Startup Manages The 7th Largest Pension in the World

Gregory Van, Samuel Rhee, and Joo Won Lee combined their executive backgrounds across GrabTaxi, Morgan Stanley, and Goldman Sachs to address the global pension underfunding crisis. Bootstrapping the business for four years without external venture capital, the founding team engineered a custom, cloud-native tech stack capable of integrating directly with Singapore's $400 billion Central Provident Fund (CPF). Upon receiving government approval, Endowus unlocked automated pension investing for everyday citizens, scaling client assets from zero to over $5 billion across 400 strategies in three years. Their trajectory demonstrates how deep institutional finance experience, combined with purpose-built software, can transform legacy state pension infrastructure into a scalable digital wealth platform.

Gregory Van: Hi, my name is Greg. I am the co-founder and CEO of Endowus. Endowus is a wealth management platform that helps people invest better to live better. We launched about three years ago and we have really transformed the way people in Singapore invest. Today we have over $5 billion in assets across more than 400 strategies from 70 global managers, in everything from cash management solutions to private equity and hedge funds.

I come from a family of founders. Like a lot of people's stories, they were refugees out of China who had to do anything to make a better life for themselves. I was raised mostly in Hong Kong, where I saw my grandparents and my parents all pursue entrepreneurial activities, so working for someone was not something I thought of as normal. I am someone who really wants to maximize efficiency. My main objective for anything is how to get the most utility out of it. Unfortunately, a key to unlocking a lot of life's activities is money. We live in a very capitalist society, so the question becomes how to maximize money so that I can do all these things in the real world, not how to make as much money as possible.

Like many people, I got very interested in the stock market. I thought our generation knew which companies were going to be big, and I started trading stocks in college. I made a lot of money, up 300%, and then I lost 90%. A lot of us have gone through this experience. What I realized was that this is definitely not a good use of time, effort or money. There has to be a better way. That is when I really got into the academics and the science behind investing, as opposed to gambling and speculation.

My first job was in investment banking, where I got to interact with a lot of institutional investors and understand how they run money. I left because I thought it was too high level and went to work at a younger company. At the time it was called GrabTaxi, when Grab was cash only across Southeast Asia. It was at Grab that I saw how technology could scale an experience and a service to a lot of people. That is really the technology revolution we are having. I was always looking for a great, deep partner who really believed in what we were doing. Sam was introduced by a friend, just as he was coming back from some time off after a long career in institutional financial services.

Sam Rhee: Hi, I am Sam Rhee. I am co-founder and chairman at Endowus. Before that I was at Morgan Stanley Investment Management in Asia, where I was CEO and chief investment officer. I have a lot of good memories of Morgan Stanley. It has a very unique, client-centric culture that is not about maximizing profits, and as a result it really takes care of its employees. I grew up in that industry and it shaped me a lot.

One of the most shaping moments was when my partner and I, as co-heads of the Asian market, were both up for promotion. My boss flew in from overseas and told us only one of us could be promoted. I volunteered to give it up so that we could work together better and lead the team together. The worst thing in a family is when the mother and father fight. We really did build a great team, because we were able to trust each other more and build the right culture for the office. Toward the end I was both the CEO and the chief investment officer, which is very rare and requires a lot of work. After more than four years of that I was very burnt out, so I left the company and officially retired at the age of 42.

Then I spent some time focusing on what I wanted to do in the next chapter of my life. I set up an entity to invest in fintech companies, and that is when I met Yuning, who brought Greg and me together. We started Endowus together, although Yuning never joined us full time. I was passionate about retirement adequacy and the global pension crisis. That was an important factor in bringing us together, because we shared a common vision and mission about solving something much more meaningful, like retirement.

Sam Rhee: Retirement adequacy is a global problem. The global pension system is heavily underfunded because populations are aging very rapidly, especially in developed markets. If you have a lot more people retired in old age and very few people working and producing in the economy, you are not going to be able to fund their lives. The pension system built for the older generation does not have enough money and is going to run out. What we are trying to do is solve a big problem that is only going to get bigger. To do that in Singapore, we had to tackle the CPF problem, the Central Provident Fund.

Singapore has a regulator, the MAS, that is very friendly and very business-friendly, and the country was becoming the wealth hub of Asia. It was a good hub for wealth talent and for fintech talent. That is why we brought on Joo Won Lee, our CTO, who already had experience building a robo-advisor and was perfectly suited for our team.

Joo Won Lee: My name is Joo Won Lee. I am the chief technology officer at Endowus, and this is my 14th year working as a financial technologist. Leaving Goldman Sachs was probably one of the toughest decisions of my career. My parents were very proud of their son working for Goldman Sachs. But I could not resist the hunger, and a little bit of the frustration, that I was carrying, and that is why I decided to join a startup.

A common friend of Greg's and mine introduced me to Greg and Sam. During the meeting they tried very hard to convince me of the dream of winning the government pension fund, and I was not convinced at all. Singapore's population is only 5.5 million, but its government pension scheme, the CPF, holds about $400 billion in assets, making it the eighth or ninth biggest pension fund in the entire world. I could not believe a startup could penetrate that market. But after a few more meetings with Greg and Sam I thought, even if the chance of making this happen is 30%, just being part of this insane, crazy plan is going to be pretty fun. And if I can make it happen, the reward is going to be huge.

Sam Rhee: Joo Won, first of all, is a good-looking guy. I only work with good-looking guys, Joo Won and Greg. He was obviously supremely experienced, and that was critically important for me. It is always difficult to attract talent when you do not have massive amounts of VC money, so bringing people on is really about convincing them of the dream, the mission and the vision.

