Mike Zhang and the Art of Choosing Who Gets Your Money

When Mike Zhang sold his first company, the telephone became rather more sociable. Wealth managers from Goldman Sachs, Merrill Lynch and Credit Suisse wanted his attention. Some sent gifts. He had built an online retailer of airsoft equipment; suddenly, he was the valuable inventory. The change in his circumstances had been rapid. His standard for choosing people remained stubbornly personal.

He chose Andrew Palmer at Bel Air Investment Advisors. They had met at an entrepreneurship awards event in 2011, before the sale, when Zhang had much less money available to invest. Palmer had taken an interest in the business anyway. By the time Zhang needed an adviser, the relationship already existed. A business card had acquired some history.

“When I have a rainy day, I don’t want to talk to an opportunist.”

Mike Zhang, 2014

That small decision offers a useful way into a career that moves from online retail to Good Money, the banking platform where he served as co-CEO, and onward to altHQ, his private-market software company. The industries change considerably. Questions about who gets trusted with money, and what happens after the introduction, keep returning.

A computer lab, before the conference rooms

Zhang’s first trading floor was a middle school computer lab. He bought and resold video games on eBay. The attraction was practical: extra income, followed by the realization that selling online could help his parents afford a down payment on their first house. The son of Chinese immigrants had found a business ambition with a very specific beneficiary.

Airsoft Megastore followed while he was still in school. It sold equipment for recreational games using plastic BBs, a niche with customers who cared about the differences between products. A retailer serving that audience had to understand both the merchandise and the people discussing it. The website was the shop window; the business behind it still had to buy, store and deliver physical goods.

His family’s involvement made the undertaking unusually consequential. His parents put $25,000 into the first purchase order in 2004, money he later described as nearly all their savings. The company began in the family apartment. He had grown up in Beijing and Shanghai before moving to Los Angeles at seven. By 2008, two months into UC Berkeley, he left university to run the business full time.

Four thousand things to get right

By the time a recapitalization was announced in January 2013, Airsoft Megastore carried more than 4,000 stock-keeping units. Founded by Zhang and his family, the Irwindale business had attracted Jay Snider, whose experience included leading the Philadelphia Flyers and building other companies. JAYTS, Snider’s investment vehicle, became the partner in the transaction.

The assortment matters. Four thousand items mean thousands of opportunities for a retailer to disappoint someone with an incorrect listing, an unavailable product or an order that fails to arrive. Growth increases the number of promises a company makes every day. A busy checkout page can conceal an extraordinary amount of work.

Zhang wanted a partner with experience running larger organizations. The transaction brought together his familiarity with airsoft and ecommerce and Snider’s experience building businesses. Intrepid Investment Bankers advised on the deal; Pacific Western Bank provided senior financing. Rutan & Tucker handled legal advice for Airsoft Megastore. The apartment business had acquired a considerably longer meeting invitation.

Recognition had preceded the transaction. In 2011, Zhang became an Ernst & Young Entrepreneur of the Year finalist in Greater Los Angeles, selected from nearly 70 nominations. Airsoft Megastore also received Empact100 recognition at a White House ceremony in 2012. Awards could introduce the young founder to useful people. The stock still needed counting the following morning.

The twelve-month software lesson

There is another revealing detail in Zhang’s retail years: an order-management system took about twelve months to implement. While data migrated, the old software continued running. The vendor also delivered two days of training in person. A purchasing decision had become a year of work.

Zhang had evaluated everyday business processes before deciding what the software should do. He gathered colleagues’ requirements and considered compatibility with the shopping cart, reliability, infrastructure and price. He wanted the system to fit the company’s work rather than require the company to sacrifice efficiency to accommodate the system.

Training had to reflect the job being performed. Customer service staff needed customer service examples; warehouse staff needed shipping examples. This is a less glamorous account of entrepreneurship than the sale announcement, and a useful companion to it. Even an apparently straightforward online retailer depends on people understanding how information passes between departments.

