Money management, Silicon Valley-style

Written by Adam Lashinsky, Forbes Friday, 14 September 2012

Joe Lonsdale is what an earlier generation would have called a young man in a hurry. A protégé of investor Peter Thiel, Lonsdale helped him build Clarium Capital into a multibillion-dollar hedge fund. Then, again with Thiel, Lonsdale co-founded Palantir Technologies, a security analytics software firm.

Having made a small fortune in his twenties -- he recently treated himself to a 30th birthday party at Hearst Castle on California's Central Coast -- Lonsdale has set his sights on a new challenge: designing software for the ultrawealthy. Addepar, his three-year-old startup, aims to apply Silicon Valley smarts to the increasing complexities faced by the super-rich in tracking, analyzing, transferring, and reporting their finances. (The name is Latin wordplay based on a line in Ovid's Metamorphoses meaning "Add a little to a little and you'll have a great amount.")

For a fee of 0.05% of assets under management, Addepar connects family offices or endowments with the various entities that manage their money, facilitating fund transfers, generating speedy reports, tracking currency conversions, and cutting down on data-entry errors. With the first handful of clients representing more than $100 billion in assets, Addepar says it generates annual revenue of about $25 million. Read More..