Lori: Hello and welcome to Fine Is a 4-Letter Word. Our guest today is Anders Jones. Welcome to the show Anders.

Anders: Thanks for having me. Excited to be here.

Lori: I am too, because I know this is going to be a good conversation. I don't know how, I just have a feeling. So I always like to dive in with this question because I think it helps listeners have an understanding of where you're coming from in the rest of the conversation. And that is, the question is, what were the values and beliefs that you were raised with that contributed to who you've become?

Anders: Geez, that's not a small question to start with.

Lori: Yeah, we don't do small questions here.

Anders (00:40.64)

Yeah. Well, let's hope I get this right in case my mom ever listens to this, right? I would say one of the core values that my mom really pushed and kind of continues to gently remind me of is, you know, I was fortunate to be raised in a good situation. My mom had a big job in corporate America that actually, funny enough, she worked at Fidelity and helping millions of Americans stay for retirement. And that's a version of what we do at Facet. So we kind of like to laugh and say, I'm in the family business. But I was very fortunate that I grew up really not wanting much of anything.

And I'd say one of the things that she was very very good at sort of gently reminding is gratitude and just kind of knowing that like, look, to a certain extent, you're born into kind of an arbitrary situation. And I was very fortunate to be born into a great one and not just socioeconomically, but also with really kind of amazing nuclear family supporting me and as I grew up.

And so, so, so that's, that's probably one, mean, the sort of gratitude practices, one that is, the older I get, the more I lean into that and, and just think about like, you know, I, I always kind of laugh and say, you know, when I die, I want to come back as myself. I feel like that's a, that's a pretty good place to be.

Lori: Wow, that's amazing. That's a powerful statement. All right, did you have to write thank you notes after like birthdays and holidays?

Anders: Yeah, but I would say with with sort of like, you know, medium discipline, right? Like, like, I think that was always the goal. But whether or not it happened, you know, it was was was 50/50. Yeah.

Lori: Okay, were there other gratitude practices that you remember? Because I know some families, like they go around the table at dinner at night or whenever at breakfast, wherever they're together and share, you know, something good that happened that day.

Anders: Yeah. Yeah. No, we definitely did a fair amount of that. mean, certainly the one that I always think about is Thanksgiving, right? I mean, that's the one where you're really on the spot, not just with your immediate family, but also all the extended people who are gathering. We've had some funny ones over the years too. As you could imagine, some that were politically charged and people not really reading the room or whatever it might be.

But yeah, I think it's more, there's certainly, I think goodness to putting sort of frameworks in place. Like, there's sort of nightly, hey, what was the good thing that happened to you today? But also just like, I mean, I've spent a lot of time in my 20s and 30s with the meditation practice and sort of more mindfulness and having the opportunity on a on a daily basis or, you know, I try to do it daily to kind of sit and just be and just be present. that usually brings it on too, which is nice. Yeah.

Lori: Yeah. How were you introduced to your meditation practice?

Anders: Well, I was up in Boston, but then I went to college in California and I stayed out there for almost 15 years. so, you know, that just being in Northern California, like I feel like you just kind of, you just sort of pick it up, walking down the street. But actually my co-founder at Facet, he is a bit older than me and he had gone through a whole process. He like really ripped the bandaid off and went and, you know, spent a month in Tibet at a monastery, like no contact.

It's actually a funny story. He, he went in, I think August or September of 2008 and he had just sold his first company. so like, you know, it was in the middle of the financial crisis, but he had no idea. And so then he, you know, turned his phone back on and like, was like, Whoa, mean, if you have to pick a good time, if you had to pick a time to be, uh, you know, meditating with monks on the top of the mountain in Tibet, that's probably it. Right.

So, so, but anyways, he, you he and I spent a lot of time talking about it and, you know, I've read some, some great books by Thich Nhat Hanh is sort of the, that was kind of the, the jumping off point in my early twenties.

Lori: Do you, so now you're the CEO of Facet. So I wanna come back and ask you how you got into that, because like, did you always have the direction that you were gonna go into the family business as you called it. But I'm also curious, and these are like totally different questions, you, how you, if or how you introduced like these calming practices to your employees.

