Jonathan Stein Email Address

Founder and Chairman of the Board

Betterment is the smarter automated investing service that aims to provide optimized investment returns for individual, IRA, 401k, and rollover accounts.

I’m a founder, advisor to CEOs, and board member. I aim to build and back organizations of great purpose and impact. I have 20 years leadership experience in finance and tech, consumer and B2B, from startups to global public. At Betterment, the company I founded and led as CEO for 13 years, 15 as Board Chair, I grew the team to more than 400 people and raised $400M equity (VC), and today we have more than $35B of assets (AUM) and 750,000 funded customers. My "polestar" is Efficiency: making more from less, because efficiency is what makes us humans (and our planet) better off. Transparency, reliability, process, and fairness are guideposts pointing to efficiency. I find that we (and I) often make efficient progress by racing off (often in the wrong direction) and correcting as we go. What excites me about my work is making processes and products more intuitive, accessible, and delightful - making them more efficient. I believe, as Utilitarian John Stuart Mill says, “[Happy people are focused on an objective] other than their own happiness; on the happiness of others, on the improvement of mankind, even on some art or pursuit, followed not as a means, but as itself an ideal end. Aiming thus at something else, they find happiness by the way.”