Before creating Kubera, we were the founders of Webyog (database tools) and Newton (a popular email app). Both companies were acquired in 2018 and the team moved on in different directions figuring out life and what next.
I took some time off, helping & writing small checks to friends who were starting companies. I was also thinking of new ideas, which frequently lead to impromptu purchase of domain names.
In a random event, I was caught in a rip tide in Costa Rica and had to be rescued. After heading back home, the first thing I did was to list ALL my assets in Google Sheets and share with my wife.
The list I put together started to look interesting.
The different types of assets & their custodians were not as simple as I thought it to be. It was no longer just real estate, stocks & bonds, retirement accounts, insurance, etc. Assets like collectibles, precious metals, private investments, foreign investments, loans to family/friends, crypto, domain names, trademarks, taglines & other digital assets filled up the list.
Entering information in a spreadsheet was quite simple but I quickly realized that I wanted more.
I wanted a bunch of features like:
- Sharing controls better suited for this particular task. Sharing your net worth with friends and family can result in judgment, change of behavior and leaking out of personal info. But at the same time the family should get access to critical info if something happens to me. I called it - “Share, but not yet.”
- Fetch current asset values automatically wherever possible
- Some basic reporting
I started asking my friends if there was an existing solution that I could use to achieve this. I was pointed to a few solutions that aggregate bank accounts, credit cards, etc, but I really didn’t like them.
- They all had a clunky interface - We are living in the age of Notion, Figma, et al. I was looking for something as smooth and a joy to use.
- The interface didn’t support all kinds of assets.
- No meaningful sharing features.
- Tried to sell something that I don’t need - one of the services was bombarding me with new credit card offers. These were not the subtle and relevant ads that I would gladly see to support the service. These are large in-your-face banners occupying > 40% of the screen.
- Constantly spying on & judging - Another service would constantly remind me how poorly diversified I was and I should immediately talk to their ‘advisors’. After a few days, I started getting phone calls from the advisors.
- Focussed on features that are not relevant to me - They assumed I was looking for budgeting. They generated nice reports on how much I’ve spent on movies vs restaurants in a given month. Yes, these were nice to have but not critical for me.
During this time I reached out to my ex-colleagues Manoj and Umesh. It turned out that they also maintained a similar spreadsheet. A lot of people we then spoke to either did nothing or listed everything in a spreadsheet just like us. It looked like an itch we all wanted to scratch and something that will be extremely useful for others.
It was time for us to come together once again. Like always we wanted to solve this by Sensible Design and Cutting Edge Tech. So we fired up our tools and started building something and called it Kubera - the lord of wealth :)
We built Kubera to achieve the following:
- List your assets, traditional and non-traditional, in simple spreadsheet form.
- Fetch current asset values automatically whenever possible.
- Support for multiple currencies (foreign investments) and crypto.
- A document vault to store important documents.
- Purpose-built sharing controls - to ensure safe transfer of critical info to the person you designate, in case you become incapacitated.
- Most importantly Kubera has no ads. It does not spy on you or sell your data. Just a clean subscription model.
- And nothing more; Kubera is simple and lightweight. See how it works.
