Mo Al Adham leads Frec, a direct indexing platform backed by Greylock and angels from Google, Meta, and Brex. He’s a seasoned builder (ex-Twitter, Microsoft, and first advisor to Instacart) and brings sharp insights on how fintech is making complex investing strategies—like tax-loss harvesting—accessible to everyday investors. He’s great on mic and can speak to emerging investing trends, fintech innovation, and what it takes to build tools for the self-directed investor.
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For years, investing was divided along a stark line: professionals had tools; everyone else had apps.
Institutions — with their access to tax-loss harvesting, direct indexing, and dynamic rebalancing — could optimize down to the basis point. Retail investors, meanwhile, were left with prepackaged portfolios and the illusion of control.
That gap is finally narrowing. Not because individual investors suddenly became more sophisticated, but because fintechs began rebuilding the infrastructure beneath the surface — automating complexity, abstracting tax logic, and rethinking how investment tools could empower without overwhelming.
It’s a shift that’s gone largely unnoticed, yet it touches a growing number of investors. And it signals a new era for wealthtech: one where the hardest parts of investing — tax, timing, adjustment — are handled quietly in the background.
In this week’s interview, we talk with Mo Al Adham, founder of Frec, a direct indexing platform backed by Greylock and angel investors from companies like Google, Meta, and Brex. With experience building at scale at Twitter and Microsoft, and as an early advisor to Instacart, Mo brings a product-first lens to a space long dominated by finance-speak.
Mo helps us unpack what happens when fintech moves past dashboards and into infrastructure — and why the future of investing may not be about better interfaces, but about making complexity disappear altogether.
We talk tax myths, product trust, behavioral simplicity, and the next generation of automation quietly shaping self-directed finance.
And as always at FinTech Weekly, we zoom out: this is about a shift in how the most powerful tools in finance are being rebuilt for everyone — not by simplifying them, but by embedding intelligence beneath the surface.
Enjoy the conversation.
1. Direct indexing has long been reserved for institutional investors. From your experience, what changed — either technically or culturally — that made it realistic to bring this strategy to a wider audience?
For a long time, direct indexing was only available to people with a lot of money and access to private wealth managers. It was too complicated to manage manually, especially if you wanted to do things like tax-loss harvesting or customizing your portfolio. What’s changed is automation.
With the right technology, we can now handle all that complexity in the background. So instead of needing a team of advisors, you can get the same benefits through an easy-to-use platform.
Glossary: Direct Indexing
Direct indexing is an investment approach where you buy the individual stocks that make up an index, rather than investing in a fund that tracks it.
Why does it matter? It gives you more control — think personalization, better tax strategies, and the ability to avoid specific companies or sectors. It used to be only for the ultra-wealthy with private advisors, but automation and fintech have opened it up to a broader audience.
2. You’ve been close to the evolution of automation in personal finance. What do you see as the next layer of complexity that automation will quietly solve for individual investors?
I think we’re just scratching the surface. Right now, automation helps with things like rebalancing or harvesting losses. But going forward, it’ll start handling more of the real-world stuff, like adjusting your strategy when your income changes, planning ahead for tax season, or even reacting to market moves in a way that fits your specific goals. The best part is, it’ll happen automatically.
Most people don’t want to be full-time investors, they just want to know they’re doing the right thing with their money. That’s the role automation can play: giving you peace of mind without the mental overhead.
3. Tax-loss harvesting is gaining mainstream awareness, but often misunderstood. What misconceptions do you most often encounter when people first encounter tax-aware investing?
A lot of people think tax-loss harvesting is something you only do at the end of the year, or that it’s only useful when the market crashes. But that’s not really how it works.
The reality is, markets move every day, and if you have the right system in place, you can use those ups and downs to your advantage year-round. Another misconception is that it’s only for wealthy investors. That might’ve been true before, but not anymore.
Glossary: Tax-Loss Harvesting
Tax-loss harvesting is a strategy where you sell investments that have lost value to offset the taxes you owe on gains elsewhere in your portfolio.
The twist? You can reinvest in similar assets to stay on track while still getting the tax benefit. Done manually, it’s complex and often mistimed — but automated systems can spot and execute opportunities in real time, year-round.
4. You’ve worked at major platforms like Twitter and Microsoft and advised early-stage successes like Instacart. What product principles from those environments have stayed with you when building in fintech?
One thing I’ve carried with me from Twitter and advising companies like Instacart is the importance of first principles thinking. You can’t just copy what works elsewhere—you have to deeply understand the problem you're solving and rebuild from the ground up.
Especially in fintech, where trust and user behavior are nuanced, you can’t afford to be reactive or surface-level.
We listen carefully to what our users need—not just what they say, but what their behavior tells us. That feedback loop, combined with proactive, thoughtful iteration, helps us build products that feel inevitable in hindsight.
5. There’s a growing market for self-directed investing tools, but also increasing noise. What signals do you look for to know when a financial product is actually empowering users — not just overwhelming them with features?
To me, a good financial product makes you feel more confident and in control. It doesn’t throw a bunch of charts and tools at you and expect you to figure it out. It shows you what matters and helps you make smarter decisions without needing a finance degree.
Our goal is to build tools that do powerful things in the background but still feel simple and approachable on the surface. If people walk away feeling less stressed and more in control of their money, that’s how we know we’re doing it right.
6. Fintech is increasingly about infrastructure beneath the surface — APIs, rebalancing engines, tax logic. How do you think about building trust in a product that users don’t always “see” working?
That’s a huge challenge in fintech, especially when a lot of the value comes from things users don’t actively see, like tax logic or rebalancing engines. What we’ve found is that trust comes from two places: transparency and results.
Even if the process is complex, you should be able to understand what’s happening in plain English. And at the end of the day, people trust outcomes, like seeing their taxes go down or their performance improve. So we focus on showing the impact, and making sure users feel informed along the way.
7. For product builders looking to bring sophistication to mass-market finance, what’s your advice on balancing user simplicity with technical depth?
The key is starting with real people and real problems, not just the technology. It’s easy to get excited about complex features or smart algorithms, but if they don’t solve a real need in a clear way, it’s just noise.
You have to keep asking: is this making the user’s life easier? Is it saving them time, money, or stress? If the answer isn’t obvious, you probably need to simplify. Sophistication doesn’t have to mean complicated. In fact, the smartest products are usually the ones that feel the easiest to use.
