Founding Manifesto of Bubble : A Personal Story on Creating an Investment Platform Rooted in Transparency, AI, and Fair Pricing.
It explores the challenges of building a decent company within the traditional finance industry.
The city was just waking up, sunlight glinting off glass towers as I sipped my coffee in the corner of a crowded café. My co-founder and I huddled over a battered laptop, the aroma of espresso mingling with the nervous energy of possibility. I remember staring at the screen, the cursor blinking on a blank document titled "Bubble Invest – Manifesto." "Are we really going to do this?" my co-founder asked, voice low but urgent, eyes scanning the room as if expecting a chorus of naysayers to materialize from the next table. I laughed, but my stomach twisted. "I don't know if it's possible to build a decent company in finance. But I do know I can't stand being part of the problem anymore. Let's at least try."
We're Building the Product We Desperately Wanted to Use
The truth is, Bubble Invest started with a selfish problem. After six years in traditional finance, we found ourselves in an absurd situation: we knew exactly what good investing looked like—diversified ETF portfolios, low costs, quantitative strategies—but we couldn't find a single product that delivered it without the usual finance industry nonsense. We'd sit there with our own money, frustrated. Pay 2% annually to a wealth manager who'd underperform a simple index? Use a robo-advisor that charged reasonable fees but offered zero customization? Build our own spreadsheets and manually rebalance every month? "There has to be something better," I told my co-founder over yet another conversation about our personal investments. "An AI agent that actually understands modern portfolio theory, speaks plain English, and costs what software should cost—not what a human advisor charges." We looked everywhere. The product we wanted simply didn't exist. So we decided to build it. For us, first. A tool we'd actually want to subscribe to, that speaks to our values and those of our friends who are equally frustrated with traditional finance. We use it daily for our own investments, and honestly? We think there might be others out there who want the same thing. This isn't market research or demographic targeting. It's scratching our own itch and hoping we're not the only ones who have it.
The Bubble Invest Vision: Decency as a Design Principle
Our answer isn't a grand promise to revolutionize everything overnight. Instead, it's a commitment to transparency—about our choices, our mistakes, and the temptations we'll face. We want to build in public, documenting the journey so others can see not just our victories, but our doubts and failures, too. Our first test is deceptively simple: build a genuinely useful product, made for 2025, not 2005. In finance, most so-called innovation is just slapping a slick app interface onto the same expensive, complex products. We want to do better.
The Product: AI-Powered, Personalized, and Radically Simple
Imagine opening your phone and seeing an AI agent that acts like a hedge fund manager in your pocket—except it speaks plain English, not jargon, and helps you build a personalized ETF portfolio using multiple strategies. No hidden fees, no complexity for the sake of it. Just clear, actionable advice. And the pricing? Flat. €10–20 per month, full stop. No 1–2% fees that balloon as your wealth grows. No sneaky add-ons. Just honest, predictable pricing. "You'll never make money that way," a well-meaning advisor told us over lunch. "Clients won't take you seriously with such low fees." Maybe they're right. Or maybe, just maybe, treating people fairly can be a competitive advantage.
Is Shittiness a Choice or an Inevitable Outcome?
Six years in traditional finance had shown me that smart, well-intentioned people slowly become cogs in a machine that rewards the wrong things: complexity, opacity, and wealth extraction. It wasn't that they were bad people. As Frederick Brooks wrote in The Mythical Man-Month, "A bad system will beat a good person every time."
But what if it didn't have to be that way? Is being a "shitty" company—a company that extracts value instead of creating it—a choice, or is it baked into the reality of markets and competition?
- The evidence is mixed:
- Structural Incentives: In finance, the system rewards complexity and margin extraction. Swimming upstream feels impossible.
- Proof Points: Companies like Patagonia and Vanguard show that values-first approaches can work, but they require constant vigilance.
- System Design: Many failures are systemic, not personal. If you don't design incentives carefully, even good people compromise.
We decided our "line in the sand" was this: the moment we start optimizing for our own wealth extraction instead of client outcomes, we've failed.
Building Transparency Into the DNA
- Transparency isn't just a buzzword for us; it's our moat. Here's what that means in practice:
- Audit Trails for Every Decision: Every algorithmic choice comes with a plain-language explanation you can inspect. No black boxes.
- Temptation Logs: Monthly "Temptations Resisted" reports showing the compromises we refused to make.
- Explainable AI: Users can see, challenge, and even tweak our recommendations in real time.
The Pricing Paradox: Is Simplicity a Liability?
We keep hearing that €10/month is "too cheap" and that users expect complexity. Behavioral economists like Dan Ariely show that people often equate price with value. But we believe simplicity is a badge of honor. Our mantra: We do the hard math so you don't have to. Stripe won developer loyalty by making payments less configurable and more "it just works." We want to do the same for investing.
AI Agents and MCP: Useful or Creepy?
One of our most ambitious ideas is building on the Model Context Protocol (MCP), allowing our AI agent to integrate with users' digital lives. Investment advice that considers your actual spending patterns, career trajectory, and life goals—not just a static risk questionnaire. But where's the line between "useful" and "creepy"? We're designing for progressive consent—granular permissions, visible toggles, and clear explanations of benefits. Users control what they share, with explicit opt-out at any time.
Learning From the Internet's Blueprint
Finance feels stuck in the pre-internet era—slow, expensive, full of middlemen. Our vision is to do for investing what the internet did for communication: flatten hierarchies, reduce costs, and democratize access. But there's a cautionary tale here. The internet also created new concentrations of power and new risks. As we remove intermediaries, who fills the trust gap? We believe the answer is radical transparency, explainable AI, and user empowerment. But we're learning as we go.
What Are We Missing?
- We know we don't have all the answers. Areas we're actively watching:
- Regulatory Risk: We're proactively engaging regulators, hoping transparency wins allies.
- User Trust: Simple systems need robust safety nets when things go wrong.
- Community Building: Fostering a community that reinforces our mission and holds us accountable.
The Invitation: Join Us on This Experiment
We're not claiming to have solved finance. We're not even sure if our experiment will succeed. But we're committed to learning in public and inviting you—users, critics, fellow builders—to join us. I can still hear my co-founder's voice from that first morning in the café: "Want to follow along as we figure it out together?" Whether you're a skeptic, a supporter, or just curious, we want your feedback. Because honestly? We don't know if it's possible to build a decent company in finance. But we're curious enough to find out—and bold enough to try. Follow our journey. Challenge us. Hold us to our word. Let's see if decency, transparency, and technology can finally tip the scales in favor of the people finance is supposed to serve.
