In this interview, Assam (formerly of Personal Capital, now part of Empower) walks through how budgeting evolves as a tech company moves through three lifecycle stages: startup, growth, and enterprise (post‑acquisition). In the startup phase, budgeting is informal and driven by a race to product‑market fit, with little regard for detailed financial models. During growth, the company adopts formal financial modeling, regular budgeting cycles, and must justify spend, especially on non‑functional requirements (NFRs) such as scaling, security, CI/CD, and developer productivity. Assam explains that they committed to allocating roughly 20% of engineering capacity to NFRs and used the tool Jellyfish to track and demonstrate this spend to product and business stakeholders, turning the allocation into a measurable accountability metric. In the enterprise stage, after acquisition by Empower, the focus shifts to reliability, predictability, and delivering on promised outcomes, making the budgeting process heavier and more rigorous. The conversation also touches on the distinction between pre‑acquisition planning (scoping known work) and post‑acquisition execution (rapidly allocating resources). Overall, the interview provides practical insights into budgeting strategy, accountability mechanisms, and tool adoption across a company’s growth trajectory.
Chapters
So with that, so again, I'm super excited about having Es on here because I feel like he can do, you know, at least two different webinars on budget planning just because of the pretty different contexts that we've worked together or that I've seen, you know, Personal Capital as it went, you know, through, you know, big late-stage growth phase and then, you know, post-acquisition. Assam, what if you had to, if you had to like, you know, simplify it or crystallize it for everyone, what are the big differences between, you know, startup phase versus later stage growth versus, you know, post-acquisition part of a, you know, part of a big public company or part of a subsidiary of a big public company?
Yeah, I mean, as you said, there are three distinct phases to like to a company's life cycle from startup to growth to enterprise. And I was fortunate enough to see that happen to Personal Capital as we started it from nothing. You know, it was me and the co-founder and eventually like, you know, we started hiring more people, building more products and, you know—
Raising some money in there somewhere.
Yeah, yeah, raise money, you know, be successful with the product market fit, customers liked it, be able to raise more money and then like, you know, get to a point where the main idea has proven itself and now you just want to scale it up and reach more customers. And then after that, you know, you may go public or may get acquired, which the latter happened to us. We got acquired by Empower, which if you don't know them, they are the second largest 401(k) record keeper who had a foot in wealth management, but by acquiring Personal Capital, they wanted to accelerate their presence in the wealth management market. And so what have, you know, the way that I can distinguish between them in regards to budgeting You know, in the startup phase, I distinctly remember in one of the board meetings that one of the board members was telling to our founder that his definition of entrepreneur is someone who plans without any regards to budgets, you know, money, resources. You know, the founder is just, or the entrepreneur is just focused on What can we do? And just marched towards it. And, you know, that was a good description of how the early years, you know, for us happened. And, you know, we were focused on the mission, we were focused on delivering on the vision. And, you know, what mattered was the race against hitting, you know, finding that market fit before we, ran out of money. Now in the growth phase, that's when like, you know, you have like a financial model that you take seriously, that you're planning against, and you have like, you know, you actually start officially going through budgeting cycles and planning your next year budget. So that's when we did a lot more formal budgets and had to justify the way that we're gonna spend and the budget that we're proposing. And then once you hit the enterprise, the focus changes from being aggressive and being able to sort of like the race against finding the next market fit and staying alive to, You know, what becomes important is that you do what you say and you deliver on what you promised. So reliability and accountability and predictability becomes really key, and that's why the budgeting process becomes, you know, much heavier effort to meet that value. So these are like, you know, the differences between, you know, the three stages. That I've experienced.
Got it. Got it. And I feel like just from knowing you, you know, through— well, I didn't know you during the first phase, right? Like, you know, early stage startup, all bets are off. You didn't— we probably didn't exist yet at that point. And, but knowing the— like seeing the arc, especially after Empower acquired you, it felt like maybe there was maybe that first year, like some of the plan was kind of baked into the acquisition because like this was part of the, you know, We're buying you, we're gonna integrate, and we're gonna do these things. And so I'm guessing like the, you know, part of what you had to do then was, and I'm curious like how much of this was like, you know, pre-acquisition versus like as soon as the acquisition's announced, then you have to like roll up sleeves and do it. But it almost felt like, you know, scoping work, there was known work and then you just needed to scope it like, and then to, you know, figure out what the investment was gonna be required. To do it.
Yeah, that's exactly right. And, you know, going to the growth phase, I can actually give you, tell you the, like, one of the reasons we actually looked for jellyfish-like product was that we wanted to be accountable that, you know, we need to spend 20% of our engineering budget, of our resources, of our capacity on non-functional requirements, on NFR. And you can, you can see why that's important because you're in growth mode, you're, you know, you're always growing, you're always scaling, you have to spend, and this is the determination that we came to, that you have to spend a good amount of your overall development and operation capacity on the non-functional requirements like scaling, security, CI/CD, developer productivity, all of that. And, you know, we wanted to find a tool that can show to the product management, to the business that we are going to use 20%, we're not going to use more. And if we had to use less than 20%, like, you know, we'll put it in the bank and we'll put it on the, like, the tech debt credit and, you know, find a way to pay it back later. So, you know, in the growth mode is when you need to focus and find ways to explain how some of your budget needs to be spent on these nonfunctional requirements, NFRs, and be accountable to it, to the business. And like, you know, a tool like Jellyfish was really helpful in driving that point home because we were able to convince the business that this is what we need and we're gonna keep ourselves accountable.
Were you able to stick to the 20% guideline or was this a thing that like once you started to weigh and measure it, like, you, you started to say like, okay, it, we can either make it less because it's not as much as I thought, or it actually kind of needs to be more because it just turns out it's more.
We, uh, you know, I, I look at this as one of our success stories. We were able to stick, um, to it and we were able to do so much with that 20%. I mean, um, 20% is, is a lot. And, uh, you know, especially when you count it and I, you know, we like, you know, for example, we moved from a monolith architecture or service-oriented architecture to microservices. We were able to move our cloud-native application from the early orchestration to, you know, to EKS and Kubernetes. So we were able to make big changes in our infrastructure within all that 20%. And the beauty of it is that, you know, by segmenting that 20% and giving it to the engineers, they don't have to go have constant, you know, push, you know, push and pull with the product, with the business, that, you know, we need to make this tech debt or enhancements to the structure. It's the budget they have, they know how best to utilize it, and Over time, the business saw that the application got faster, operating it got cheaper, and, you know, the reliability of the system got better. So there were tangible impact to the business as well. So win-win.