Anders: Wow. are, those are two, we'll take those one at a time. So, so the story of Facet. no. So the short answer is, is no. Well, yes and no, I guess. So I graduated from college back to the financial crisis. I graduated from college in the spring of 2009, which is probably in recent memory, the worst time to graduate from college, except for maybe the spring of 2020. And funny enough, my brother graduated from college in the spring of 2020. So.

My, you know, my poor mother. but, but anyway, so, you know, my plan was to graduate and go work on wall street and, you know, probably be an investment banker and then, you know, private equity or something like that. And, and that obviously went out the window. but I was fortunate. mean, I, you know, was, was at school at Stanford. So was in Silicon Valley and, know, this was right around the time when, the sort of web two.dot-oh was starting to take off, like mobile was really becoming a thing.

And so the, the sort of fallout from the first.com crash was gone and there were sort of signs of life in Silicon Valley again. And so I joined the early team of a company called eventually became known as live ramp, but it was basically like six or seven guys. Uh, I think it was, I think it was one girl.

We weren't quite in a garage, but we were one step beyond that. We really got a taste for entrepreneurship. The CEO, guy named Orin Hoffman, started dozens of companies at this point and has been very successful. He had this philosophy at the time. I don't know if he still does this, but he basically hired young smart people who are really ambitious and just say, go figure stuff out.

Which was, which was, mean, that was an unbelievable learning experience, right? you know, mean,I think I got sued twice, investigated by the FTC once, you know, you know, made, you know, created some real value too in the, process. But, you know, but, but sort of, was, it was a little bit of like the wild west and, and I found that that actually suited my personality way, way better.

And then when that sold, we, you know, we sold that company and, um, and then I was doing some early stage investing and just kind of hanging out, you know, as a 25, 26 year old in San Francisco. And, um, and then started getting really interested in what was going on in financial services. And for sure, I was kind of drawn to, to that part of the, world, I think, because of the exposure I had from my mom. Um, and then, you know, a variety of things sort of fell into place over the course of 18 months.

I put the pieces together and Facet was born. So, and yeah, and that was almost 10 years ago. And then, in terms of calming practices to our team, man, that's a, so the short answer is no, I don't lead like group meditations or anything like that. I think this is another big question.

I think, you know, one thing about being a CEO is you see the entire chessboard to a certain extent. Like you actually don't see all the intricacies of what's going on on a day in day out basis. You have to build systems to figure that out or to get that visibility, but you do see how all the pieces fit together.

And, I think one thing that I've learned is that the more that you can show that full picture to everyone else of the company, not only are you going to create more value because people are able to put what they're doing in context of other stuff. And that's how good ideas usually come to fruition. But also, I think that does have a calming effect because you could have someone who, I'm going to make an example up, right?

But you have someone who's you know, on our member experience team, which is essentially our sort of customer support function, right? Everything from password resets to cancel requests to service issues. That's a hard job, right? I mean, you're basically answering the phone. Very rarely are people calling to say, my God, love some, you know, I love you so much, right? But, you know, they could get three really angry calls in a row. And, and in isolation, they would think, wow, this company is really in bad shape.

But then you can put the other pieces in place and it actually paints like a, you know, a much better picture. So, yeah, so I spend a lot of time thinking about, okay, how do we share information? How do we help people see the full chessboard? And I'd say, you know, I would give myself maybe a B at that. Part of the issue is we're a hundred percent virtual, right? So we've got about 150 folks in 42 different States plus Canada. And so, you you don't get the information sharing like you do in an office. And so you have to be very, very thoughtful and sort of proactive about how you put all that together.

Lori: What have you found the best way to do that is? I'm curious. Is there something, is there like a thing that you're like, okay, all right.

Anders: There's no one silver bullet to this, honestly. We do quarterly all hands meetings where we talk about the state of the business. Do monthly deep dives on specific topics. We do weekly, we call them the 29 minute meeting where Thursday afternoons at 4.30, everyone gets together for 29 minutes and there's some topic that someone presents on. Usually once a week, or excuse me, once a month.

