Alex Kruszewski, Founder and CEO of Abacus, joins Paul Anthony for a homecoming conversation that traces an unlikely path from investment banking to building what he calls a brand-new category in wealth technology. A Notre Dame finance graduate, Alex began his career in investment banking and private equity at firms including Evercore, Madison Dearborn Partners, and BDT, before a step into pharmaceutical operations turned into a sale process that ended with Eli Lilly buying the business. That outcome led the founding family to ask him to stand up Goldfinch Capital Partners, a Chicago-based family office where, at 27, he served as CIO running the investments.

It was there that Alex hit the problem that would become Abacus. Everyone talks about allocating capital, he explains, but almost no one talks about the unglamorous work of tracking it. At Goldfinch, answering the deceptively simple question of "what are we worth right now?" required six-figure legacy software plus two full-time accountants, and it was only ever as accurate as the last person to key in the numbers. Abacus fuses software and service to solve that garbage-in, garbage-out problem, building each client a "financial digital key" that ports in public equities, private equity, venture, real estate, debt, and documents, then keeps it continuously correct through a White Glove services team of ex-bankers and private equity professionals working alongside agentic AI.

Paul and Alex dig into the model Abacus calls SPaaS, service presented as a software: clients get the interface without ever having to fill it in. From there the conversation opens up into pricing philosophy in an AUM-obsessed industry, why Abacus deliberately stayed in stealth, and a genuinely useful stretch on team building, incentives, and founder life with young kids. Alex closes with contrarian advice that cuts against startup culture: don't do it for the money or the title, and don't do it at all unless the vision is so big it's the only thing you can work on.

Key Takeaways

● Allocating capital gets all the attention, but tracking it is the real unsolved problem, and it only stays accurate if the underlying labor is flawless

● Abacus builds each client a "financial digital key" that consolidates every asset class and document, then permissions it out to advisors, CPAs, or AI tools on demand

● The SPaaS model (service presented as a software) delivers the interface without making clients do the data entry, pairing agentic AI with human domain experts

● Alternatives resist standardization, so human relationships and domain expertise, not just API pipes, are what actually keep the data current

● The best AI use case is not replacing people but freeing them from the annoying parts of their jobs so they get back to the work they were hired to do

● Great teams come from defining a narrow scope, identifying what makes each person tick, and incentivizing them accordingly, not from hiring generalists

Connect:

● OpStart: https://www.opstart.co

● Paul Anthony on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/paul-anthony-8a256087/

● Alex Kruszewski on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/alex-kru/

● Abacus: https://www.abacuswt.com

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