I think there are other wealth management-related startups that are actually changing the paradigm, e.g., Wealthfront, whereas (to the extent of my knowledge) Addepar is helping the incumbents in the space continue to capture fees in excess of their value add (your original point). Relative to other local firms, Addepar operates at an information asymmetry advantage - the finance and especially wealth management industry is less well understood by the average CMU SCS graduate than, say, the social media industry. I think Addepar exploits this.
Of course everyone starts smaller than their end state, but as far as I can tell, Addepar still focuses on client reporting. There's a lot of data aggregation, etc., that goes into that, but from their website: "Addepar gives you a competitive advantage. By eliminating the manual burden of aggregating your financial information, and making it easy to generate customized reports in just seconds, we free you up to spend more time designing and advising on client investment strategies." If there's more there, like portfolio construction/rebalancing, order generation and execution management, clearing and settlement, etc., it's not easy to apprehend from publicly available information.
Look, I think Addepar is amazingly beautiful software, exceedingly well executed (though it may be pearls before swine.) It also has tremendous hype (which is often seen as an unalloyed good in the Valley). Is it a viable business? Is it revolutionary, or is it a much-better executed Advent with the advantages of no legacy code- and userbase? I think those are interesting questions.
Of course everyone starts smaller than their end state, but as far as I can tell, Addepar still focuses on client reporting. There's a lot of data aggregation, etc., that goes into that, but from their website: "Addepar gives you a competitive advantage. By eliminating the manual burden of aggregating your financial information, and making it easy to generate customized reports in just seconds, we free you up to spend more time designing and advising on client investment strategies." If there's more there, like portfolio construction/rebalancing, order generation and execution management, clearing and settlement, etc., it's not easy to apprehend from publicly available information.
Look, I think Addepar is amazingly beautiful software, exceedingly well executed (though it may be pearls before swine.) It also has tremendous hype (which is often seen as an unalloyed good in the Valley). Is it a viable business? Is it revolutionary, or is it a much-better executed Advent with the advantages of no legacy code- and userbase? I think those are interesting questions.