One of those will be like an AMA. And so people submit questions in advance and then myself and the rest of the executive team will have a chance to, you know, we'll kind of, answer the questions. And we have policy where we put, like it's like a Google form. It goes into a spreadsheet and I just screen share the spreadsheet. don't edit anything. And so, you know, we've gotten some humdingers over the years, as you can imagine. but it also, it kind of reinforces how people don't see the whole context, right? Cause people ask questions like.

You know, I'm actually just going to tell you why the premise of this question is wrong, not try and like make an excuse. that's, that's, it's a good litmus test to see like how good your information sharing actually is.

Lori: Yes, I would imagine so. And it gives you an opportunity to do something I think that a lot of leaders are reluctant to do, and that is be vulnerable.

Anders: Yeah, yeah, 100%. 100%. I think it's one of those things that people are very afraid of doing, but it's actually like a secret, it's like a superpower if you do it well. But it also has to be authentic, right? Because I think like sort of fake vulnerability is, that's a total vibe killer.

Lori: Everybody sees through that.

Anders: Yeah, totally. But no, mean, being vulnerable and, but you all, I mean, yeah, yeah, but you also have to be thoughtful about like the things you're vulnerable about, Like, oh my God, we're about to run out of cash. Like, that's not a good one to be vulnerable about to the whole company, right?

Lori: No, right, agreed, Yes. But it does engender trust from your team to the extent that you can, of course, right? Mindfully.

Anders: Yeah, yeah, no, for sure.

Lori: Yeah. What's the best advice you've ever received?

Anders: Always trust your gut when it's negative, never trust it when it's positive.

Mm-hmm. That, yeah, I love that one. So, pretty self-explanatory.

Lori: And have you found that to be like truth and helpful? Like can you really not trust your gut when it's positive?

Anders: Well, I think it's just, it's like, more homework, right? you know, it's like, this feels good. Like, okay, great. Good, good signal. But then like, go, go get the data to verify that it's, that it's good. and when it's negative, then you know, you, you have a much steeper hill to climb, I think, to, to turn that around. So, you know, I mean, like the, the obvious examples are in hiring decisions, right.

And, and, I have made many mistakes over the years from a hiring standpoint. But, you know, but I would say that that is, is, has always been been true. You know, if you, for better or worse, I think, you know, someone comes in and has a bad interview. It's, you know, that's a, there's a lot of talent out there and, it's not worth, you know, trying to convince yourself otherwise, you know, but at the same time I've been enamored with people and then just sort of push them through a process very quickly. And, you know, we've also ended up in a bad spot. So.

Lori: Do you think your meditation practice helps you get in touch with that gut feeling?

Anders: For sure. Yeah. Yeah. Cause I think you just, I mean, that's kind of the idea behind meditation, right? It's like, see the world for what it is. so, you know, building in time to kind of sit back and say, okay, let me see the whole picture here. I think that's a, that's a pretty powerful tool. Yeah.

Lori: Yeah. What is there, is there advice that somebody has come to you for that you were able to help them with? Is there a particular something that stands out to you? Like someone was struggling with something they came to you, maybe it was an employee even if they feel like since you've built this trust with them.

Anders: That's a good one. mean, I would like to think that I'd like to think the answer that's yes. You know, I would say one thing that I find happening more and more, which I really love actually, is I have younger entrepreneurs reaching out to me and usually someone I have some sort of relationship with. You younger entrepreneurs or I should say entrepreneurs who are earlier in their journey with their company.

Um, then, you know, then I am, I, you know, I still think of myself as like a pretty, you know, young and, and, uh, uh, you know, untested entrepreneur, guess. Um, but. You know, I guess we've been, you know, we'd have this for 10 years, so I've seen some shit and, yeah.

Lori: Right, exactly. I mean, the whole idea of like young or experienced is all relative. Right? I mean, you could have some kid who has been running their own business since they were five years old. I granted it's not at the same level that you're running yours now, but that they have that entrepreneurial experience under their belt. And there are some kids who are running like real businesses. I'm not talking about lemonade stands.

