FOUNDER PERSPECTIVE
The Principles Guiding WealthProof Toward Launch
A shared north star for the work ahead.
By Brian Holman · Founder & CEO, Dezota LLC
A launch gives a product a public beginning. The principles behind it should already be visible. As we prepare WealthProof for that next step, I want to share a draft of Our Approach to Financial Clarity: the standards we are using to guide how we work with financial information, explain results, and recognize the limits of what we know.
Read our draft guiding principles
The starting point is a conviction that has run through this series: you deserve to understand both your financial picture and the evidence behind it. Bringing records together is useful, but understanding them requires more. A number needs context. An estimate needs recognizable assumptions. A difference between records needs investigation. These principles give us a way to examine whether the product is helping someone understand those distinctions.
I think of this document as our north star for launching WealthProof. It should influence decisions that may never appear in a feature list: whether to present a result, how to qualify it, what to preserve when records disagree, and when to say that more information is needed. A commitment becomes useful when it helps us make those choices, especially when the more careful answer is less convenient or less impressive on a screen.
Some of the principles are deliberately concrete. Missing information should not become zero. We should not invent a transaction to make a comparison match. A change in an account balance is not automatically investment performance. A plausible explanation, whether it comes from a person or an automated tool, still needs evidence. Those distinctions help define what responsible financial analysis should mean in our work.
The document also describes the experience we want to create. People should be able to begin with a clear overview and look more closely when a result matters to them. Explanations should make dates, methods, coverage, and uncertainty easier to understand. The goal is to help people participate more confidently in conversations about their finances, including conversations with their advisors. WealthProof is an analysis tool, not a substitute for personal judgment or personalized professional advice.
We are sharing this as a draft because the work is still developing and deserves constructive challenge. It is not a claim that every institution or financial situation is supported, and it is not an independent certification of our software. We will need to keep examining our methods, testing difficult cases, and improving our explanations. Making the principles visible gives us a clearer standard against which to evaluate that work.
I invite you to read the draft and consider whether it describes the kind of financial understanding you would find useful. Where does it leave a question unanswered? Which distinction needs a clearer explanation? Those are conversations worth having before launch. Our commitment is to build toward results that are as useful as the evidence allows, with limits clear enough for the person reading them to decide how to use them.