. It’s like signals and systems processing. I came out and I was working in financial services, actually in an early FinTech that was half IBM and first Boston, which doesn’t even exist anymore, right? But it was like formed on Wall Street to bring the ability to build software faster to other financial services companies. So I did that and I ended up like consulting at Schwab and Wells Fargo in different places. That’s how got to California. I was originally on the East Coast, to school in Boston, came out here and then, so I was doing that and then…You know, think the whole San Francisco thing, like, you know, the whole culture of like building companies was alive back then. And, you know, it was like, all right, let’s, know, we started our first company at like 25 or 26 years old. We’re like, let’s do this. And like, we started our first company. We’re like, let’s, we were like, we want to start a company and like, what do we know about, we know about getting into college. Like we just got out the college. So back in the day, like getting a school, you read these thick Peterson’s books. I’m totally dating myself, but like, literally you would like figure out where into college you would read a book and be like flipping through these things which is really fat and like Harvard versus Brown versus whatever, SUNY Buffalo right and like how do you choose and we’re like we can make this into software so we built software and then the internet happened and we’re like let’s put this on the internet which is a good decision and then we ended up building like the first company that let you do college search applications, inquiries, financial aid all on the web super we were like one of the earliest SaaS companies ever.
Jack Sharry: Interesting.
Steve Chen: People from our company then went to work for Salesforce, which obviously then they got rich and like, you know, we’re gonna have to do other things, that’s how that started on the path of like building companies and getting into the ecosystem with venture capital and stuff. And so did that, my company got sold and also learned for the other entrepreneurs out there, like the good and the bad, like, you gotta be careful taking venture capital. It’s a powerful drug, but also it can…
Jack Sharry: Right, right.
Steve Chen: Lead to bad outcomes. And we had like, we raised too much money for the size of company we were. We were actually filed to go public, but we didn’t get out. And this was back in like 99. And so because we didn’t go out, like then we had this overhang of like too much capital and like not a good enough business. Market was down, company got sold, you know, so we had an exit. So I found a home for our employees and our customers, but like it could have been very different. so learn some lessons, did consulting stuff, and then…
Jack Sharry: Yes, yes.
Steve Chen: You know, I’ve built a consulting business. built a digital marketing business and, was like bootstrapping these things, saw this problem around retirement, started as a project and then it became like a full thing. And then full circle ended up raising 20 million of, you know, VC money, venture capital money for this. So, but hopefully it will be prudent with it.
Jack Sharry: Wow. And so how long in terms of new retirement slash bold and how long.
Steve Chen: Well, new retirement, like officially, you know, we’ve been at the company existed in 2015 and it was a project before that, but like the paid product wasn’t launched till 2018. And then we didn’t really take venture capital till like, you know, we got some early money in 2021, but like we kind of raised like a series A and go over the course of 2023 and 2024. What you will find, when you talk to lot of entrepreneurs is like money raising, especially early, it never ends.
Jack Sharry: Gotcha.
Steve Chen: So it’s kind of continuous process. mean, some people are like, we announced the series A, but really they might’ve been like cobbling together money for like 18 months and then announced it, which is kind of like what our story was.
Jack Sharry: Sure, Yeah. Gotcha, gotcha. So I’m fascinated by the whole crowdsourcing aspect of what you’re doing. Describe that. How did they get started? How does that work? Describe that process, because it sounds like it’s been a pretty important part of improving the product itself.
Steve Chen: Yeah, I think, you know, they say building things, it’s like, got to put your 10,000 cycles in, right? Like you have to learn 10,000 lessons. And I feel like that’s what this is. We, because we had to, cause we didn’t have, we, our fees are so low. We charge people like $120 a year, 10 bucks a month, right? For planning. We’re like, well, we got to do one to many. So we have classes, office hours, stuff like that. Like we’re like, let’s start a community and like, see what happens. And then people started. Then it took on a life of its own. It’s interesting. like, I think with many things, it’s like, it doesn’t work until it does. So like in the beginning, we’d be like, hey, throwing stuff out, you know, there’s a hundred people in there and no one’s saying anything. And then it takes off and then you’re like, holy smokes, look where it’s growing. And then they kind of grows and whatever. And so we just started supporting our users that way. And I think our users. A lot of our growth is word of mouth. We have a net promoter score of like 65 to 70. A lot of people tell us, I’ve told my friends about this and you know, it’s not mutually exclusive with an advisor. They might have many have advisors, but they’re like, I like a second opinion. And I like being able to control this myself. And you just get the reps in of like, okay, this worked, that didn’t work. How do we make it simpler? know, users are getting confused here and there’s still such a long way to go. Like I feel like we’ve done some interesting stuff.
Jack Sharry: Interesting.
