There are fewer than 4,000 public companies in the United States. In the late 1990s, there were 8,000.
The companies that left public markets didn’t stop creating wealth. They simply stopped being accessible to ordinary investors.
The world’s most sophisticated institutional investors know this. The Ontario Teachers’ Pension Plan, widely regarded as one of the global leaders in institutional investing, is 60% allocated to alternatives. The average high-net-worth individual is under 2%.
That gap isn’t a knowledge problem. It’s an infrastructure problem.
Jason Wenk is the founder and CEO of Altruist. He grew up in a small working class town in West Michigan - mostly farmers, one small community bank, no financial advisors. At 19, he was at Morgan Stanley building systems for the ultra-wealthy. The disconnect between what those systems did and who they were built for is what he’s been closing ever since.
Michael Miller is the Product Manager leading Altruist’s private markets build, coming over from Robinhood, where he worked on product strategy for brokerage and IPO access.
A few topics we covered:
Why building a self-clearing custodian is harder than launching a rocket, and why the incumbents' inertia made it worth doing anyway
The subscription workflow that takes under 90 seconds and less than 10 clicks, and why that alone still shocks advisors who've spent 20 years in the industry
What happens to a model portfolio when public markets sell off 15% and the private side has a 30-to-60-day settlement window
Hazel, Altruist's AI tax agent, and how a product that does in two minutes what used to take a family office 10 people wiped out $120 billion in market cap in under 24 hours
Why "self-driving money" was never achievable with software alone (and why it might be achievable now)
"You kind of go, hey, I want the people that I grew up with and the families I knew, I want them to be able to have a fighting chance. And you can't do that if the minimums are 20 times higher than how much capital they have."
Jason has spent over two decades peeling back the layers of this problem. This conversation gets to the root of it. Hope you enjoy!
Listen to the full conversation here, on Spotify or Apple Podcasts.
The infrastructure buildout Jason and Michael are working on is one piece of a much larger picture.
On June 25, we’re hosting The 2026 London Private Markets Technology Summit and bringing together the operators and builders working on exactly these problems. If that’s you, we’d love to see you there.
