About Us
FutureAdvisor was founded in May 2010 based on three observations:
Many investors make easily correctable mistakes that oftentimes costs them thousands of dollars or exposes them to undue risk.
Good financial advice is traditionally only available to those who are already rich: many advisors enforce $250,000 or $500,000 account minimums to be a client. In addition, advisory fees easily can run several thousand dollars a year.
We wanted to manage our own investments, but have someone looking over our shoulder to point out opportunities, optimizations, and mistakes. We wanted this service to be available at any time and to cost an order of magnitude less.
Finance Team
Simon Moore, CFA is a Chartered Financial Analyst who advises FutureAdvisor on investing algorithms design. His work experience includes Putnam Investments, Microsoft, Anheuser Busch and the Bank of England. He has an undergraduate degree in Politics, Philosophy and Economics from Oxford in the UK and a Masters in Business Administration from the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern. He is the author of Strategic Project Portfolio Management (Wiley, 2009). Simon grew up in the UK and currently lives in Seattle with his wife.
Josh Tokle is a PhD candidate in Mathematics at the University of Washington, where his research focuses on probability theory and stochastic analysis. Prior to his PhD program he worked for the consulting arm of CB Richard Ellis, advising institutional clients on real estate investment decisions. Josh holds degrees in Mathematics, Computer Science, and Philosophy from the University of Iowa. He and his wife live in Seattle, where he plays the drums, keyboard, and sings.
Yun Zhang is a PhD candidate in Applied Mathematics at the University of Washington, specializing in portfolio optimization. She holds a Certificate of Computational Finance from the University of Washington, and a bachelor's degree in mathematics from Peking University (China). Throughout her academic experience, she has interned at Microsoft Research Asia, China Financial Futures Exchange. She likes playing the piano and skiing.
Bo Lu is a co-founder and investment professional at FutureAdvisor. He opened an IRA when he was 16 and bought his first mutual fund with money from a summer job. Bo holds a degree in Computer Science from the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign with a minor in Technology and Management. In a previous life he was a Program Manager on the Windows Phone 7 project at Microsoft.
Engineering Team
Jon Xu is co-founder, interaction designer, and engineer at FutureAdvisor. He has been a casual investor for over a decade. Building and using FutureAdvisor has helped Jon realize and fill the gaps in his long-term holdings portfolio. Before founding FutureAdvisor, he worked on Exchange ActiveSync, Windows Live Mobile, and Windows Phone 7 at Microsoft. Jon holds a degree in Computer Science from MIT.
Clyde Law is a founding engineer at FutureAdvisor and has been hacking ever since he received a Tandy 1000 TX in the third grade. While growing up on Long Island, NY, he and Jon met in high school. He went on to receive a Master's degree in Computer Science at MIT, doing his thesis in the Advanced Network Architecture Group. At Microsoft, Clyde was the principal designer and developer of the File Classification Infrastructure in Windows Server. Outside of work, Clyde's hobbies include linguistics, Wikipedia editing, Ultimate, and puzzlehunts. He has also created puzzles for events such as Microsoft's College Puzzle Challenge
Jared McFarland is a founding engineer at FutureAdvisor who's been building applications using Ruby and the Rails framework since before it was cool (as in 2006). He builds highly scalable systems in the cloud; his most recent application served 45 concurrent requests per second at its peak. Outside of work he leads competitive cycling teams, taking a group of five novice cyclists to the Cochise County Classic in southern Arizona and finishing in 4:04 - only 9 months after the group started cycling.
Bryan Reeves coordinates business operations and marketing efforts for FutureAdvisor. Prior to joining the FutureAdvisor team, he was the shore support coordinator and a shipboard research assistant for the 13-month Around the Americas sailing expedition. Bryan holds a degree in Engineering Science with a minor in Managerial Studies from Vanderbilt University. Outside of work, Bryan enjoys spending time in the mountains and on the water engaging in a variety of human and wind-powered pursuits.
Jason Uanon is majoring in Computer Science at the University of Washington. At FutureAdvisor, he's a member of the engineering team and is the overall owner of the Fund Search Product. In a previous life he was a competitive Judoka.
FutureAdvisor is a
Y
Combinator
funded company.
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