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Jon Stein is the founder of Betterment, an independent online financial advisor, who’s mission is to, “Help People Live Better”. Originally in May of 2003 working as a financial consultant in Manhattan, Jon realized that through his job there were not enough individuals within the financial industry that cared about the customer. Through his personal experience with investing he also realized there was no company out there who gave personalized advise on how to make the most of his money. With this gap in the market it sparked inspiration of  the creation of his financial service which was to help average people save money in a easy and simple way.

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Factors of Production: Entrepenuership
In 2007 Jon became hooked on this business idea and he quit his consulting job to go to Business school at Columbia. He knew as he was gathering knowledge in his classes while also curating a company, that at the core of it all was that the goal of this company was all about the customer experience. His target customer turned out to be “professionals”, people who were professionals at their job making over $100,000 willing to invest their money. Jon describes as a young entrepreneur the hardest challenge of all was learning that when inventing something totally new, no one wants it (takes time for people to build trust in financial services).

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Factors of Production: Labor
In the early days of Betterment Jon seemed to think he could do everything on his own (marketing, customer service, design), but he ended up adding on old friends and new employees. The first person he invited on board was his roommate  Sean Owen, a Google Engineer, who essentially helped him build the database and website. After him came this securities attorney at the time (who was named co-founder) Eli Broverman who helped Jon with all of the legal barriers he had to overcome as he was starting a financial business. As time went on he curated a driven and passionate staff who have helped immensely in the success of this company.

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Factors of Production: Land
For Betterment there isn't exactly a huge land factor of production because they are an online business. The only real land factor would have to be the building and office the employees work out of. The resource they use for their technology throughout their work days included using immense amount of energy

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After working on the company and testing it for over a year, on May 2010 Betterment was launched at a technology conference called TechCrunch. The Betterment staff was working some part of the presentation for it to have a good impression on the audience. It ended up doing extremely well and they received about 400 real customers after the conference that they had to jump on. The conference essentially helped get the company out there so people knew about it, but it really got up and running in 2012.

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Factors of Production: Capital
When Betterment decided to expand they invested in a office building in Manhattan right next to Madison Square Park. Allowing the company to have its own space with all the employees created more opportunity to collaborate and it was a step in the right direction to make the company bigger and bigger each day.

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Back in the first year of their business they were only managing $10 million of investments and now they serve over 175,000 customers who invest more than $5 billion with us. Their success has proven to traditional banks that finance is heading in a new direction. As Betterment continues to manage people’s money, over time, their goal is to allow customers to get the best possible expected return.