When Ankur Nagpal sold Teachable for a quarter of a billion dollars, he felt lucky. Then, he quickly felt lost when trying to navigate the financial systems of a country he wasn’t born in and learn the institutional language often only spoken fluently by the historically wealthy.
It would be a few years of self-employment, and building a venture firm later, before Nagpal returned to the moment as one of the early catalysts for his newest startup, Ocho. The company, launching publicly today, wants to make it easier for business owners to set up and manage their own 401(k) retirement accounts.
Personal finance is hard — and that’s a tale as old, and difficult to disrupt, as time. And while Nagpal agrees that there’s no “north star” company that has shown how to tackle finance literacy at scale, he’s hoping that Ocho’s 10-person team may just have a not-so-boring wedge that changes that.
Ocho is joining the several fintech companies out there that aim to modernize, and really rebrand, the retirement account away from traditional providers like Charles Schwab or Fidelity, or expensive solutions like lawyers and consultants.
“I’ve started exploring the space, and we realize everyone — like Robinhood to Coinbase — is just spending unsustainable amounts of money to acquire customers, but are making no money themselves and continually sort of need these large funding rounds just to exist,” Nagpal said. “I’m actually expecting there to be a very rough six, 12 or 18 months for fintech companies specifically.”
Ocho’s twist from the competition, he thinks, is in its market focus. “There’s so many companies targeting startup founders and their wealth — there’s literally a new one launching every month or two all backed by big-name VCs, but no one is focused on the business owner that is otherwise doing well but is not a startup founder or a startup employee,” he said.
Instead, Ocho is leaning into Nagpal’s background of working with creators when he was building Teachable. Teachable helped creators build revenue streams; Ocho wants to help those same creators take their earnings and invest, harvest and scale them in a smart way.
“At Teachable, we helped these people make money online and now there’s lots of places for creators, freelancers and entrepreneurs to make money online — but how do we help them think about building wealth?” Nagpal said. The long-term vision for Ocho is to offer products, beyond solo 401(k)s, that help business owners build wealth.</…….