He Ran PayPal With Elon. Now He Has $100M and Spends Nothing

**Daniel Berk** (0:00)
You got to tell me what it was like to work with Peter Thiel and Elon Musk.

**Bill Harris** (0:03)
Oh, it was between Elon Peter, Max Levchin, myself, David Sacks, Reid Hoffman. There wasn't a single one of us whose ego would fit in a large gymnasium.

**Daniel Berk** (0:15)
What is the net worth that you're at now?

**Bill Harris** (0:17)
It's probably about 100 million at this point. Money is a means to an end. It's not an end. Yes, it's about money, but it's not about money as a scorecard or something like that. It's about how do you bring your life and your resources together? Because that's about all we've got.
Money, life and time.

**Daniel Berk** (0:36)
My guest today is Bill Harris, who has a crazy resume. He was CEO of Intuit. He was the founding CEO of PayPal, where he was in the room with people like Elon Musk, Peter Thiel, Max Levchin, and they were building PayPal at the time above a bakery near Stanford. He then founded Personal Capital in 2009, grew it to 23 billion in assets under management, and sold it to Empower for close to a billion dollars. He's done something like that 11 different times across fintech and cybersecurity. Today's net worth is around $100 million.
Half is liquid and half is in operating companies that he's still building. He's 70 years old. He's self-funding his newest venture with about $10 million in his own money, and he spends less than $100,000 a year. That's right, less than $100,000 a year. He sold houses, cars, airplanes, tons of pets, including mountain goats and an iguana, and moved to a small cottage near Miami Beach where he bikes to work every day. His name is Bill Harris, and he is one of the most interesting conversations I've had on this show. I met Bill from a mutual connection that I have within the Hampton community. Hampton is a private network for high growth founders and CEOs doing $25 million on average. What I love about this show is that Hampton is where conversations like this happen naturally. At dinner, in a group chat, I just get to put a mic on it and share these conversations with you publicly. If you're a founder doing real revenue and you're not in Hampton yet, you have to go check it out at joinhampton.com. Here's what we cover in today's episode. First we go deep on the numbers. What $100 million actually looks like when it's spread across public equities, private operating companies and about $100K in annual burn. Then we get into his shedding. Why someone worth $100 million sold everything they own and what it actually feels like on the other side. And we close in something that Bill said that I've been thinking about ever since. The difference between money as a scorecard versus money as rocket fuel for the life that you actually want to live. This is Moneywise. I'm Daniel Berk. Strap in. Let's get started. Here is Bill Harris. Bill thanks so much for joining us on Moneywise today. How are you doing?

**Bill Harris** (2:41)
Really good. How are you, man?

**Daniel Berk** (2:42)
I'm great. I'm in Charleston. You're in Miami. So we're both dealing with some tremendous heat right now, which hopefully passes soon.

**Bill Harris** (2:47)
Yeah, but I tell you what, I love it. I get up early, take my little bike to work and come home late. So it's always, you know, relatively cool. I'm not doing anything in the middle of the day, except sitting in air conditioning.

**Daniel Berk** (2:59)
Yeah. Same as me for another three months, probably. I was digging into your profile and you were the CEO of Intuit. You were the CEO and co-founder of PayPal. Of course, peers at the time with Elon Musk and Peter Thiel.
You've started your own business. You sold that to Empower. You now have your own firm. Walk me through the experience of what it's like in your life, Bill, and bring me up to speed today.

**Bill Harris** (3:23)
First of all, life is luck. You do a little bit of hard work and being smart, but it's mostly luck. I was lucky enough to be born in an academic and affluent place. What my deal growing up was to be the golden boy, to always be good at academics, at sports, at everything. Then, good schools, good companies, and I sort of transferred the notion of doing what I thought my parents expected of me, to what I thought society was expected of me. Then, all of a sudden, I ended up 40 years old, running a public company with 5,000 employees. Based on what I had done in my life, including business school and all the rest, that was supposed to be it. The company was Intuit. What I realized, and by the way, I wasn't the only guy who realized it. A lot of people around me realized it.