Steve Chen: And there’s always the imposter syndrome, like, and we’re still terrible at so many things. like, there’s so many ways we could be so much better at this business. And, you know, that’s, but that’s the interesting part. There’s always interesting challenges to solve.
Jack Sharry: So it sounds to me that you’re getting the feedback, you’re making the adjustments, nothing’s ever perfect, but essentially it sounds like there’s a good communication, good dialogue, good productive, constructive effort on all sides.
Steve Chen: Yeah, 100%. I mean, I think one of the lessons for me and I share this with other entrepreneurs is like, people email me, us, you know, or whatever, message us on all kinds of channels and be like, hey, I this feedback or that feedback. And if you will take the time to like write up something for us, I will write you back and be like, hey, thanks for the feedback. Let me know if you want to jump on Zoom. Even if you love it or you hate it, because I want to learn and it’s so valuable. If someone’s willing to give you the time of day and very often they’re the biggest, like if they hate it, but you talk to them, you might be able to convert them and like figure out royally what’s wrong and then, okay, actually we’re listening to you and we do care about this. And if they love it, what do they love about it? And then can we make them more of an enthusiast to help us? But it’s that kind of like, it’s looking at the like surface of data and then it’s also just talking to people and listening to what they tell you about how to do it better and they have the answers, right? You’re building for them.
Jack Sharry: So it sounds to me, correct me if I’m wrong, but it sounds to me like you’ve got a solid model, sustainable model. You’ve got a good communication with your community. They can continue to contribute to advancing the offering. You’ve got a great net promoter score. So if you were talking about you’re in a positive light, nothing’s perfect, but sounds quite positive. What’s next? Where are you now? Let’s talk about where do you find yourselves now? And you also, by the way, a chunk of money with a $20 million raise. So you got a lot going for you. And so I’d love to hear where are you now and then where you go from here.
Steve Chen: Yeah. So as a business, you know, we are investing and so therefore burning money. And so I think we would like to get to break even so we can control our own destiny on our current balance sheet. So that’s one. We do think that there’s a, this problem is still unsolved at scale, right? Our vision is how do we help a hundred million people? Today we have a million people. If you look at consumer and enterprise that are on this platform. So we’re like, Hey, we’re 1 % of the way there, but you know, how do we get this to five to 10 million people? And then like, ultimately, if we reach that number, it will be international and it will be all, you know, we’ll be supporting huge financial services companies that have massive tens of millions of their own users, stuff like that. So I think where we’re really thinking about is, you know, keep going on the DTC business, like learn and like, that’s like a lab and it’s a real business, but it’s a lab. learn really quickly there. And then especially in the workplace, most Americans and most people.
Jack Sharry: Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.
Steve Chen: Save most of their money and their 401k and IRAs and stuff like that. Our users are 401k millionaires and they’ve been working and saving their whole life, making good decisions. They’re like 50 years old. All right. I might live to a 90. You know, if I stop working, if I glide path out from like 55 to 65, you know, start consulting, I still might have to finance 25 years and plus with technology, who knows? But like that’s a long time. So you got to be smart about it.
Jack Sharry: Now what you do?
Steve Chen: So I think leaning into the workplace is a big part of this and then, yeah, supporting hopefully.
Jack Sharry: Are you there now? you working with the workplace side of things?
Steve Chen: Yeah, well, our biggest customer there is Raytheon or RTX. So the big defense manufacturer, they’ve made our platforms available to, they have 250,000 planned participants. And so like we regularly do work with them. the, you know, we’ll be out there, we help them with their healthy wallet, financial wellness. They basically, you know, it’s like financial planning, well, financial wellness through planning is how we think about it. And then there’s some other companies that like we just got contacted by a big tech firm. have 9,300 people in their internal channel talking about personal finance. And they’re like, people are using your product in our channel. We want to talk to you and we’re going to chat with them. And then they can actually through that, hopefully help us get into the HR side of things. So we’re seeing, this is where the community side comes to life, not just for learning, but also distribution. People use the product, they know it’s valuable. And they’re like, they tell their family, they also want to buy it for their families, and then they can tell their workplace as well.
Jack Sharry: Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. So it seems that with where you’re going, you’ve got the community thing down, always more to go. There’s a lot more word of mouth to be had. And you’ve mentioned enterprise. You have some enterprise relationships. That would seem to be a natural next step, whether it’s on the workplace side or the wealth management side. Talk a little bit about that. How do you see that unfolding? would imagine that’s got to be in your periscope.
Steve Chen: Yeah, we really think of ourselves as this platform. it’s like, there’s, you know, anyone can build their own financial plan. And then the advisor can like, becomes, it goes from TurboTax to like Google Docs. The advisors can then jump on or coaches can jump on and collaborate with people in the same plan that the end user has built or built with the help, but it’s not gated by the human being. So I think that’s something that’s, that’s a big difference. till now mostly planning was either they did it on a spreadsheet or you talk to an advisor, they built the plan and gave it to you and they kind of controlled it. So we think, you know, it’s way easier if you build a plan and you understand it and you get educated through building a plan, but there’s that collaboration. you know, we think this is necessary. like McKinsey’s got to report out on wealth. It’s like, we’re going to need 350,000 financial advisors within the next 10 years. And we’re on track to have 250, you know.
