Twenty years, four companies, one argument.

The short version: I build the layer underneath independent advisory firms. The long version explains why that took four companies and why they were built in the order they were.

The argument came before any of the companies

I started in wealth management more than twenty years ago, and the formative part of it was at Jackson National Life Insurance Company, working on wealth platform strategy and national distribution.

That job put me in front of independent advisers constantly, as an external wholesaler, in their offices, looking at how the work actually got done. It is a useful vantage point. You see a hundred versions of the same firm and the pattern separates from the noise.

The pattern was a gap. Large firms had portfolio infrastructure, risk systems, compliance tooling, and people whose entire job was operations. Independent advisers had the same regulatory obligations, the same client expectations, and a fraction of the machinery. The industry treated that as the price of independence.

THOR came first because portfolios are the foundation

You cannot solve an adviser’s problem with software if the investment layer underneath is improvised. So the first company was THOR Financial Technologies, built around systematic, rules-based strategies rather than discretionary calls.

THOR delivers those strategies as exchange-traded funds and as model portfolios. One of them, THLV, has a piece of history attached to it: it was the third exchange-traded fund ever to trade on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange.

That fact is trivia in one sense. In another it is the whole point. Getting a fund to that floor requires infrastructure, counterparties, and institutional credibility that a small shop is not supposed to have.

riskDNA came second because a portfolio is only half the problem

A good strategy that a client abandons in a drawdown has done nothing for them. The industry’s answer to that has been the risk questionnaire, which produces a score.

The trouble is that a questionnaire measures how someone feels about risk in a calm room. It does not measure what they can afford to lose, and it does not measure what they will do in March when it is actually happening. Tolerance, capacity, and behaviour are three different things, and one number collapses them.

riskDNA AI exists to keep those three separate.

UX Wealth came third because most advisers do not want to assemble this

Having built portfolios and analytics, the remaining problem was delivery. An adviser running a firm of three people does not want to integrate a model provider with a risk engine with a custodian with a reporting system. They want the thing to work.

UX Wealth Partners, founded in 2020 in Centennial, Colorado, is that delivery layer — a turnkey asset management platform for independent registered investment advisers.

Three companies, one thesis, built in the order the problem revealed itself. The fourth one has nothing to do with any of it.

Civly is the outlier and I am not going to pretend otherwise

Civly is a co-parenting coordination platform. It shares no customers, no regulatory perimeter, and no technology with the other three.

What it shares is a shape of problem: two parties who need to coordinate, a lot of friction in the coordination, and a record that matters. Retrofitting that into a grand unified theory would be a story rather than a reason.

Before any of it, San Diego State

I went to San Diego State University and played Division I soccer there, where I was named captain of the men’s team and earned Academic All-Conference honours.

The captaincy mattered more than the soccer. It is the first job where the outcome depends on people who do not report to you and are not obliged to listen.

Since then the competitive outlet has been endurance sport — two Ironman finishes, at Ironman California and Ironman Maryland, and two USA Triathlon world championship qualifications. More on that here, including why I think the analogy between endurance sport and building companies is mostly overstated.

Where things stand

I work from Centennial, Colorado, in the Denver Tech Center corridor. UX Wealth Partners serves independent advisers, riskDNA and THOR supply the analytics and the strategies, and Civly runs on its own track.

I am a registered person, CRD number 5159325, and that record is public.