Anders: Totally. Yeah. And you're going to see more and more of that, right? mean, with AI especially, like you're going to see young people with one or two, you know, maybe solo or maybe with a partner or something like that build really massive, meaningful businesses, not raise money, not have massive teams of engineers. Like it's going to, the world's going to look very different five years from now, the entrepreneurial world, I think. Yeah. I don't know. I mean, I guess there's sort of like maybe two categories, right?

There is entrepreneurship and CEOship 101, where there's a set of things that are just the correct thing to do. Building your board decks in the right way or using your board meetings in an effective way.

There's a right way to do it and there's a wrong way to do it. And like, that doesn't really change, I think throughout the, you know, no matter kind of what company you're, you're running or what stage you are. but then, and then I'd say the second category is like edge cases, right? Where like, you have an employee, you know, a C level employee, you know, who, has a secret cocaine problem. I'm making up hypotheticals here to be clear, right? But, but like, I mean, this is stuff, you know, thing, things that are sort of similar to this that we've either dealt with or have heard about. And it's like, man, okay, that's a tougher one to deal with. like, I mean, what you find is that as time goes on, the bigger your company gets, shit like that's gonna happen. like, humans are remarkable in terms of the breadth of they can create either for themselves or for other people.

Lori: Yes, absolutely. In fact, this whole past year, I have implemented this mantra and that is, people are interesting.

Anders: Yeah, that's a good way to do it. Yeah. Yeah.

Lori: It's very useful for lots of situations.

Anders: Yeah. mean, and honestly, mean, you know, there's certainly like existential things where it's like, have to take it really seriously and, you know, but then there's other stuff where it's like, okay, once you sort of like deal with whatever the acute issue is, like, you know, you have to have a sense of humor about these things. And, and, you know, I mean, like, I like to, you know, I sort of like think where it's like, oh, you know, never boring, right?

Or, or like, I'd much rather be dealing with sort of interesting and difficult situations and not be bored than like, you know, live a quote unquote normal life. Yeah. But I'd say the other thing too is like you get desensitized to things too, right? I mean, we, you we went through, you know, some, some pretty difficult decisions a couple of years ago around reducing costs and, and, really pushing towards profitability.

And, you know, we were, were in a tight spot from a, from a cash standpoint. And, you know, I won't go into all the details, but you know, mean, there were, there were some moments where it was like, my God, you know, is, are we going to survive? and, and. You know, once you have that as sort of like your benchmark, everything else gets a lot less. Meaning, you know, it's like, wait, did, did I have to wire money from my bank out to make payroll today? No, I didn't. Okay. Then this is not a big problem, you know?

Lori: Yeah. When you were talking about firing an employee for a cocaine habit, that's okay.

Anders: To be clear, that didn't happen to us. Yeah. Yeah.

Lori: Yeah. But it brought, reminded me, I actually had a guest almost two years ago, Grant Muller, and he was fired for that reason from a company in, I think it was in Silicon Valley. He was a C-suite exec. I think he was C-suite. He was pretty high up. Anyway, he was fired for that. And it spiraled into much worse, but since he was on my show, he went through the time when Fine was not fine and then pulled himself out and is now a very, very successful real estate, realtor and coach. Yeah, but it does happen. He's proof it happened. Yeah. Good episode too.

We were talking before we started recording about dinner parties. Because yeah, because I am, as we were recording this, I was telling you I'm hosting a gratitude dinner tonight. And then we're talking about some other ones. So if you were to host an intimate dinner party, what would be the topic of discussion?

Anders: So I'm a big believer that you can't pick one topic. I think you need at least three. But I would say, and it should be three wildly different topics, right? So one would be like geopolitics, one would be something very personal about you or your family. And then, I don't know, one would be like maybe like a future prediction, 10 year prediction or something like that.

And, and, know, I do these from time to time actually. And, you know, the structure that I really liked that I find works really well is you basically, you're, you are allowed to have one conversation going at any time. So there's no sidebars. It's like one conversation. You have someone actually moderate it. So you have someone who, who's in charge of kind of keeping the conversation moving, engaging people who aren't talking. and, and obviously you make it like totally off the record.

So it's not a, you know, people, people are free to kind of speak, speak to mine and you have an end time. That's another one that I think is actually, maybe underrated, which is, know, you basically say, like at this moment in time, the dinner's over. And if you want to stay and have conversations, fine. But like, you know, you, you, put a time limit on it.

