Digit

I have been obsessed with personal finance since I got my first bit of cash at my Bar Mitzvah. I invested most of this money and by age 15 I had seen my net worth triple and then go to 0, thanks to the Internet and telecom bubbles.This early experience of managing my own money set me on a lifelong journey in search of the truths underlying the financial realm.

This journey eventually led to a BSBA in finance (University of Florida), where I was a finance research assistant (published) then a Fixed Asset accountant at Lockheed Martin (Mr. Fun), where I started a video show on Finance (TWTBW), which led led me to my first real job (Marketing) working for a financial startup (Cake Financial).

Through these experiences, a truth I kept wrestling with was the disconnect between the information available to help people make good financial decisions and the actual decisions people were making with their money. When I look around I see people, including myself, being inefficient and irrational with money decisions and yet there’s a book, article, paper somewhere detailing exactly what should be done to maximize financial health.

I thought the problem was that the information wasn't getting properly packaged for a broad enough audience, hence my creation of TWTBW and my job at Cake Financial.

When the economy hit hard times in 2008, I got laid off from Cake Financial. This led to founding Flowtown, a marketing company. I was on the cutting edge of video and social marketing so it was a skill I could immediately cash-in, while the economy was crashing, to cover my bills. Flowtown blossomed into a marketing software company that grew to a customer base of 26,000 businesses and an eventual acquisition by Demandforce for $4.5M in 2011. 8 months later Demandforce would be acquired by Intuit for $425M.

Once the dust finally settled on all the acquisitions, I had the space and freedom to go back, dig up my troubling financial truth and arrive at a brand new realization. For the first time in my life I could see that the problem wasn't the delivery mechanism of financial information, it was the expectation that people would give a shit. Not everyone is a finance nerd like me and not everyone should have to be in order to have financial stability.

So while in the shower one day in January 2012, I made the commitment to spend the rest of my life tackling the problems of modern financial management from this fresh perspective. I wanted to answer a question I found no one else was asking: “How could we help people maximize their money, while at the same time driving the amount of time and effort it takes to do so as close to 0 minutes per year as possible.”

In November 2012 I left my job at Demandforce/Intuit and the next day I started hacking and trying to answer this question. Five prototypes, many sleepless nights and three incredible teammates (Todd Larsen, Chris Wilson, and Michael Murray) later we arrived at an answer and a very early version of Digit — a service that automates your savings so you don’t have to think about it.

Our longterm goal at Digit is to make all the complicated financial services in your life automated, intuitive, and intelligent. We dream of a world unburdened by arduous financial tasks. So far Digit has saved over $600,000 for our beta users. And today we’re announcing that we’ve closed a $2.5M seed round that will help us open up Digit to the world.

If you're interested in giving Digit a try, be sure to sign up for an invite. We'd love to hear your thoughts and feedback. And if you're in search of meaning and looking for a change, we're hiring.