Money Moves: David Snider's bet on brains over buzz
In a city like New York, where wealth is both a currency and a cult, David Snider moves with the quiet confidence of someone who has seen the machine from the inside and decided to tinker with its gears. At forty-something, with a résumé that reads like a tech-finance bildungsroman — Bain Capital, Compass, and now Harness Wealth — he’s the kind of person you’d expect to find sipping an oat-milk latte in a Flatiron co-working space, surrounded by the low buzz of venture capital pitches. But Snider isn’t here to disrupt for disruption’s sake. In a recent interview with CEO.com, we learned he’s here to tackle a problem that is both mundane and maddening, yet almost radical: helping people determine what to do with their money once they’ve earned it.
Snider’s origin story isn’t the classic Silicon Valley garage-to-riches tale. He grew up in Massachusetts and attended Duke, then Harvard Business School — standard elite credentials, sure, but he didn’t leap straight into the startup fray. Instead, he spent years at Bain Capital, the private equity giant, where he helped orchestrate deals worth billions, including the IPO of Sensata Technologies, a sensor manufacturer that’s about as exciting as a spreadsheet but made a lot of people very rich. It was there, he says, that he learned the art of “optionality” — a term he uses often, meaning the ability to keep doors open and pivot when the moment demands it. “Private equity teaches you how to see the chessboard,” he tells me. “But it’s also a little like playing with someone else’s pieces.”
By 2012, he was ready to move on. He joined Compass, a real estate tech startup, as its first business hire at a time when it was just a seed-funded glimmer in the eyes of founders Robert Reffkin and Ori Allon. Snider became its COO and CFO, guiding the company from a scrappy outfit to a $1.8 billion valuation before its 2021 IPO. It was a wild ride — eight rounds of fundraising, late-night strategy sessions, and the kind of growth that transforms a team into a tribe. “Compass was about taking a traditional industry and dragging it into the future,” he says. “We didn’t always get it right, but we learned how to scale chaos.”
Yet, even as Compass soared, Snider felt restless. He had witnessed the other side of wealth creation — employees with stock options they didn’t understand, founders overwhelmed by tax complexities, and millionaires who had achieved greatness but were clueless about sustaining it. “I kept meeting people who had won the game but didn’t know the rules of the next one,” he says. That’s when Harness Wealth began to take shape, first as a vague idea during his time as an executive-in-residence at Bain Capital Ventures and then evolving into a genuine platform that connects high earners with advisers and equips them with technology to manage their financial lives. It’s not a robo-adviser, he insists — it’s a “supercharger” for human expertise. “The goal isn’t to replace advisers,” he says. “It’s to make them better.”
Since its launch in 2018, Harness has raised $36 million, including a $15 million Series A in 2021 led by Jackson Square Ventures. Its clients — tech entrepreneurs, startup employees with equity windfalls, and the quietly affluent — aren’t the Forbes 400 set but the “mass affluent,” a term Snider uses without irony. These are people with enough money to require assistance but not so much that they have a family office on speed dial. The platform offers a sleek dashboard to track assets, tax scenarios, and estate plans, then connects users to a curated network of advisers — tax experts, financial planners, and estate attorneys — vetted with the rigor of a private equity due diligence team. “We’re not here to sell you a mutual fund,” Snider says. “We’re here to answer the question: What’s the best next step?”
It’s a pitch that seems almost too sensible for the hype-driven tech world, where billion-dollar valuations often depend on sexier promises — AI that predicts the future, blockchain that remakes civilization. But Snider believes the real disruption lies in the unglamorous aspects: execution, clarity, trust. “The wealth management industry is a mess,” he says bluntly. “It’s fragmented, opaque, and half the time it’s more about selling products than solving problems.” He cites a statistic from the interview: Traditional advisers spend only eleven minutes a year discussing clients' actual goals. “Eleven minutes,” he repeats, shaking his head. “That’s not advice. That’s a sales call.”
Snider is not above a bit of self-awareness about his own journey. He wrote a book in 2010, “Money Makers: Inside the New World of Finance and Business,” a breezy exploration of Wall Street’s power players that now feels like a time capsule of pre-crypto bravado. “I was younger, trying to make sense of it all,” he says with a half-smile. “Now I’m just trying to build something useful.” That utility-first ethos permeates Harness, which he leads with a team of thirty-five, many of whom are veterans of Compass or Bain. He takes pride in the culture — less bro-y than the startup stereotype, more “thoughtful hustle,” as he describes it. “We’ve got people who’ve experienced big wins and big messes,” he states. “That’s the kind of team you need when you’re handling people’s money.”
Outside the office, Snider’s life is a study in balance, or at least an attempt at it. He’s married to Sarah, a former nonprofit executive, and they have two kids under ten. They live in the West Village, where he has been spotted jogging along the Hudson or grabbing coffee at a place that charges $6 for a pour-over. “Family keeps you grounded,” he says, although he admits the juggling isn’t easy. “You’re always optimizing — time, energy, attention. It’s not that different from running a company.”
“Wealth isn’t going anywhere,” Snider says. “People will keep making it, and they’ll keep needing help managing it. The question is whether we can make the process less painful, more human.” It’s a modest ambition, maybe, but in a city obsessed with the next big thing, there’s something refreshing about a man who’s betting on the next smart one.