Former PayPal CEO Bill Harris debuts tech-focused RIA Evergreen Wealth 25 years after working alongside Elon Musk at the trailblazing fintech firm. “Quite frankly, we almost came to blows some days, just because there was such intensity,” Harris said Tuesday. “What did I learn working at PayPal? It’s actually more that I learned not to do. It was complete chaos.”
Former PayPal and Intuit CEO Bill Harris has launched Evergreen Wealth, a digital RIA he says is being self-funded with over $10 million of his own capital.
Evergreen Wealth is not the first RIA venture from Harris, who was also the founding CEO of Personal Capital before the digital advisory firm was sold in 2020 to Empower Retirement. Evergreen Wealth’s tech-driven platform includes an AI advice engine for providing automated financial advice, investment portfolio analysis, and tax planning.
“We’re today announcing the dynamic portfolio, which is a tax optimized, personalized, diversified way to manage your money,” Harris said Tuesday in New York City at a launch event for Evergreen Wealth. “What is the enabling technology? It’s raw compute power. It’s the chips today that could do so much more than they could do when I started my last investment advisor Personal Capital.”
Personal Capital managed $23 billion in assets under Harris and was sold to Empower at an enterprise value of up to $1 billion, according to a press release for the sale. Evergreen Wealth will require a $250,000 investment minimum from clients. Harris said Evergreen’s ideal client will have between $1 million and $10 million net worth with investable assets between $500,000 and $5 million. Evergreen’s portfolio allocation will spread across stocks, ETFs, mutual funds, bonds, cash equivalents and does not have current plans to invest in alternatives.
“There are three big guys — Vanguard, Schwab and Fidelity. The big guys don’t have billions, they have trillions. That’s where the money is, that’s where the clients are, that’s where we’re going to find our clients,” said Harris. “And so no matter how big we get, we will be a speck in relation to those guys, which is good because that means we can pick off the people who are really looking for a technologically advanced solution.”
PayPal lessons
Harris joined Intuit as executive vice president in 1993 and became CEO in 1998. After departing Intuit he became the founding CEO of PayPal, the fintech giant whose co-founders include Elon Musk, Peter Thiel and Max Levchin. Harris resigned from PayPal after only five months, according to an article published by CNET in 2000.
On Tuesday, Harris was asked by InvestmentNews what he learned about building companies from his time at PayPal alongside Musk, the Tesla CEO and wealthiest person in the world.
“What did I learn working at PayPal? It’s actually more what I learned not to do. It was complete chaos. And quite frankly, some of the great things come out of environments of complete chaos,” Harris said.
Musk founded a payments company called X.com, which merged with Thiel’s Confinity in 2000 to eventually form PayPal. PayPal went public through an IPO in 2002 and was a subsidiary of eBay from 2002 to 2014. Today, PayPal has a market cap of around $64 billion.
“It was not clear on any particular day who actually was in charge. Some days it was Peter, some days it was Elon, some days it was me. And we would show up, and quite frankly, we almost came to blows some days, just because there was such intensity,” Harris said Tuesday. “But from that intensity, I think what I learned was not to be scared of uncertainty. And that’s the biggest thing when you’re going to start a company.”
Harris was 40 years old when he was CEO at PayPal. “I was the adult supervision,” he added while on stage at his launch event for Evergreen Wealth.
“I learned not to be scared of uncertainty and chaos, and also from all three — from Peter [Thiel], from Elon [Musk] and from Max [Levchin], I learned to some extent, to be bold. I learned to say, ‘okay, my rational mind doesn’t think that we can do this, but I think we can.’ Sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn’t, but you need that. Elon is the boldest business person I’ve ever met. There are a lot of things that I don’t like about Elon, but in that sense [he’s] incredibly inspiring.”
Evergreen Wealth launches with offices in Miami, Dallas, and Raleigh, NC. Harris said he aims to eventually have offices for the RIA in New York and Palo Alto. The company currently has about 50 employees, Harris said.