Jack Sharry: Gotcha.
Steve Chen: Financial advisors are aging out, there’s going to be 100,000 short. So how do we bridge that gap? And I think it’s going to be technology enabling advisors to serve more people. AI will be a big part of this thing. I think enterprise distribution and where the enterprise can give it at scale, also planning can help. Planning frames it all up. So if you’re like a big bank, you can be like, great, I’ve got 30 million customers.
Jack Sharry: Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.
Steve Chen: That I helped transactionally like open checking accounts, lend money, whatever. But if I gave them a, I know a lot about them. Like when you do a mortgage, you everything to build a financial plan inside of a mortgage. So you could be like, anyone who gets a mortgage, I’m going to give you a financial plan that looks at your income, expenses, assets, and debts. And then like frames up your forecast could look like and helps you identify, Hey, Jack, you know, maybe this kind of mortgage, maybe investing this way, having a 529, so have kids, you know whatever, here’s how we can do some tax efficiency plays. you actually should, people like you should talk to advisors like that. They can open up those kinds of dialogues.
Jack Sharry: Gotcha. And so no podcast is complete without a conversation around AI. So talk about that if you would. What are your thoughts there? It seems unnatural for what you’re doing.
Steve Chen: 100%. Yeah, we’re super excited about it. I mean, I will say, having been lived through the internet, Cloud, mobile, AI is real. And it’s amazing, even to me, living here in Silicon Valley, how fast it’s changing and what’s possible. It’s shocking. And it’s a little scary. You know, just it does feel like it’s gonna, I feel like it’s starting to replace jobs. Like we built an AI, our head of design built an AI illustrator bot, if you will. This is a job we would have paid someone maybe a hundred thousand bucks for, where it’s like, okay, we wanna make illustrations using our branding and theming and style to do for marketing and for educational materials and the tool. And so now we can just be like, give me an illustration of, you know a 45-year-old looking at their mobile phone thinking about their mortgage or whatever their 529. It’s like you can kind of like spin that up and they’ll spit it out and like, you know, two minutes or whatever, 30 seconds. we’re, we’re anyway, it’s, it’s definitely happening and it’s interesting. It’s changing so quickly, but yeah. So we’re using it internally for our own productivity and all that’s changing very fast. And then we’re surfacing it for our end users.
Jack Sharry: Wow.
Steve Chen: Support with AI, so today. And in January, was like half of, we hit the switch and maybe it supported like 40 to 50 % of users and answered 60 % positively, like got to a good resolution 60 % of time. Now it handles two thirds of all inquiries and 80%, over 80 % of the time, gives a, like users like, this thing answered my question and I’m happy with the answer. And some of them are like, this was better than humans. Now we trained it on all of our support. had tens of thousands of questions, all of our help texts, which we had really robust help texts. have thousands of articles. So it is well-trained, but it’s pretty interesting. it’s. Boom. can, you can see why companies like Klarna can be like, I’m replacing half of my customer service people, you know, but those are jobs, right? That change is happening quickly.
Jack Sharry: Yeah, yeah, wow. Interesting. One of things that the industry has struggled with for a long time, something I’m quite familiar with, you and I have talked a little bit about it, and that is going from the plan to the implementation. And so from what I’m hearing, there’s a group of folks that are willing to lend a hand their perspective, and there may be some interesting ideas, but some of the algorithms required to optimize around cost, risk, tax, security, all that kind of stuff is largely doesn’t exist, at least not yet. It will at some point, obviously. And it does exist, it’s just not rampant. Where do you see that all going? Where do you see the multi-account? The implementation of what the plan is and where you can improve the outcome in terms of after-tax return and mindful of risk and all the rest of it.
Steve Chen: Yeah, it’s a really interesting story. So first I would say, I think we always want to have a human in the loop. Like I don’t like as a person, right? Like, I’m like, okay, great. I like using technology to help answer questions and solve suggest ideas on how to do better. But am I going to want to say to a computer, Hey, go find me the lowest mortgage and then transact on it? No. Like I think I might say, go find me the best mortgage for my situation and show it to me.
Jack Sharry: Mm-hmm. Yep.
Steve Chen: Show me the company and let’s talk about it. And then, okay, now I want to transact and then I’m approving it. But I do think AI can do things, like computers can do things. Like we do like Roth conversions. This is one of the killer things that we do. A lot of our users are 401k millionaires. They’re like, okay, I’ve piled up a bunch of money in my 401k, but I see RMDs, required minimum distributions, are going to basically make me pay half a million dollars a year. I’m going to have higher income in retirement than I had working.