Lori: Yes, I completely agree. actually the structure of the gratitude dinners that I host is it is from 630 to 930 and then get the hell out. Yeah.

Anders: Yeah. Yeah. I found that some of those dinners go until one o'clock in the morning because the conversation is so good, but like, no one's obligated to stay, right? I think that's important. Yeah.

Lori: Right, yeah. Yeah, especially if it's on a school night.

Lori: Where, what direction do you anticipate or do you, are you inspired to take your company? Like what's your vision?

Anders: There are tens, if not hundreds of millions of people in the United States that don't have access to high quality financial advice. And that doesn't mean they need to have millions of dollars and have someone who's buying and selling stocks for them. That's not what we're selling for. basic financial literacy in this country is terrible.

Money is the number one cause of, stress, number two cause of divorce behind infidelity. and like literally if you are in bad financial shape, you will start having, physical, a physical reaction to it. something like 80 % of kids graduate from high school without knowing the difference between a credit card and a debit card. it's like basic, basic, basic stuff. Yeah. so it's it's a huge problem.

So, you know, we saw a very small part of that right now, right? We have, you know, what I like to describe what we've done at Facet is we've taken something reserved for the, you know, for the wealthy. We've made it more accessible, more affordable, and we've made it better. So we've built Uber Black for financial planning. And we're working right now on what I call UberX, which is a much lower cost version that's more kind of mass market instead of mass affluent.

But I think everyone in this business loves to go up market, right? The sign of making it is you work with wealthier and wealthier clients. For us, our goal is to go down market and help as many people as we possibly can for less and less money. And it's a beautiful thing of technology and innovation. And I'm really excited for what AI is going to unlock for us in the next couple of years. But you can continuously lower the cost of this service and increase the quality as time goes on. So, like I said, I would love to build the next Fidelity or the next Schwab. And I think there's a hundred million people out there that in the next 20 years we can really help. So that's the goal, right? I mean, there's a lot of work to do between now and then, but that is kind of the thing that really inspires all of us.

Lori: That's such a worthy goal and I don't say that just because I want to like pump up your ego or anything. to what you said, most people don't understand how money works. It's not taught in schools, just like really we need to know all of this other stuff, which a lot of it we do, but some of it is like, wait, but what about the practical stuff? People graduate.

Certainly they need to know how to read and write, which is also not always the case, but this whole financial literacy is sometimes, and who was it? I was just having a conversation recently with somebody about why more people don't understand money.

And is it like, it may have got, we didn't get political, but is it because the quote unquote elite, whoever they are, want to keep themselves in power. And if people don't know how to manage their money, then they keep them dependent.

Anders: I think, I don't know, I would say that that to me feels like a stretch. I think there's a much more fundamental reason, which is money is a scary topic for most people. do a lot of work around behavioral finance and like the psychology of money. And actually one of the things that we do is we put all of our members through a what's your money mindset quiz. And it's basically like a Myers-Briggs for, for, you know, how you think about your, your personal finance.

And anxiety is the number one thing. when you're anxious about something, easiest thing in the world to do is ignore it. So I don't think there's a grand conspiracy that's trying to keep the little guy down. I think it's more just like, it's a scary thing. And it's also very complicated and more so in this country than in most countries with like the tax code.

I mean, the amount of financial products that are out there. The other thing think is that financial products are sold, not bought. A hill that I will die on is that financial advisors in the last few decades have done more harm than good on average to the average American. You look at the people like Edward Jones, and I don't mind naming names, honestly, who are selling people annuities and taking a 7 % commission off the top and locking their money up.

That is purely a money grab. It's not at all appropriate. One of the reasons why we started Facet actually was sort of one of the real like aha moments was in 2015, the Obama administration tried to pass a rule called the fiduciary rule. And basically it was a law that, most simplest forms said, if you are a financial advisor, you're now legally obligated to act in the best interest of your clients. And it didn't pass, right? So we're sitting, yeah.

Lori: Like what? This is the most basic thing of your job.

