Jon Stein

So I started at...

Columbia Business School in 2007.

And I had the idea for Betterment and the name even before I started there.

I went to school thinking I wanted to come out starting a company, open-minded to other things that might come up.

But I worked on Betterment while I was there in school.

I workshopped it in so many of my classes and built out the business plan and did user research with my classmates.

People got really sick of hearing me talk about this idea.

And it took a long time to put the company together because it was a big idea.

It was fundamentally reinventing the financial services system around a better model for customers.

And that took time.

It took a lot of engineering work.

I didn't know how to code when I started.

I taught myself to code while I was in business school so I could build the first version of the site with my partners, Sean, who was an engineer at Google at the time, and Eli, who was a lawyer.

Those are my three co-founders.

And we got some early investment from a guy who was in the brokerage industry named Ryan O'Sullivan.

At that time, I had no debt.

At that time, I had saved a fair bit from consulting.

When we were in those early days, we didn't need a ton of funding because we didn't pay ourselves salaries.

So basically our funding was paying our rent and food for that first year or so.

I'm curious.