The Man Who
Rewired How
America Invests

SigFig launched in 2012 as one of the country's first robo-advisors - portfolio tracking rebuilt as an automated investment service. Within months, 400,000 users were on the platform. But Sha looked at the consumer acquisition numbers and then looked at the balance sheets of the banks already managing trillions of dollars, and ran a calculation that most startups in his position were too proud to make. Going direct-to-consumer would cap growth. Getting inside the institutions would not. "We looked at that market and said, how large are we likely to get going direct-to-consumer versus how likely are we to get if we actually build the technology and put it in the hands of incumbent players." He chose the latter.

The pivot was neither obvious nor comfortable. Enterprise sales to financial institutions is slow, bureaucratic, regulated, and deeply skeptical of outside technology. Sha's edge was not speed - it was credibility. SigFig had already proven it could handle sensitive financial data at scale. And crucially, Sha understood something the startups trying to replace the banks never quite grasped: "distribution and trust are the hardest parts of scaling in financial services." Not features. Not UI. Trust.

Before he built a company around financial advice, Sha spent his first post-Harvard years at Amazon. He worked on product and customer experience at a moment when Amazon was building the infrastructure of modern commerce. He was part of the small team that conceived what would become Amazon Prime - one of the most successful subscription programs in business history. He launched the Amazon Visa Card into one of the fastest-growing consumer loyalty programs. He built AI-based fraud detection systems long before "AI" became a marketing term.

The lessons embedded themselves. "The most important things I probably took away from Amazon was just ultimate and utter obsession around customers," he says. And another thing: Amazon saw itself as a software company that happened to sell things, not a retailer that had built some software. That distinction - product-led, systems-first thinking inside what looked like a traditional business - became the template for everything Sha built afterward.

In September 2025, after 19 years of building toward it, Sha renamed the company Tandems and launched WealthOS - an AI-native operating system for wealth management advisors. Not a feature update. A reframe of what the software is for. The three products - TandemsGrow, TandemsInvest, and TandemsMeet - attack the same underlying problem from three angles: financial advisors currently spend the vast majority of their time on administrative work, compliance paperwork, and meeting prep, leaving little time for what they are actually paid to do, which is give advice.

TandemsMeet automates meeting preparation, note-taking, and CRM sync. TandemsGrow identifies gaps in client portfolios and streamlines onboarding. TandemsInvest handles portfolio construction, rebalancing, and tax optimization. Together, they are designed to automate what Sha estimates is 90% of advisor administrative burden.

The architecture reflects Sha's precision about AI's actual limitations in finance. He does not believe any single AI vendor should be trusted as the sole source of recommendations in a regulated industry. Tandems uses an open architecture, running multiple models and prioritizing accuracy and configurability. "Being 90% right is kind of like 0% useful in production" - an observation that most enterprise AI vendors would prefer not to discuss.

Notably, the 2025 Tandems rebrand was funded entirely from balance sheet and cash flow. No new venture round. This after SigFig had already raised $113 million over six rounds from General Atlantic, Union Square Ventures, and Bain Capital Ventures. The message to the market was deliberate: this is a business, not a pitch.

Mike Sha and Parker Conrad met at 17 as Harvard freshmen in the same dorm. They were roommates for most of college, always joking about starting a company together. They did, with Wikinvest in 2006. The partnership lasted until 2012, when Conrad departed SigFig.

Conrad went on to build Zenefits and then Rippling - now valued at more than $13 billion and one of the fastest-growing enterprise software companies in the world. Sha continued building what is now Tandems. It is hard to find another college friendship in technology that produced two simultaneously successful founders operating at this scale across different decades.

Sha grew up in a household where his mother's passion for self-directed investing was the backdrop of his childhood. The dot-com boom was in the air. By college, he was watching classmates trade stocks in real time. The interest was always there. Amazon sharpened the business instinct. Harvard gave him the co-founder. The data from half a trillion in tracked portfolios gave him the mission.