Jon Stein, founder @ Betterment

TL;DR

Jon Stein, founder of Betterment, shares hard-earned lessons from building the company over ten years. Core takeaways: make your product tangible fast, delegate until you have nothing to do, anchor everything in a mission that attracts talent and capital, stay obsessively close to customers as you scale, never settle, and prioritize ruthlessly to avoid breaking the company.

Key insights

• The most impactful early advice Stein received was from cofounder Sean: "make it real as quickly as possible" by shipping a working signup and printing business cards, rather than designing graphs and
• A founder’s primary job is to build a team and delegate so that the founder themselves has no work to do; relying on the founder for deliverables is a bad sign.
• Mission was the single force that attracted early employees (e.g., Dan Egan, Alex Benke) who left high-paying, secure jobs at big financial services firms.