2026-04-10. Nomoyu Daily for Indie Developers (Issue 328)

📰 News

A16z: Do Not Let Your First Hundred Million Be Ruined by Wealth Managers

SpaceX is moving toward a $2 trillion IPO, and OpenAI’s valuation keeps soaring.

Silicon Valley is entering one of the wildest wealth-creation waves in human history. Overnight, thousands of engineers and founders may see several, or even dozens, of extra zeros appear in their accounts.

But few people tell them this: 90% of the newly rich in tech lose more than half of their wealth within five years.

What destroys that wealth is not a market crash or a terrible investment decision. It is often the well-dressed, always-available wealth manager who can help you find a nanny, book a private jet, and handle every little errand.

Michelle, CIO of A16Z’s multi-family office Perennial, punctured the industry’s biggest illusion in a rare public interview.

Traditional wealth management is essentially a retail product wrapped in high-end service.

Banks do not train wealth managers to become professional investors. They train them to become excellent service staff. Their KPI is not how much money they make for you, but how much your assets under management grow.

So you discover that they always reply to your emails instantly and always seem helpful, while the portfolio they give you is always the safest, laziest mix of stocks and bonds.

The AUM fee model decides everything: doing easy work and doing hard work can earn the same fee. Human nature being what it is, few people choose the harder path.

Building a professional alternative-asset investment team? Too expensive, too troublesome, and too slow to show returns. It is much easier to recommend a few standardized funds and collect management fees.

The irony is that newly wealthy tech people are exactly the easiest group to sell this to.

They may be geniuses in their own fields, but in wealth management they are complete beginners. They do not know how to judge someone’s investment ability, so they fall back to judging who provides better service and who feels more trustworthy.

“My friend recommended this person. They are really nice.” Michelle says this is the reason she hears most often when people choose a wealth manager.

Worse than choosing the wrong wealth manager is impulsively building a single-family office.

“I want my own family office” has almost become the default status symbol for newly rich Silicon Valley founders. It sounds cool and prestigious, but 99% of people have no idea what they are doing.

To build a global multi-asset investment team covering stocks, bonds, venture capital, private equity, and real estate, you need at least five to seven top-tier investment professionals. Their combined annual compensation can easily exceed $10 million.

Unless you have more than $1 billion in assets, the cost of that team can swallow all of your investment returns.

The more fatal problem is retaining talent. Why would an ambitious professional investor work for you forever as your private financial steward? Eventually they leave for a bigger platform or start on their own.

And those family offices built in the name of “family unity” often end even worse. Data shows that after the first-generation founder dies, more than 70% of single-family offices fall apart within three years.

The children take their own money and walk away.

Now the industry’s biggest test is coming.

If SpaceX really goes public at a $2 trillion valuation, it will create tens of thousands of deca-millionaires and thousands of billionaires. The entire wealth-management industry is already preparing to harvest what may be the largest liquidity event in history.

They will appear when you are most excited, most confused, and most in need of help. They will take care of every small thing, make you feel seen, and make you believe you have found someone you can trust for life.

Then they will put the money you earned with a decade of youth and hard work into mediocre products with high management fees, products that will never make you truly rich but will also never make them unemployed.

Of course, they will never say any of this. They will only say, “We will help you preserve your wealth and pass it on to future generations.”

🖥️ Software

CookEase

CookEase is a kitchen productivity tool that automatically extracts recipe information and generates smart shopping lists, with multi-platform import and Instacart ordering support.

SailWP

SailWP is a lightweight WordPress theme that integrates the features of eight plugins, with a 94 KB frontend payload, no external requests, AI page generation, and multiple editing modes.

DearSQL

DearSQL is a lightweight cross-platform SQL editor and database management tool, built natively for macOS, Linux, and Windows, and released as free open source software.

Deducr

Deducr is a free tax tool that shows deductible costs directly on Amazon pages and can email a Schedule C reference PDF.

FeedNote

FeedNote helps users capture ideas from content and turn them into practical, usable notes.

🎮 Games

Koiny

Koiny is a gamified dashboard for teaching children financial literacy and responsibility, with a no-signup demo and playful mechanics for building money awareness.

GeoMinesweeper

GeoMinesweeper is a web-based minesweeper game played on real-world maps, combining geographic exploration with classic gameplay and supporting revives and mobile devices.

✍️ Notes

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