Gregory Van: When you are trying to find a good mission, it cannot be just about money. If it is just about money, you will end up finding ways to screw over whoever is paying for your service, and that will be very short term. You need to deliver something that makes their life better. You want a mission that propagates long after you are dead. Those are the companies that really last. 

Joo Won Lee: When we were fewer than 15 people, the trust between team members was really like a family. I spent all of my life savings to buy shares of Endowus. I had less than $7,000 left in my bank account and I was completely okay with it. That is how much we trusted the mission and the potential of the company.

Sam Rhee: The obvious challenge was a lack of resources. We bootstrapped for four years. We did not take any external investor because we wanted to have product-market fit. And product-market fit was very unique for us, because the CPF required us to build a purpose-built tech stack. We had no guarantee the government would even approve it, and it took us two years to build an automated, purpose-built stack for the CPF Investment Scheme.

Joo Won Lee: We were not just a startup. We were a regulated financial institution because we had a license, and to keep that license we had to go live in about nine months. So we had to build an institutional-grade wealth management platform with fewer than five engineers in nine months. It was definitely the biggest challenge I have faced in my life. My health got worse during that period. I would not deny it. I gained a lot of weight and developed very strange sleeping habits, which got me into health trouble in the late part of my twenties. Then the second wave of challenges came from unlocking the CPF. We had to integrate our cloud-native platform with government pension systems that have been there for decades.

Sam Rhee: We finally got approval at the end of 2019. After we launched the CPF investment scheme we scaled from zero to $500 million and became full retail. Then we went more mass market and lowered the minimum to $1,000, because college kids without a lot of savings wanted to use our platform. Then we intentionally moved into the high-net-worth space as well. As we did that, we really broadened the platform. We are not just a robo-advisor. We are a platform business, like Amazon, and those individual building blocks let us build personalized, curated, built-for-purpose portfolios. That flexibility exists because we built a platform that is scalable but also hyper-personalized.

Sam Rhee: The way we see it, fintech requires more than a technology-led solution. For the wealth management business in particular, you need deep fin. That is why the investment office is very unique at Endowus. It is a team of high-quality professionals from Cambridge, Mercer and Morningstar, and it does unique work. It filters all the investment products and solutions around the world, all the mutual funds and ETFs, and looks for the best-in-class product. It is like an Amazon or Netflix curation model, and it is unique to our platform.

Joo Won Lee: As a CTO, you might want more control over the way things are done, and technology can do that same job. Why not use AI to filter and do due diligence on the fund houses and let AI select the funds for us? We do not need human beings. That could very well be the case, and there are fintech companies doing it. But as a technologist who has spent 14 years in the financial industry, I do not believe AI is there yet to beat our experienced human advisors at selecting and curating the funds that are best for our customers.

Sam Rhee: When you are investing, a lot of people think an investment objective is, I want to generate a 25% return. Unfortunately, having a target return is not an investment objective. The way most people invest is the wrong way to invest, because they take too much risk. They want to maximize returns without any objective other than higher returns. So let's focus on what actually works, and what history has taught us is that why is more important than how.

Why are you investing this money? If it is just to gamble and play around, and you are okay losing it, then fine, go ahead. But if you are investing for a real need in the future, retirement, a house, a family, college, then you need to succeed, because it matters a lot. That is why we say you always start with yourself. You do not start with the market or with instruments like stocks or funds. Starting with yourself clarifies how you should invest. If you are 20 years old with your whole career ahead of you, you can invest in 100% equities, lose it all and still be okay. If you are 60 with your life savings, you cannot lose it, so you invest in a conservative, less risky way. Those things drive your asset allocation, and asset allocation determines your long-term returns.

Then you look at the underlying instruments to find the most efficient way to gain access to that asset. For US equities, you find the lowest-cost passive index fund. Passive investing works less efficiently in fixed income, so there you find a great fund manager like PIMCO, Allianz or JPMorgan to build a fixed income portfolio. Get your asset allocation right, then choose the right products. That is where Endowus comes in. We advise you and then find the best underlying products to achieve the best outcomes.

If you need to sell, the selling has to be driven by a need, not by a view. The need is that I need to buy a house, buy a car or even go on holiday. Whatever the reason, it is a need, and the need drives how much money you take out and when. It should never be because you want to time the market and have a view about it, because as human beings we cannot predict the future. In financial markets there are many charlatans who say the market is going up or down, when that person has no credibility in predicting the future. Do not take a view on the market. Focus on the need you have, and that drives the timing of the selling. When you reach retirement, that is when you start selling or reallocating your assets. Before that, do not time the market and do not sell. Save and invest continuously throughout your life.

Sam Rhee: Some of my biggest learnings are a continuation of what I learned throughout my career, whether at Morgan Stanley or in Davos. As an individual, it is really, really important to surround yourself with good people. There is so much to learn from other people. Finding the right people, and the right fit within an organization where people bring different things to the table, has been critical to the success of a small team or a large organization, and you keep learning from them constantly.

It is also really important to be able to take pain. At a startup some of that comes through as loneliness, or as physical ailments. You have to stay disciplined. This is a long game. This is a marathon. We are not trying to build a business to scale and sell in two years. We are building for the next quarter of a century, to be the biggest independent digital wealth platform.

Gregory Van: It is really rewarding to provide a platform where people can do their best work and be compensated for it. Even if they eventually leave Endowus, we want them to grow, to do their best work, and to look back on their time here feeling they were empowered. Endowus has scaled from zero to $5 billion in client assets in three years, and that is a fingernail of the market. We have barely scraped the surface. The wealth markets in Asia are in the trillions of dollars. In my view, we are building a trillion-dollar business. I do not know how long it will take, but we will be here, continuing on this mission every single day.