Episode 52: Michael Paulus - Founder of PCM Encore

**Amir Fischer** (0:00)
This week on Generating Alpha, I sat down with Mike Paulus, Stanford-trained entrepreneur, former partner of Andreessen Horowitz, and founder and CEO of PCM Encore, a multi-billion dollar family office. Mike studied economics and management science and engineering at Stanford, where he helped manage a portion of the university's endowment through the student-run Blyth Fund. He went on to serve as president of Addepar, the wealth management technology platform that reports on trillions in assets before co-founding Assurance IQ in 2016
In the SureTech platform, they matched customers with insurance products at scale and sold Prudential for $2.35 billion in 2019, making Mike a billionaire at exit as he bootstrapped the business.
He's also spent time at a partner at Andreessen Horowitz and holds two patents for innovations in financial technology. In 2021, he founded PCM Encore, a fiduciary employee-owned multifamily office and has since grown it to billions of dollars in assets under management. In our conversation, we talk about his path from Stanford to Silicon Valley, building Addepar, co-founding and selling Assurance IQ, his time at A16Z, why he started PCM Encore, how he thinks about alternatives in portfolio construction for high-net-worth families, and much more. If you enjoyed this episode, please follow the podcast and rate it 5 stars on Spotify, subscribe on YouTube, and share it to anyone who you think might find it valuable. I really enjoyed speaking to Mike and I hope you guys enjoyed the episode. Thank you. Thank you, Michael, for coming on the podcast. I really appreciate it.

**Michael Paulus** (1:21)
It's great to be here. Big fan.

**Amir Fischer** (1:24)
Thank you. Well, I want to start where I always do. The beginning, as you know. If I'm correct, you grew up on a blueberry farm in Washington state.
Tell me about your childhood, the environment you grew up in, how that shaped you. I'd love to hear the backstory.

**Michael Paulus** (1:37)
Yes, I grew up on a small blueberry farm, almost on the Canadian border, and then my mom was the local Lutheran preacher. It was a very idyllic childhood. But I was really always interested in the financial world and technology, and I think the farm taught me hard work, but I also knew I wanted to get off the farm. When you're going up and down the same row of blueberries for months on end, it gives you a little extra motivation to do well in school. My biggest memory was just thinking through the time till coffee time, then lunch till the end of the day, just because the work was so monotonous. I said the most important thing for me in my career is, I never want to look at a clock. I've been very fortunate to do things where you're excited about the day.
That's one of the best gifts, I think, no matter what you do in your life, that you can take away.

**Amir Fischer** (2:36)
If I'm correct, after growing up there, you go to Stanford, you earn two degrees, a bachelor's and a master's.
What was that like, that contrast between growing up at a blueberry farm, Washington State, and then going to Stanford, one of the most prestigious kind of formal education institutions in the world? Tell me about your time there. What did you take away? What did you learn? After that, how did you know what you wanted to do? Or did you know what you wanted to do?

**Michael Paulus** (3:00)
Yeah, it's a great question. I think the biggest takeaway from Stanford, from the positives, was you get to meet your tribe. You get to meet people from all over the world that are like yourself. I look at my best friends and they're from Nigeria. I met my wife at Stanford from Switzerland, another good friend from Ireland. I think you meet a lot of folks there that are very different, and that has its own benefits, but you also get to meet these people that have so much in common, and it distills that group from around the world. Then I think being there at such an interesting time, we had the 2000 crisis that Silicon Valley was just coming back from. You had Facebook really just starting to take off, the coolest kids were getting internships there, and it was dynamic. I mean, Instagram was founded while I was there.
Bobby Murphy from my freshman dorm was one of the Snapchat founders, and that was happening there. So I think to be at that time and that place as Silicon Valley was really just reemerging, I think I was very fortunate.

**Amir Fischer** (4:08)
Was it during those college days when you wanted to be an entrepreneur, or did it take some time after that to really understand that?