Titan Co-CEO & Co-Founder, Clayton Gardner — ‘Courtside Seats’ to Active Money Management
Full Episode → Spotify | Soundcloud | Apple
“There’s plenty of passive roboadvisors in the world. The world doesn’t need any more low-cost, automatic rebalancing index funds with tax-loss harvesting. I think that’s a commodity, it is free on many platforms, and will trend toward zero fees over time. What I think the world does need is more democratization of investing in more alternative and novel active ways and that’s our bread and butter”
In today’s episode, Ally McCloskey sits down with Clay Gardner, proud Wharton alum and Co-CEO & Co-Founder of Titan, the active investment management platform democratizing elite investment products and experiences for everyone. Clay co-founded Titan in 2018 alongside Joe Percoco to build a world-class investment manager for the ‘rest of us,’ or those typically ignored by Wall Street firm products that historically only catered to the ultra wealthy. Titan aims to grow capital over the long term by following a time-tested investment philosophy: identifying the rare species of stocks known as “compounders” and holding on tight.
In the dynamic and insightful conversation, we discuss:
- How Clay and his co-founder Joe reunited 6 years after meeting in Wharton undergrad to democratize active investing
“It was very much students of the scientific method, instead of thinking of smart company ideas and hoping they become big, you start with the problem and a hypothesis of how to solve it and then to the extent you start to find that product-market fit, you kind of pull the threads and see where this client takes you and where this problem goes. For us, it was do consumers want active investment management? Our hypothesis was yes, if you build it in a mobile, transparent, cost-effective way, they would eat it up. We know this because I’m doing this for my friends on the side and they love it. And it’s taking up more of my time than my actual day job.”
- The investor persona Titan was built for and how it curates sticky content for industry-leading DAU/MAU
- Why active management in public equities hasn’t gone out of style
“In COVID-19, people re-awoke to the value of active management, which is, when things are up and to the right and green, no one asks any questions. Everyone looks like a genius, everyone believes it’s skill not luck, but it’s when the proverbial stuff hits the fan that people ask questions, they re-evaluate…Giving them what we call this courtside seats example. You know when the game is on the line in the fourth quarter, that’s when people want courtside seats. If the team is dominating every game and they have an undefeated record, you can be outside the stadium looking at the big board and it’s like okay, business as usual”
- Clay’s most memorable week in markets rejecting a portfolio company’s initial acquisition tender offer
- His advice to entrepreneurs on product-market fit
“The most important thing, probably so much so that if you get this right everything else will take care of itself is just building something people want, finding product market fit. It is so incredibly hard, and the best KPI to measure that is just organic, word of mouth growth. Zero dollars marketing spend attributed to it, just people loving the product so much they’re willing to talk about it incessantly and pay you for that product, importantly.”
- How to measure true customer loyalty
“You can create something that goes viral, like a meme account or something, there’s plenty of those on Twitter, but having something that people will share and talk about for free yet pay you for is the ultimate sign that you’re onto something”
- What he’s most excited about in the future of investing
“I’m more broadly excited for the democratization of kind of everything. I don’t think everything should be investible. Some people think things like wine, collectibles, and sneakers. It’s great that you’re letting people have the choice, I don’t consider those investible necessarily because those aren’t productive assets, they’re effectively a scarcity game, to some extent a greater fool game, but I love the ethos of making things accessible that currently are not, that are walled off to a certain population”
- The investors he admires most
- And so, so much more!
Check out the Episode on the platform of your choice here → Spotify | Soundcloud | Apple
Clayton Gardner
Clay is the Co-founder and Co-CEO of Titan, an active investment management platform democratizing elite investment products and experiences for everyone. Prior to Titan, Clay was an investor at several hedge funds and investment firms including Farallon Capital Management and Cerberus Capital Management. He is also a proud alum of the Jerome Fisher Program in Management & Technology at the Wharton School (where he graduated summa cum laude) and the School of Engineering at the University of Pennsylvania, where he earned dual degrees in Economics and Computer Science. You can find Clay on Linkedin and Twitter.
About Titan
Titan is an active investment management platform democratizing elite investment products and experiences for everyone. Since its founding in 2018, Titan has graduated from Y Combinator and grown from zero to over $500M in assets under management and over 25,000 clients with essentially zero marketing budget, making it one of the fastest growing advisors on record. The company also just raised their $12.5M Series A led by General Catalyst with participation from Ashton Kutcher’s Sound Ventures, Lee Fixel, Instagram founder Mike Krieger, Eventbrite founder Kevin Hartz, and many others. You can download Titan’s mobile app at www.titanvest.com and get invested in just minutes.
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Ally McCloskey
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And for more related listens, check out these previous episodes:
-Robinhood’s COO, Gretchen Howard — Democratizing Finance, Navigating a Crisis, & Embracing Change
-Noah Kerner, CEO of Acorns — Leveling the Investment Playing Field
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About the Author
Ally McCloskey is a first-year MBA Candidate at The Wharton School and Co-President of Wharton FinTech. She fell in love with the rapidly evolving FinTech ecosystem during her years in both wholesale and retail strategy, incubation, and partnerships roles at JPMorgan Chase & Co. Nowadays, Ally is focused on becoming a best-in-class advisor, partner, and occasional angel investor to early- and growth-stage FinTechs. On ‘campus,’ you can find her sourcing/dilligencing pre-seed — Series A startups as a Venture Fellow for both Pear VC and Republic, hosting episodes of the Wharton FinTech Podcast, and promoting financial inclusion as a Wharton Impact Investing Partners Associate. Originally from Connecticut and a Vanderbilt alum, Ally enjoys staying active (yoga, snowboarding, Peloton’ing, ice hockey), experiencing new cultures, and crafting. To get in touch, you can reach Ally on Twitter, LinkedIn, or at allymcc@wharton.upenn.edu.
