The View from the Office. 

I met up with Max Klein, co-founder of the startup LEA at the food court at the Brookfield Mall in Battery Park.

It was late in the day and I was coffeed out so I had a Pellegrino and treated myself to a chocolate chip cookie. Max had a cup of bone broth.

Max and his co-founder Chuck Blake launched LEA to solve problems many wealth management firms have in collecting and managing data.

Specifically, he said that RIA firms, especially large, fast-growing ones, struggle to gather and process client data into Salesforce and other applications.

Max’s background was working for Amazon on Prime, Kindle and Alexa. He also spent time in business development at Intel while living in Beijing, China.

The idea for LEA came from Max helping his parents do the paperwork needed for their finances. It was a shockingly manual process. Surely, he thought, there must be a better way.

The technology challenge and business opportunity is a familiar one: extracting data from an array of documents, standardizing and organizing it. It reminded me of my friend Harald Collet, co-founder of Alkymi, which extracts terms and conditions from private credit term sheets.

There remains a staggering amount of financial services work still done by hand. Automating the data collecting and orchestration provides a huge efficiency gain. 

Only after we talked for an hour and were leaving did we realize that Howard Lindzon and Matt Ober from the venture firm Social Leverage had funded both of our startups.

The world can be both so big and so small at the same time.

You can connect with Max via LinkedIn or DM me for a warm intro.