The episode helps explain why his later work in financial software makes sense. Long before altHQ, Zhang was describing the cost of getting business information from one system into another. He had experienced the interval between buying a solution and having something employees could use.

Good Money’s invitation to the customer

Good Money took a different question into financial services: what if a customer received ownership in the banking platform? Its December 2018 announcement described equity for opening an account, with additional equity available through actions such as setting up direct deposit and referring friends. Everyday customer behavior would become part of the ownership proposition.

The company announced a $30 million Series A led by Galaxy Digital’s EOS VC fund. Its stated commitments included directing 50% of platform profits to social and environmental projects. The founding team also pledged half its equity to philanthropy and impact. These were promises about how the business would work, with a future tense that matters.

The proposition borrowed from a much older tradition. Credit unions had already demonstrated member ownership; Good Money proposed a for-profit digital platform with a customer equity component. Customers would also have a voice in where the pledged portion of profits went, including sustainable investments and charitable causes.

For Zhang, whose first business began with a family’s savings, this was a different arrangement of the relationship between a company and the people supplying its economic foundation. Customers were being offered a place in the ownership story. Whether a share is valuable still depends on the business behind it. A cap table, however pleasantly presented, cannot manufacture profits.

A 2019 account of Good Money’s founding group placed him alongside Gunnar Lovelace, Poornaprajna Udupi, Andrew Masanto, Bear Kittay and Katiyana Kittay. In January 2021, he appeared on The A Suite Podcast as the company’s co-CEO. His Good Money chapter brought an ecommerce operator into a venture attempting to make banking serve a different set of relationships.

The people who remember the favor

Some of Zhang’s effect on other businesses shows up in their founders’ recollections. Hireframe’s Tyler Rachal and Mike Wu have described how the staffing company began with a request from him. While building Good Money, Zhang asked about help finding staff, including possible partners in the Philippines. They offered to do the work themselves.

It is a modest origin story: someone has an operational problem, someone else offers to solve it, and a business begins. Zhang was a customer as well as a supporter. The recollection places him in a familiar position, looking for the people who could help a company function.

His own management advice points in the same direction. During his subsequent consumer-business career, he emphasized working with people smarter than himself. The instruction is easy to admire and harder to practice. It requires a founder who enjoys making decisions to recognize the value of somebody else’s judgment.

“the importance of finding and working with people who are a lot smarter than you”

Mike Zhang on his management lesson, 2016

Those relationships can last through changes of company. Investor Al Doan remembers meeting Zhang at the White House and later backing altHQ. A ceremony intended to recognize young entrepreneurs also provided an introduction that survived well beyond the photographs.

Now the inventory is information

At altHQ, where Zhang is co-founder and CEO, the work concerns private investments and the information surrounding them. The company describes a familiar administrative predicament: PDFs, portals and spreadsheets that do not communicate cleanly. Its software is intended for family offices, investment advisers and institutional allocators.

The product pitch centers on consolidating data, reporting on portfolios and reducing administration. Documents have replaced airsoft equipment, but the need to organize an unruly assortment remains. Information must arrive in a form that the next person can use. An investment may be sophisticated; the work of finding its latest numbers can be decidedly ordinary.

In a February 2024 discussion, altHQ investors talked about making private investments searchable, digestible and standardized. Eric Jorgenson described family offices with numerous active private investments as a setting where those tools could help. The attraction was the prospect of extracting information accurately without leaving people to perform extensive cleanup.

A concrete development followed on September 16, 2025. U.S. patent 12,417,214 was issued for adaptive semantic parsing and structured data transformation of digitized documents. The record names Mike Zhang as inventor and altHQ as assignee. Its subject is the conversion of documents into structured information, a technical expression of the problem the company set out to tackle.

There is a pleasing continuity here. The teenager learning to sell online became an operator choosing order software, a banking executive thinking about customer ownership, and a founder working on investment information. Each chapter asks people to hand over something valuable and expect competent care in return. Zhang’s early choice of adviser suggests he learned to examine that expectation from both sides of the desk.