Jason Wenk and the advice nobody had time to take

The advice arrived by email. For $29 a month, Jason Wenk’s subscribers could get recommendations for their 401(k) accounts, tailored to the retirement plan they actually had. His early business, Smarter Than Wall Street, offered a sensible bargain: a little money for help with a consequential decision. Then subscribers began leaving. When Wenk asked why, he learned that people lacked the time to put the recommendations into practice. He had delivered the instructions. His customers still had homework.

That small failure belongs near the center of Wenk’s career. He has spent much of it moving closer to the work that comes after an explanation. First he became an advisor. Then he built tools other advisors could use. Eventually he started building the machinery underneath their businesses. Altruist, the custody and technology company he founded in 2018, is the latest expression of a question that has followed him for years: how much easier could this be for the person who needs help?

The customer had homework

Wenk grew up in a farming community in West Michigan. Finance was far from the family vocabulary. His parents owned no stocks or mutual funds, and his original ambition was to work at a Silicon Valley dot-com. Computers offered an entry into a larger world. He studied computer science at Grand Valley State University, interned at Morgan Stanley at 19, and joined the firm in New York at 20.

He was still working in technology. The setting happened to be an investment bank. Among the projects he encountered were efforts to make investment research available over networks, replacing the awkward circulation of data on CD-ROMs. Here was finance from a developer’s angle: information, interfaces, and decisions that a better system might improve. The young computer enthusiast had found plenty to fix without reaching California.

Retirement Wealth Advisors followed in 2004. Wenk saw a growing population of retirees facing decisions about income and investments, and built software to help with the work. His practice reached $100 million in client assets. A business that began with advice now had clients to onboard, plans to prepare, and relationships to maintain. Success came with an expanding list of things to do on Monday morning.

A snow day rewrites the office

One change arrived courtesy of Michigan weather. Clients in their seventies did not want to travel on icy roads and suggested a Skype meeting. After the call, Wenk offered the option more widely. By 2009, he had moved his practice entirely online. The clients had supplied a useful reminder: an appointment with an advisor did not necessarily require a journey to an advisor’s office.

His approach to finding clients also took shape online. He wrote detailed financial-product reviews and learned how search could connect a particular question with a particular reader. Videos let him explain ideas to many people while retaining something of a face-to-face conversation. A small practice could reach beyond its immediate geography without requiring everyone to leave home. The internet was becoming part of the service itself.

“What matters is what your client thinks of you.”

Jason Wenk

Other advisors began asking how they could use what he had built. FormulaFolios grew out of that interest. Wenk started writing its code in 2011 and launched it in 2012, offering a platform that helped advisors attract and onboard clients. He was moving from doing the work himself to supplying other people with a way to do it. Each advisor could bring those capabilities into a separate practice, with a separate set of client relationships.

FormulaFolios put mathematical models to work in investment management. By 2017 it ranked No. 10 on the Inc. 5000, after a three-year growth rate of 13,927 percent. Wenk received an EY Entrepreneur Of The Year award in 2018. Those were conspicuous milestones for someone who calls himself a math geek. Yet the larger the business became, the more clearly he could see the costs sitting underneath it.

The bill beneath the bill

Running a platform for advisors meant paying for the software that kept it running. Wenk described spending more than $200,000 on those tools. Opening accounts could be cumbersome; accounting and management applications could be expensive. An advisor hoping to serve more people at a lower price had to work through those costs before deciding what to charge. The household at the end of the chain might never see the software invoice, but it still mattered.

Altruist took aim at that underlying operation. A custodian holds and services investment accounts; around that sit the tools for opening accounts, trading, reporting, and billing. Wenk wanted those jobs to fit together. The appeal was practical: fewer pieces to assemble, fewer processes to manage, more time available for clients. He had already tried improving an advisory practice from inside. Now he wanted to change what practices ran on.

When he introduced Altruist publicly in 2019, the industry already had large custodians, including Charles Schwab and Fidelity. Wenk arrived with the impatience of a customer who had become a builder. He wanted lower costs and a more coherent experience. He also understood the sympathy a smaller entrant could attract. “I came from very little and I root for the underdog,” he said. Competing would require considerably more than a pleasing sentiment.

In 2023, Altruist acquired Shareholders Service Group, bringing an established advisor-service business into the operation. That year it also moved to self-clearing, taking on clearing and custody responsibilities previously handled through Apex. These are technical milestones, with little of the glamour of a new app screen. They matter because they change how much of the underlying operation a company can control.

Wenk cared about the screen as well. In 2025, Altruist overhauled its brand and platform. He described the company as design-led from the beginning. Simplicity had a job to do: help advisors and their clients use the product. For someone whose career began around software, appearance and operation were closely connected. A complicated task gains very little from an interface that makes it feel more complicated.

A long way from a quiet weekend

The public-facing founder has a more private side. Wenk has described himself as reclusive, someone who enjoys being at home with his family. His reading ranges from Jim Collins on organizations to Max Tegmark on the universe and Seth Godin on marketing. The combination fits the work: an interest in systems, alongside an interest in how people encounter and understand them.

He has also credited the people he met through Endeavor, which selected him as an entrepreneur in 2017. Mentors, fellow founders, and investors helped him gain confidence while scaling his business. In 2022, he joined its Great Lakes regional board. Los Angeles became his base, but Michigan remained a place where he wanted other entrepreneurs to build. The network that helped him became somewhere he could contribute.

In February 2026, a family trip to Zihuatanejo supplied an inconvenient demonstration of how far Altruist’s reach had grown. Wenk had planned a three-day weekend after an invitation from an advisor friend. He got one relaxing day. Attention around the launch of Hazel’s AI tax-planning capabilities then turned the next day into calls, messages, and Slack. The connection was too weak for a video meeting. A founder who had helped make remote work practical had encountered a rather firm limit on it.

Hazel extended Altruist’s work into another part of an advisor’s day. By September, the company had introduced AI-powered financial planning as well. Wenk described his commitment as continuing to build, even as the company entered negotiations that would change its ownership. The ambition remained tied to the client’s outcome. The number of tasks he believed software could help with was growing.

The Bogle question

On August 26, 2026, Vanguard announced an agreement to acquire Altruist. The terms were undisclosed. The transaction was expected to close later in the year, subject to regulatory approvals and other customary conditions. After closing, Altruist was expected to keep its leadership, brand, and operating model as a standalone business. Vanguard had first invested in 2020; the agreement followed years of an existing relationship.

For Wenk, the choice had a personal intellectual history. He had read Jack Bogle’s books and watched his interviews early in his career. Bogle’s argument for lower investing costs helped shape the thinking behind Altruist. Former Vanguard chief executive Bill McNabb sits on its board. What could look like a sudden destination from outside had been present in Wenk’s thinking for years.

His explanation also looked beyond his own tenure. He wanted an institution capable of protecting its purpose after its founder was gone. He saw Vanguard’s investor-owned structure as a home for that ambition, and said he intended to stay. By October, he was still discussing the agreement and Hazel in public, including an onstage conversation with Josh Brown in Brooklyn.

“How do I get more people ahead financially?” Wenk asked in a September interview. It is a plainer question than the language surrounding acquisitions and venture rounds. It also returns him to the people who paid for those early emails. Getting an answer into someone’s inbox had been possible. Helping them use it required a different business. Wenk has kept finding more work in the space between the two.