Jack Sharry: Yep, yep, yep. Mm-hmm.
Steve Chen: which sounds crazy, but can happen. And then I want to move, want to relocate my money from qualified to Roth. And so they engineer lower income for certainly now between 60 and 65 or whatever, 60 and then like do conversions and move their money around. We can use simulations behind the scenes to kind of figure that out for them in a way that like you wouldn’t be able to do it on spreadsheet. And also we can look at like multivariate problems so you can, cause this is what’s so interesting about planning is that every action has a reaction. So you’re like, claim social security differently. You know, it changes your tax forecast, you know, do you know, move here, move there. It’s like, you move from California to Tennessee, guess what? No state income tax. That’s great. But other costs might go up and whatever risks and stuff like that. So you’re trying to help people think about all this stuff and optimize better, you know, for their situation. And computers can be good at like surfacing things that you might not have seen. Cause we also see hundreds of thousands of users that have done it before, what did they do? Like what did Jack who’s 10 years older do, you know, at your age that led to better outcomes and say, okay, you might want to consider this. Humans do this too. If you’re an advisor and you’ve served hundreds of people, you’ve kind of seen these patterns and you pattern recognize and be like, it’s like this.
Jack Sharry: Gotcha. Gotcha. This has been fascinating. I to look to bring this to a close. Any key takeaways you want to share with our audience in terms of what you’ve discovered, what we’ve been talking about?
Steve Chen: I would just say it just feels like an exciting time to be building in tech. like, would invite anyone who’s listening, if they’re curious to, you know, build a plan on bolden.com, all feedback is welcome. Anyone can build a plan. you know, we are all like, this podcast is great because you talk to a lot of, you know, FinTech and WealthTech influencers who are thinking about this and exploring these ideas. But, you know, it’s the world could, you so we’re the feedback, but also the world could change. The world is changing.
Like I feel like, you know, we don’t know what the world’s going to look like in two years. Like it could be so different. So that’s what’s interesting.
Jack Sharry: Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, interesting. Well, this has been great, Steve. I really enjoyed the conversation. You and I have chatted over the years. Been watching your company emerge this last time around. go, whoa, this is pretty serious. You’ve really put something together that’s pretty special. So congratulations on doing that. One last question before we part. What do you do outside of work for fun that people might find to be interesting or surprising?
Steve Chen: Yeah. Well, Jack, just want to say one, I appreciate you having me on here and, you know, the feeling is mutual and I, it’s always good. I love talking to entrepreneurs about what they’re doing and, know, they’re core part of the economy and creating things, right. Innovation. yeah. So for, for fun, I’ve started wing foiling, which is, like, so I used to windsurf way back in the day and, then my oldest son was born and then I was like, and then I stopped windsurfing for like 20 years and then, but it’s basically like, there’s a board.
Jack Sharry: What is that?
Steve Chen: And then underneath it, there’s a mast and underneath that there’s like a mini airplane. like, I don’t know if you, if you ever go to San Francisco, you see under the Christie Christie, under the Golden Gate bridge at Christie field, they’re holding on to these wings, which are like big umbrellas, but you know, it’s not a kite up in the air, but it’s like a wing and you drive along and then you get on the foil. Right. And so. Yeah. Yeah. So you’re on this board. That’s like three feet above the water.
Jack Sharry: Yes, I have seen that, yeah. Right, right.
Steve Chen: And it is like riding a magic carpet, although you can hurt yourself. So I don’t know if you see this, but like I basically sliced my hand open, arm up, which is not healing. And I probably should have stitched it up, but I was like, you can hurt yourself, but it’s also awesome. Some people say it’s like powder skiing, it’s pretty incredible. It’s actually, you know, it’s very accessible. mean, well, you have to have a win, but it takes like a couple of weeks to learn once you’re learning.
Jack Sharry: Yeah
Steve Chen: And there’s a more to learn, but it’s super fun. I highly recommend it.
Jack Sharry: Yeah, it sounds like fun a little crazy but fun. I like it. I like it. That’s great. So Steve, thanks a lot This has been a great conversation really enjoyed getting to know you further and deeper Congrats on all your success. I think there’s a lot more to come For our audience if you’ve enjoyed our podcast, please rate review subscribe and share what we’re doing here at well tech on deck We’re available wherever you your podcasts should also check us out at our dedicated website wealth tech on deck comm all our episodes are there along with blogs and curated content for the many folks that are around our industry and often appear on this podcast. So Steve, thanks again. was real pleasure.
Steve Chen: Yeah, Jack, thanks for having me on here. I’m looking forward to it and thanks for building this podcast and then building your audience. Good job.
Jack Sharry: Yeah, thanks very much. Take care now.