Anders: So instead they have this thing called the suitability standard, is, you know, is the advice that I'm giving you a suitable for your, you know, for, for your, your situation, but it doesn't have to be in your, it doesn't have to be the best advice. It just has to be suitable. I think you might have to add this part out, but I think that's fucked. I, know, like, I think that that's a, that, that is a, really kind of, mean, it would, it's, it's not dissimilar to like a doctor, you know, giving you a prescription because they get paid by the pharma company. Yeah, and I would argue that's fucked also. So anyway, so I think that all of these, but at the same time, you think about the incentives, I don't think individual advisors are bad people. I mean, some are for sure, but most advisors are not bad people. I think it's more just the industry structure and how it's grown up over time.

I think that markets are efficient over time. The subscription-based fiduciary conflict-free transparent way of doing financial advice is going to win the day. It could take decades, but we're in this for the long haul.

Lori: I appreciate your passion because it is something that is important for everybody to understand and to know. And I think in addition to why people don't know is because generationally, if your parents don't know and they can't teach you anything or they were bad examples just because they didn't know, then how do you learn? It's like a lot of things. If it's not passed down to you, you don't even know what you don't know.

Anders: Totally. Well, and this is another thing too, right? Is that a huge percentage of families don't want to talk about money, like even amongst themselves. Yeah. it's, you know, it's a topic, it's like, you know, money, sex, religion, and politics are like the four things you don't, you don't talk about. It's just, they're not talked about. I do think that we're seeing, you know, more and more as time goes on, like people are more open about that and I've noticed it amongst my friends, maybe because we're entrepreneurs and we think a lot about making money, we're much more open with each other.

Lori: Yeah, think entrepreneurs in general are more open to talking about it. Yeah. And I agree with you, though. think some of even the younger generations, it's becoming more socially acceptable to talk about it, because to be more transparent is the word.

Okay. I, this has been such a good conversation. You seem like a really interesting mix of like laid back energy, but very like, will do whatever I got to do to get the job done. And is that no? Okay. So where I'm leading into is when you need an extra boost of energy, maybe to like that last push of getting something finished. What is the song you listen to?

Anders: Um, there are a few of them, but the one that comes to mind is, uh, is riding with the King, which is, uh, Eric Clapton and, BB King. Yeah. And that's not, by the way, that's not like a, an ego boost on my part. That's more, I just, I love that song. I'll tell you a very, a very quick story. So when I was growing up, um, my stepdad, uh, uh, gave me my first car. He had an old, he had an old Saab and he basically said, like, he's, he's British.

And he said, look, you can have this car, but there's two requirements. Number one, it's a stick shift, so you have to learn how to drive stick, which is a great decision. Like that's served me well. And honestly, it's just way more fun. Really? I have an automatic now, I go like literally two weeks ago. There you go. Yeah, exactly.

Lori: Yes, absolutely. That's the only kind of car I've ever owned. Yeah, still do. It's an anti-theft device.

Anders: So that was number one. And then number two was it had a single CD changer and he had this like leather folio that like sat right underneath it. And he was like, I get to pick your music. And so he was a British guy who grew up in London in the 1960s and 1970s. And so, you know, I had like Dire Straits, know, the Rolling Stones, the Beatles, Bob Dylan.

Between the ages of like 16 and 18, as I was bombing around in this thing, I was listening to all this like great English rock. And, um, and so that was, that's, that's why I have an affinity for that song and others like it.

Lori: That's how you got introduced to that song. I love it. Thank you for sharing that story. Anders, if somebody wants to get in touch with you and find out more about what you're doing or continue this conversation, where's the best place for them to reach you?

Anders: So if you're interested in facet, facet.com, F-A-C-E-T. And we got a bunch of like quizzes and things on there so you can learn more about your own like money mindset and your own financial situation. And then if it makes sense, you can talk to one of our folks. can ping me on LinkedIn, andersjones, anders at facet.com. It's all pretty, it's all out there. Yeah.

Lori: Yeah, awesome. I will put links to all of that in the show notes. Well, I'll make it really easy for people. Thank you so much for joining me today on Fine Is a 4-Letter Word.

Anders: Thanks for having me, Lori I appreciate it.