401k
(7)
Abdul Al-Asaad
He grew up in a refugee camp and learned finance at Goldman Sachs. Now Abdul Al-Asaad wants to hand ordinary savers the borrowing power that has always belonged to the wealthy.
Aaron Schumm
He built the plumbing behind America's savings accounts - the 401(k)s, 529s and state programs most people never think about - by betting that the boring middle of finance was the biggest opportunity nobody wanted.
Trevor Gary
Trevor Gary is the founder and CEO of Micruity, a retirement-income infrastructure company that connects 401(k) recordkeepers, asset managers and insurers so plans can offer annuities and pension-style lifetime income. A former pension actuary at Deloitte Canada, Gary saw firsthand how the shift from defined-benefit pensions to 401(k) plans left millions of Americans without guaranteed income in retirement. He founded Micruity in 2017-2018 to build the data conduit that makes lifetime-income products work at scale. The company has raised roughly $27 million from a roster of insurance and financial heavyweights including Prudential, TIAA, State Street, Nationwide, J.P. Morgan Asset Management and Pacific Life.
Jean Smart
Jean Smart is the founder and CEO of Penelope, a New York fintech rebuilding the retirement recordkeeping layer for the small and micro-businesses Wall Street forgot. After a 20-plus year career as a financial-services executive at Charles Schwab, TD Ameritrade, Citigroup and UBS, she left a managing-director seat to build affordable, fully-digital 401(k) infrastructure for solopreneurs and mom-and-pop shops. The company, which she named after her daughter, launched in 2022 with a mission to put generational wealth-building within reach of the workers institutions have historically overlooked.
Qian Liu
Qian Liu is a fintech operator and data scientist who helped build the robo investing movement from the inside. A computer scientist by training - PhD in machine learning from Penn, BS from Tsinghua - she was an early member of the Wealthfront founding team and its Director of Research, then Head of Data at GoFundMe, then Chief Data Officer at Guideline, the small-business 401(k) platform. When Gusto acquired Guideline, she moved into a leadership role at Gusto, where the brokerage entity sits inside its HR, payroll and benefits platform serving small and medium businesses. In 2024 she co-authored 'The Little Book of Robo Investing' with Elizabeth MacBride, turning a decade of building automated investing products into a plain-spoken guide for ordinary savers.
Jeff Schneble
Jeff Schneble is the CEO of Human Interest, a San Francisco-based fintech company on a mission to close America's $28 trillion retirement savings gap by making 401(k) and 403(b) plans affordable and accessible for small and medium-sized businesses. A physicist turned venture capitalist turned operator, Schneble brought together a rare trifecta of academic rigor (PhD from Cambridge, MBA from Harvard), investment experience (Partner at Wing Venture Capital), and hands-on operational chops (Silver Lake Partners) before taking the helm at Human Interest in 2019. Under his leadership, the company has grown to serve over 45,000 companies, surpassed $200 million in ARR, raised over $1 billion in total funding at a $3 billion valuation, and is eyeing a public listing.
Roger Lee
Roger Lee is a San Francisco-based serial entrepreneur best known as the co-founder and CEO of Comprehensive, an all-in-one compensation management platform, and the creator of Layoffs.fyi, the internet's go-to tracker for tech layoffs. He also co-founded Human Interest, a $1B+ 401(k) platform serving over 20,000 small businesses. A Harvard Applied Mathematics graduate who taught himself HTML at age 12, Lee has been building internet products since the early 2000s - including a teen social network that reached 30 million monthly views in 2003. Named to San Francisco Business Times '40 Under 40' in 2023, he's become the de facto authority on both where tech workers are being let go and how much they should be getting paid.