Jason Wenk is the founder and chief executive of Altruist. He grew up in a small farm town in west Michigan, started at Morgan Stanley in New York City at 20, and built Retirement Wealth Advisors and FormulaFolios before founding the company in 2018. He is known for putting custody and the software an independent adviser uses every day in one place.
School ended in the second year
He studied computer science at Grand Valley State University for about two years. In that second year he and his girlfriend were expecting a child. His mother, Deborah Kempker, met the news with support, he later told Mike Consol of Real Assets Adviser. He left school. The firm had interviewed him months earlier and put him in investment research and asset management systems. He told Consol he was one of the youngest employees Morgan Stanley had in the world. On his own site he adds that he thought of himself as a hacker and a largely self-taught engineer. He meant to finish the degree. The weeks ran long enough that he never did.
A 401(k) site, then firms other advisers could use
About twenty years before a company profile dated June 23, 2021, he launched Smarter Than Wall Street, a site that sent advice on a subscriber's 401(k) for $29 a month. People canceled after the first months. He concluded the advice was sound and that subscribers did not have time to act on it, and that conclusion pushed him into advice as a job. In 2004 he started Retirement Wealth Advisors and, with a small team, built software for retirement-income decisions. He writes that the firm reached $100 million of client assets, and that he was one of the youngest founders to take a firm to that size from scratch.
FormulaFolios offered that software to other independent advisers. He writes that it grew from nothing to nearly $4 billion of assets in six years, that Inc. magazine ranked it among the fastest-growing private companies four years running and as high as No. 10 in 2017, and that he was named an EY Entrepreneur of the Year in 2018 and a GRBJ Newsmaker of the Year in the finance category in 2016 and 2017. The June 2021 company account describes a snowy day in Michigan when clients in their seventies asked for Skype so they would not have to drive on ice. He offered virtual meetings to the rest of the client base. In 2009 the firm went entirely virtual. The same account says FormulaFolios reached hundreds of employees, serving hundreds of advisers and tens of thousands of clients.
A name he had kept for years
He told Consol he had bought the Altruist domain and carried the name for 15 or more years before using it in 2018. He had entered the registered investment adviser business in 2004 because of the fiduciary duty, the rule that an adviser put the client's interest first, and he found it strange that only a small corner of financial services carried that legal obligation. The company about page says the first group worked from a modest office in Culver City, California, a mix of engineers and former advisers, and went on to become a broker-dealer that clears its own trades.
"Once I started to see how the financial system worked, it just seemed to be incredibly unfair, very much stacked against the average person," he told Mike Consol in Real Assets Adviser in March 2022.